Immensee and Other Stories

by Theodor Storm

  Immensee and Other Stories

  Theodor Storm

  Translated by Ronald Taylor, Bayard Quincy Morgan

  and Frieda M. Voigt

  ALMA CLASSICS

  alma classics ltd

  London House

  243-253 Lower Mortlake Road

  Richmond

  Surrey TW9 2LL

  United Kingdom

  www.almaclassics.com

  Immensee first published in 1851

  This translation first published by John Calder (Publishers) Limited in 1966

  Viola Tricolor first published in 1873

  This translation first published by John Calder (Publishers) Limited in 1956

  Curator Carsten first published in 1877

  This translation first published by John Calder (Publishers) Limited in 1956

  This edition of Immensee and Other Stories first published by Alma Classics Limited (previously Oneworld Classics Limited) in 2009

  This new edition first published by Alma Classics Limited in 2015

  Translation of Immensee © John Calder (Publishers) Limited, 1966

  Translation of Viola Tricolor © Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. New York, 1956

  Translation of Curator Carsten © Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. New York, 1956

  Front cover image © George Noblet

  Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  isbn: 978-1-84749-459-7

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

  Contents

  Immensee and Other Stories

  Chronology

  Part One: Immensee

  Introduction to Immensee

  Immensee

  Part Two: Viola Tricolor and Curator Carsten

  Introduction

  Viola Tricolor

  Curator Carsten

  Notes

  Immensee and Other Stories

  Chronology

  1817Born on September 14th in Husum, Schleswig.

  1835–36Completed his school education at the Katharineum in

  Lübeck.

  1837–42Studied law at the universities of Berlin and Kiel.

  1843Return to Husum as a local government servant.

  1846Marriage to Constanze Esmarch.

  1848–50Schleswig-Holstein War of Liberation against Denmark.

  1851First published work: Sommergeschichten und Lieder, a

  collection of poems and short stories, including Immensee.

  1852Forced departure from Husum. In the same year a further

  collection of his poems was published.

  1853–64Service in the Prussian legal administration, first in

  Potsdam, later in Heiligenstadt.

  1861Return to Husum as mayor.

  1865Death of his wife Constanze. The following year he married

  Dorothea Jensen, a childhood friend.

  1867In St Jürgen and Eine Malerarbeit.

  1871Draussen im Heidehof (story).

  1873Viola Tricolor.

  1877Carsten Curator.

  1879Resignation from legal office and retirement to the Holstein

  village of Hademarschen.

  1880–88Various stories including Zur Chronik von Grieshuus

  (1883) and Der Schimmelreiter (1888).

  1888Death of Storm on July 4th: his body was buried in the

  family grave at Husum.

  Part One: Immensee

  Introduction to Immensee

  The stories and the lyrical poetry of Theodor Storm are as unproblematical as their author’s life was uneventful. He was born in 1817 in the little, grey fishing town of Husum, in the province of Schleswig, and ended his working days as governor of that same place. Only twice did he leave his native province for any extended time: as a student, when he had been to Lübeck, Kiel and Berlin, and as a patriot, when he was virtually forced into exile under the Danish occupation of Schleswig and did not return for eleven years. And at all times his life was governed by the values that one would expect to result in, or to be expressive of, such a mode of existence; on the personal plane, a devotion alike to the responsibilities and the joys of family life, and beyond this, an intense pride in the sturdy North German independence of his province, particularly in the face of Danish aggressiveness.

  Both in its nature and in its scope his literary work is the proper complement to his life – sincere, honest, uncomplicated, direct. As a lyric poet he modelled his style on Eichendorff, from whom he received the vision of a world admittedly not perfect in its manifest forms – witness his poems of political protest – but assuredly God-given and thus true.

  As a narrative writer he stands equally in the Romantic tradition in those stories – among them Immensee – that descend from the period of his most unmistakably personal lyric poetry, that is, between 1840 and 1865, but in later life the surface of his stories became harder and his tone of voice more severe.

  At their most characteristic, both Storm’s lyric and narrative writings are sustained by a mood of reminiscence, of meditation, of “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. Their subjects are private and intimate, their justification and their validity personal; he himself characterized the novelettes composed in this spirit as “stories of situation”. Their strength lies in their honesty; their besetting danger is sentimentality – a sentimentality inseparable from their genesis in a desire to escape in the imagination from what Storm once called “this agonizing reality”. He softens the jagged outlines of this reality by drawing across them a veil of dreams and illusions, so that what he now observes, from an imagined distance in time or place, partakes of the quality of an ideal and loses much of the particularity of a “real”, here-and-now situation.

  Immensee, written in 1849, belongs in this context – its characters live in the middle-class world of Storm’s experience, contain their activities within its approved, conventional limits, yet seem almost too frail, too weltfremd to represent life in that world or to deal with its real problems. The old man, sadly reminiscing on an unfulfilled past; the sensitive, romantic youth who collects flowers and writes poetry; the simple, virtuous, rather colourless girl of childhood memory, and her pragmatic, utterly unromantic mother – these are typical creatures of Storm’s poetic world. The tone is subdued, the manner unhurried, the outcome of the events unchallenged. The emotional range is narrow – but perhaps it is the concentration forced by this very narrowness that gives Storm his particular place of affection as a minor master in the German literature of the nineteenth century.

  – Ronald Taylor

  Immensee

  Translated by Ronald Taylor

  The Old Man

  One autumn evening an elderly, well-dressed man was seen coming slowly down the road. To judge from the dust on his old-fashioned buckled shoes, he was returning from a walk. The joy of his past youth shone in his dark-brown eyes which contrasted strikingly with his snow-white hair, and carrying his gold-topped cane under his arm he looked cheerfully at the surrounding scene and at the town that lay before him in the glow of the evening sunshine. He almost gave the impression of being a stranger, for although many of the pas
sers-by felt drawn to look into his grave eyes, few exchanged greetings with him.

  He stopped at last in front of a house with lofty gables, gave a final glance down the road and pushed open the gate that led into the courtyard.

  As the bell rang, a green curtain was drawn aside from a small window overlooking the courtyard, and an old woman peered out. The old man motioned her with his cane.

  “No lights yet?” he called, in a slightly southern accent.

  The housekeeper lowered the curtain again. He crossed the broad courtyard, passed through a parlour, round whose walls stood oak dressers adorned with china vases, and went through the door opposite into a small lobby from which a narrow staircase led to the upper rooms at the back of the house.

  Climbing the stairs slowly, he opened a door at the top and entered a spacious room. Here everything was quiet and secluded. One wall was almost entirely taken up by shelves and bookcases, while the other was hung with portraits and landscape paintings. A bulky armchair with a red velvet cushion was drawn up in front of a green-topped table, on which lay a number of open books.

  Putting his hat and cane in a corner, he sat down and folded his hands in front of him as though to rest. It gradually became darker. As he sat there, a ray of moonlight shone through the window, lighting up the paintings, and involuntarily he followed its slow passage across the wall. Then it fell on a small portrait in a simple, black frame.

  “Elisabeth!” he whispered. And as he uttered the name, he was transported back to his childhood…

  The Children

  Before long he saw in his mind the figure of a charming young girl come into the room. Her name was Elisabeth, and she must have been about five years old, while he was twice that. Round her neck she wore a red silk scarf that set off her attractive brown eyes.

  “Reinhard,” she cried, “we’ve got the day off from school, the whole day! And tomorrow as well!”

  Reinhard, who already had his slate under his arm, quickly put it down behind the door, and the two children ran through the house into the garden, then out into the fields. The unexpected holiday was just what they wanted, for here Elisabeth had helped Reinhard build a hut out of turfs, in which they were going to spend the summer evenings; the only thing missing was a seat. The nails, the hammer and the planks were already there, so he went straight to work.

  In the meantime Elisabeth walked along by the embankment and collected in her apron the ring-shaped seeds of the wild mallow, which they wanted to use for garlands and necklaces. So by the time that Reinhard, despite driving some of the nails in crooked, had finally finished the seat and emerged into the sunshine again, she had reached the far side of the field.

  “Elisabeth! Elisabeth!” he shouted. She ran towards him, her hair flying in the wind.

  “Come on, our house is ready!” he cried. “You’re hot from running, so let’s go and sit on our new seat, and I’ll tell you a story.”

  They went in and sat down. Taking the ring-like seeds out of her apron, she threaded them on to long strings.

  “Once upon a time there were three silk-spinners,” he began.

  “But I know that by heart,” interrupted Elisabeth. “You mustn’t keep telling me the same one.”

  So Reinhard had to keep the story of the three silk-spinners to himself, and instead he told the story of the poor man who was cast into the lions’ den.

  “It was night, and pitch black,” he began again, “and the lions were asleep. From time to time, however, they yawned in their sleep and stretched out their red tongues. When they did this, the poor man trembled and thought that the dawn was at hand. Then suddenly there was a blinding flash, and when he looked up, he saw an angel standing before him. The angel beckoned to him, then vanished into the rock.”

  Elisabeth had been listening attentively.

  “An angel?” she said. “Did he have wings?”

  “It’s only a story,” answered Reinhard. “Angels don’t really exist.”

  “What a thing to say!” she exclaimed, looking him straight in the face. But he frowned at her disapprovingly, and in a hesitant voice she asked:

  “Then why do people always tell us that they do? Like mother and auntie and the teacher?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied.

  “Do lions really exist, then?”

  “Lions? What a question! Of course they do! In India the priests yoke them together in front of their carts and drive through the desert with them. When I grow up, I’m going there to see for myself. It’s a thousand times better than here – they haven’t any winter. And you must come with me. Will you?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “But my mother must come as well – and yours.”

  “No, they can’t,” he rejoined. “They will be too old by then.”

  “But I can’t come by myself.”

  “When the time comes, you will, because you will be my wife, and the others won’t have any say in what you do.”

  “But my mother would cry.”

  “We’ll be coming back,” said Reinhard impatiently. “So tell me straight out; will you come with me? If you won’t, I’ll go alone. And then I’ll never come back.”

  Poor Elisabeth was almost in tears.

  “Don’t look at me so fiercely,” she stammered. “Of course I’ll come.”

  Joyfully Reinhard clasped her hands and led her out into the field.

  “To India! To India!” he chanted, dancing round and round with her and making her red neckerchief fly out. Suddenly he let go her hands and said gravely:

  “It’s no good. You’re not brave enough.”

  “Elisabeth! Reinhard!” came a voice from the garden.

  “Here we are!” cried the children, and skipped back to the house hand in hand.

  In the Woods

  This was the way the two children lived together. Often he found her too quiet, and often she found him too boisterous, but they would not leave each other’s side. They spent almost all their free moments together, playing in the cramped confines of their family homes in winter, and outdoors over hill and dale in summer.

  Once when Elisabeth received a scolding from the teacher, Reinhard slammed his slate down angrily on his desk to try and attract the teacher’s attention to himself. His action passed unnoticed, but he lost all interest in the geography lessons and composed a long poem instead; in it he portrayed himself as a young eagle, the teacher as a black crow and Elisabeth as a white dove, and the eagle vowed to avenge himself on the crow as soon as his wings were fully grown. Tears filled the young poet’s eyes, and he saw himself as the instrument of a higher purpose. When he got home, he managed to find a little notebook bound in parchment, and on the opening pages he entered with great care his first poem.

  Shortly afterwards he was moved to another school, where he made friends with boys of his own age, but his relationship to Elisabeth remained unaffected. He began to write down some of her favourite tales from among those which he had told and retold in the past. He often felt an urge to add to the stories some ideas of his own but for some reason he found that he could never bring himself to do so. So he copied them just as he had heard them, and when he had finished, he gave them to Elisabeth, who kept them carefully in one of the drawers in her bureau. It gave him a warm feeling of pleasure to listen in the evenings as she read to her mother some of the tales from his manuscript.

  Seven years went by, and Reinhard was about to be sent away to complete his education. Elisabeth could not believe there would be a time when there was no Reinhard, and she was happy when he told her one day that he would go on writing down fairy tales for her as before. He said he would put them in with his letters to his mother, but he wanted her to write and tell him whether she liked them.

  As the day of his departure drew near, the number of poems in the little volume grew until it was almost half full. But altho
ugh the book and most of its poems owed their existence to her, Elisabeth was not admitted into the secret.

  It was June. Reinhard was due to leave the next day, and they wanted to have a final celebration together. So it was arranged that there should be a family excursion to the nearby woods.

  They drove the hour’s journey to the edge of the wood by cart, then took down the hampers and proceeded on foot. First they walked through a cool shady copse of fir trees, where fine needles were strewn everywhere on the ground. Half an hour later they emerged from the darkness of the firs into an open plantation of beech trees where all was green and bright; an occasional ray of sunlight broke through the rich foliage, and above their heads a squirrel leapt from bough to bough.

  The group stopped at a spot where the topmost branches of the ancient beeches had intertwined to form a kind of transparent cupola. Elisabeth’s mother opened one of the hampers, and an old gentleman assumed charge of the proceedings.

  “Gather round, children,” he called out, “and listen carefully to what I say. Each of you will be given two dry rolls for lunch. We’ve forgotten to bring the butter, so if you want something to eat with them, you will have to find it yourselves. There are enough strawberries in the woods for those who know where to look, and those who don’t will have to eat dry bread. That’s the way things are in life. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, yes!” they cried.

  “All right,” he resumed. “But I’ve not finished yet. We older folk have roamed about enough in our rime, so we shall stay here under these leafy trees and peel the potatoes and light the fire and prepare the table. At twelve o’clock we shall boil the eggs. In return for this you will give us half your strawberries, so that we can prepare a dessert. Now away with you to the four winds – and don’t cheat!”

  The children looked at each other roguishly.

  “Just a moment!” called the old man again. “If you don’t find any strawberries, you needn’t bring any back – that goes without saying. But nor will you get anything from us – so get that into your pretty little heads! Well, that’s enough good advice for one day, if you get some strawberries as well, you’ll find your way through life all right.”