Theodor Storm [Storm - Immensee and Other Stories

Immensee and Other Stories

Theodor Storm

Translated by Ronald Taylor, Bayard Quincy Morgan
and Frieda M. Voigt

ALMA CLASSICS

alma classics ltd

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243-253 Lower Mortlake Road

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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 O neworld 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

Im mensee a nd Other Stories

Chronology

1817Born on September 14th in Husum, Schleswig.

183536Completed his school education at the Katharineum in

Lbeck.

183742Studied law at the universities of Berlin and Kiel.

1843Return to Husum as a local government servant.

1846Marriage to Constanze Esmarch.

184850Schleswig-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.

185364Service 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.

1867 In St Jrgen and Eine Malerarbeit.

1871 Draussen im Heidehof (story).

1873 Viola Tricolor .

1877 Carsten Curator .

1879Resignation from legal office and retirement to the Holstein

village of Hademarschen.

188088Various 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

T he stories and the lyrical poetry of Theodor Storm are as unproblematical as their authors 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 Lbeck, 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 Storms 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 Storms 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 Storms 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

O ne 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 passers-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.