On Halloween afternoon, the small town symphony played its first concert of the 2021-22 season. The day was cold crystal, brightly lit by the sun’s brief flare. Bare trees cast hooked shadows, although some foliage still hung on isolated branches making gobbets of red and yellow color above the brown planes and edges of the landscape. The sun’s sharp angle built rectilinear boxes within boxes: square houses inside square blocks within the square town at the center of the square county, all of these containers casting hard, right-edged shadows.
I pulled up to the curb on the north side of the High School. The wind swept fallen leaves across the street. One of our town’s most famous widows parked her SUV behind me. I greeted her on the sidewalk as we hurried through the chilly wind to the door into the school. The widow was accompanied by her sister-in-law, a robust older woman with a quick stride.
As we rounded the corner of the High School building, the widow asked me if I was still writing. I’ve found that the best way to respond to this question is with a self-deprecating jibe. The question seems oddly impertinent to me: “still writing?” You might as well ask me if I am still breathing.
The rampart of the long High School facade frowned down at us. Across the desert of wilted lawn in front of the School, I could see the large white house, a pale villa on the edge of downtown, where the widow had lived before her husband died. (A prominent local physician, he was killed in a freak accident on a mountain bike trail that he had built in the small woods at the outskirts of our town.)
“It’s the old neighborhood,” the widow’s sister-in-law said, gesturing toward the white house on the short block stubbed up against the High School grounds.
Masks were mandatory in the auditorium where the symphony orchestra members, clad in black, were seated on the stage, musicians arrayed against a colorful geometric backdrop. (If the backdrop were slid to the side, the audience in the concert hall would find itself looking into the big, dark void of the basketball court on the far side of the stage.) Strings were tuning; a flute and oboe competed in playing arpeggios and brass expelled truncated fanfares. Alternate aisles were taped-off to maintain “social distancing”. I took a seat near the front, but alone far to the right of orchestra.
Because of Covid, the symphony had not played a concert for 613 days. I was a little early and so I took a book from my breast pocket, a little Reclam edition of Theodor Storm’s novella, “The Doppelgaenger”. I read a few pages in German and, then, the chairman of the Symphony Board appeared and spoke some introductory words. He told us that the artists had used their isolation during the pandemic to practice and, therefore, improve their skills. There was a joke: “This is the first Halloween concert that we’ve played in which the entire audience came in masks.”
I suppose these days of “racial reckoning” are golden for Black soloists. The concert featured an excellent African-American bassoonist who appeared beneath the conductor’s podium wearing a tinsel-colored vest. The first half of the concert had, as its main work, a bassoon concerto by Rossini, a wonderful piece with which I was completely unfamiliar. A woman nearby whispered to her husband: “I just love the bassoon. It’s such a fun sounding instrument.”
At the intermission, I didn’t leave my seat, instead reading another page or so of the novella. The second half of the concert concluded with Dvorak’s 8th Symphony. I closed my eyes to listen to the music, but found that although I could concentrate on the melody and texture of the symphony in the moment, I wasn’t able to patch together a mosaic of memories to build a coherent picture of the piece as a whole. The music’s immediacy obliterated, it seemed, what had come before and, similarly, provided little access to what would follow. I had a sense of being immersed in the symphony, drowning in a succession of instants.
Then, my mind wandered: I thought of the little mutilated book in my pocket. I had acquired a stack of Reclam Verlag editions of German classics from a college girlfriend. At first, I couldn’t recall why the books had come into my possession, but, then, memories returned to me and, at least, I thought I remembered how this had happened.
When I attended college and took German language classes, the instructors generally assigned readings in Deutsch classic literature in Reclam Verlag editions. This was before the Internet made all books in all languages more or less instantly available. In those days, books imported from Germany were expensive with the exception of the very cheaply produced, if serviceable, Reclam volumes. To spare students unnecessary cost, most German language courses in literature used these books.
Reclam Verlag books are immediately recognizable by their brilliant yellow covers. The books are all the same shape, about three by five inches, easily carried in your breast pocket if you are so inclined. (That was where I had stashed the Storm novella when I attended the symphony.) Philip Reclam, the founder of the imprint was a German radical who transformed his father’s staid “Museum of Literary Culture” into political pamphlets, small so that they could be readily smuggled as Samizdat literature. Reclam was imprisoned for distributing Thomas Payne’s The Age of Reason in German translation. After the failure of the German revolutions of 1848-1849, Reclam abandoned political tracts for German classics. Copyright law in Austria propelled creative works into the public domain after a lapse of thirty years from first publication. So Reclam reinvented his business to re-publish classic German literature such as Goethe’s Faust, Part I, the best-selling of all of his imprint’s books even today. After issuing books by Schiller and Goethe, Reclam began providing students with volumes of Shakespeare and the Greek tragedies. The business flourished. By 1908, Reclam had book vending machines in all of the major train stations in the German-speaking world. During both World Wars, the edition’s small format made them standard issue to German soldiers. The volumes could be easily carried into combat.
During my college years, I had acquired about eight or nine of the little yellow books. They were fragile, printed on very cheap paper that rapidly yellowed itself, the interiors of the books becoming the color of faded papyrus under the violent sunburst of the front and back covers. With use, the covers sometimes detached. But, despite these flaws, the little books are redolent to me of my college days and, so, I regard them with nostalgic pleasure.
As it happened, I had a stack of Reclam Verlag editions on a shelf near a small brass bowl, a Tibetan artifact, in which I was accustomed to keep my Austin Symphony Orchestra tickets. About a month before the Halloween concert, I was uncertain whether I had purchased tickets for the upcoming season and made my donation to the orchestra – each year I give the enterprise some money. One afternoon, I looked in the Tibetan bowl, found tickets left over from the last concert season in 2019, but didn’t find anything for the 2021-22 programs. In the course of that search, I came upon another Reclam Verlag volume, really just a brittle pamphlet, containing Theodor Storm’s 1886 “The Doppelgaenger”. I had just finished reading a long novel, Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann, and was between German books. I recalled enjoying Storm’s impressive novella Der Schimmelreiter (“The Pale Horseman”) many years earlier in college and, so, I thought I would try “The Doppelgaenger”. The little volume had lost it’s cover many years before and there were brownish stains on the front page of the text on which the title was printed as well as the date of publication. In a round, looping hand, my former girlfriend had written her name in print on the top of the page.
It’s difficult for me to write objectively about KS. Most of this difficulty arises from the fact that my feelings about her were muddled in 1977 and haven’t really acquired any clarity since that time. In fact, as I describe her as “my former girlfriend”, I recognize that this term isn’t exact either – I’m not sure if she was ever a “girlfriend” as that term is conventionally applied. She was certainly a friend and, on a few occasions, I had intimate relations with her – but I didn’t know what these encounters meant to me exactly and, certainly, I have no idea how she viewed the situation.
I met KS in an airless seminar room in Folwell Hall at the University of Minnesota, a graduate level class in German lyric poetry. People were allowed to smoke in classes, at least at the graduate level, some amount of nicotine in the bloodstream deemed salubrious, I suppose, and conducing to free and frank discussion and, a class about German lyric poetry, a melancholy and ecstatic subject, required nothing, if not, free and frank discussion. Inevitably, this sort of poetry is revelatory, although it tends to reveal concealed things not about the verse, but about those interpreting the verse – people made all sorts of declarations in this class: people confessed homosexuality, various sorts of crimes, deep-seated hatreds and fears and the details of intimate encounters. The professor, a swarthy middle-aged man from a part of Prussia that no longer exists, a realm that was, then, suffocating under the burden of Soviet occupation, smoked huge malodorous cigars and the air in that warm room behind a door shut on a warm corridor high in the building, was tinted blue – the color of romanticism and roiling cigar smoke.
KS wasn’t conventionally pretty, but she had a desperate, brooding aura about her that made men (and women as well – she was bisexual) frantic to rescue her from whatever obscure malaise she was suffering. She had enormous eyes in which you could drown or swim laps doing the Australian crawl depending upon your inclination. Her nose was broad and a little coarse, but she had sensual full lips and a trim, compact frame and her voice was ideal for slowly reading aloud the sorrowful poems composed by mostly doomed Germans that we were discussing. She made every lyric that she read resound as if accompanied by a languorous melody by Schubert.
A friend of mine was interested in her and, probably, had slept with her as well, but he had concluded that relations with her came with consequences that were too burdensome. So he suggested that I explore an encounter with her. She was from a rural part of the State and had suffered terrible grief when growing up (a sister had died in a car crash). Her family was humble, the sort of people that quit high school to have babies or work for the County, but her surviving sisters were all ambitious and attractive, strivers and connivers. She lived in modest rented home with several other women and they were all casually promiscuous although that phrase is unjust – it was merely the temper of the times. In those days, women would have sex with you as readily as they might shake your hand, usually I think from a sense of curiosity – no one, it seemed, had much to lose. The idea was to put the sexual experience first and, then, sort things out later. At least, this was the custom in KS’ circle. In her case, KS’ charms were accompanied by a sweet, if slightly fetid, aroma of depravity. She had traveled widely in Europe and availed herself of the local lads as well as fellow wayfarers. For a time, she had lived with some casual pick-up in the humid cellar of Peggy Guggenheim’s Venice villa and there had been a participant in all sorts of orgies, elaborate group sex encounters and, it was in that exotic setting, that she had acquired a taste for women as well as men. (After sleeping with a female mutual acquaintance, KS announced to me that she liked “big boobs, a tiny waist, and a big ass as much as the next guy.”) One had the sense that she was willing to try anything and, of course, this notion made her wonderfully appealing, if, also, perhaps a little too readily discarded after testing her limits.
I’m conscious that this description isn’t chivalrous and, even, may be a big ignoble. And it’s also unfair and misleading in a way. KS was highly intelligent, cultured, and witty. Her outer attributes revolved, it seemed, about a profound well of implacable sorrow. She was never vulgar and, even, rather decorous when she mentioned sex – if she said something explicit, she always sighed and bracketed her words with the tremolo of a silvery laugh, signifying, it seemed, that you shouldn’t take anything that she revealed too seriously. When she described sexual partners, she said that she “rather fancied him (or her)” She was fundamentally discrete, perhaps, due to her small-town background, and she wore the whiff of scandal about her as a sort of veil. By the time, I went to Austin to practice law, she had slept with everyone that I knew. Nonetheless, she prized her independence. When things took on a sizzle that she found unacceptably restrictive to her freedoms, she simply bought a plane ticket and lit out to Europe or Africa or Central America. I never knew how KS supported herself – she was what the Jews call “a Luftmensch,” someone that lives on air alone. Once, she took me to see her maiden aunt, an old woman who lived alongside a snarling traffic artery connecting Minneapolis to St. Paul. The old woman had white hair and lived in a small clapboard house, improbably situated on a tiny lawn with a single droopy cottonwood tree, her dwelling between two huge industrial facilities – there was a massive grain elevator towering over her place to the left and some sort of foundry that vomited fire at all hours of the day on her right. The house was swathed in a perpetual mist of smoke and malt fumes. The old woman was courteous, soft-spoken, and her house was full of souvenirs of travels all around the world and, speaking with her, I had the sense that I was seeing my girlfriend (if that’s what she was) as she would appear fifty years in the future.
After several brief sexual encounters, undoubtedly very disappointing for her, she began to betray me with everyone I knew. The word “betray” is too strong, but I was inexperienced and, so, I perceived her conduct ungenerously and in those terms. After cutting a swath through my close friends, she began to explore more remote acquaintances. One of these men, Harry (I will call him), proved to be her undoing.
Harry was the son of a famous Twin Cities physician and had been raised in a large house on a large magnificently wooded lot on the highest hill in the West Suburbs. His charismatic father was one generation from the boats that had brought his Irish and Italian forebears to Ellis Island. But Harry’s mother was, I think, Mediterranean in extraction and, so, the young man was wonderfully handsome. He had a satyr’s curly hair, luxuriant blonde locks coiling over his pale face with the idealized features of a Hellenist statue, the face and chest and arms of a much-beloved favorite of a Byzantine emperor. Harry was easy-going, nonchalant, and talented. He could play guitar and knew hundreds of old songs that he sang for his admirers in a clear, vibrant tenor. No one ever saw him inconvenienced or embarrassed or out of sorts. He was equal to all occasions. Women were afraid of him because he didn’t seem to be much interested in them, always catnip for the fair sex. It wasn’t that he was Gay or asexual – rather, he was a sort of Stoic of the classical kind: although much was pleasing to him, nothing was necessary and he seemed the suave master of his desires. Unlike the rest of us who were pathetically needy and supplicant, Harry could take it or leave it. He was fearless and utterly self-confident and nothing fazed him.
Harry, like KS, was independent. On a whim, he might leave town for a week to paddle a canoe alone in the Boundary Waters just under the liquid ledge of wilderness Ontario. He could build a fire in wet weather and make it burn, caught fish, cleaned them expertly, and fried them in savory batter, and he had wonderfully trained hunting hounds and was an expert shot with both rifle and scatter-gun. I don’t know what he was studying. It didn’t really matter. Education was meaningless. He seemed to be pretty much perfect and there was nothing one could add to him to enhance his appeal. At a campfire down by the pale moonlit froth of the Falls of St. Anthony, Harry told me that he was the complete master of his body: he said: “when I have sex I can just go on exactly as long as I wish. I don’t feel any urgency. It’s just very, very mellow for me.” I had no sense that he was boasting. In fact, he told me these things in a completely matter of fact way – he couldn’t understand why others made such a big deal about sexual intercourse. To him, it was a natural function just like eating or defecating.
Of course, KS ultimately made her way to Harry and, of course, she immediately tilted the relationship into intimacy. KS knew that men also found Harry immensely attractive and, I think, she hoped that he would invite some of his buddies into trysts with her. In any event, she told me that she was impressed with Harry in every way and that he possessed “a perfect penis”, quite a compliment because she had seen and employed a number of these things.
Love affairs, particularly among the young, often involve disastrous imbalances of power. In every case before Harry, KS was the aggressor, knew exactly what she wanted, and assiduously steered her lovers in that direction, both emotionally and physically. Generally, she wanted to avoid emotional engagement beyond the level of people “fancying” one another – that is, she avoided intimacy that went much beyond simple mutual enjoyment. For this reason, her abandoned lovers all felt that she was cold and somewhat vacant in their relationships with her. But this was a projection of their disappointment, in fact, she was fully present and vibrantly responsive but only on a transient basis. The simple fact was that, until she slept with Harry, KS was in control of these encounters; the power was all invested in her.
But, unfortunately for her, KS had met her match in the beautiful and indifferent Harry. He was happy to sleep with her, but didn’t show an ounce of commitment. Suddenly, KS found herself at the mercy of someone else and this sensation, apparently, appalled her. She doubled and redoubled her efforts to make Harry admit that he desired, or, even, loved her. But he was disengaged – instead of devoting all of his time to her, he spent weekends canoeing local rivers or hunting for deer and pheasants with his cronies in the lake country up north. He went to bars with his friends, didn’t bother to invite her, and sat all night listening to jazz, a single drink to purchase “cover” on the table in front of him. (Others guzzled beer and whiskey and ended up drunk. Not Harry. He had the very best marijuana in town, but I never saw him acting as if he were stoned.) KS tried every wile that she possessed, and she had formidable armory of sexual and emotional tricks, but Harry remained resolutely independent. He gave her the impression that she was merely one of a number of pleasures that he enjoyed, always in moderation, and that there was nothing special about her.
Of course, there is nothing special about any of us. Dear Reader, this is true of you and me and everyone else. But when you are young, you want to be loved for your special characteristics -- not despite, but because of, your eccentricities. And this what KS wanted. She could no longer be cavalier with Harry. Instead, she wanted to be his “number one”, his particular vice, his downfall if at all possible. But, unlike all the rest of us whom she had enjoyed, she couldn’t make a dent in his nonchalance and suave indifference. KS had fallen in love with him. But, although he liked having sex with her, Harry wasn’t really willing to cross the street for her. And this seemed to madden KS.
KS decided that if she couldn’t have Harry (probably so she could have the pleasure of dumping him), she would simply leave the country. KS had finished her college education and was at loose ends and so she explored the possibility of joining the Peace Corps. I think she had an altruistic streak – she was a very kind person, despite, perhaps, the impression I might have given of her in these words, and, in fact, she was a staunch enemy of injustice and politically progressive. If she couldn’t seduce Harry into falling in love with her, KS decided that she would abandon our city and cast herself into a kind of nunnery – that is, the Peace Corps. She attended some preliminary orientation meetings and made it known throughout our circle of friends that the only thing that would deter her from this course of desperate action would be Harry announcing that he needed her. She knew that I saw Harry about once every two weeks, usually in a club where he went with other friends to listen to music. One day, KS summoned me to her apartment and announced that she was about to leave the country and, therefore, had to distribute her belongings among her friends. I was her only friend interested in reading the Reclam Verlag books that she had acquired for her German classes at the University. And, so, with the sorrowful mien of someone making her last Will and Testament, she bequeathed to me her Deutsch books, handing them over to me ceremoniously. Then, she asked me if Harry ever spoke about her. I told her that he had nothing but good things to say about her. This was true. Harry was too noble to ever say anything bad about anyone. She mentioned a date when she planned to fly to Morocco where she was engaged to teach English at some remote desert village in the shadow of the Atlas Mountains. She told me the time that her airplane was departing, on a weekend mid-afternoon if remember correctly, and even gave me the flight number. KS said that she would miss me and hoped I would write and she gave me her address. But, of course, it was conspicuous to me that she expected (indeed, even was commanding) that I tell this all to Harry and explain to her that she was deadly serious about her plan to leave the United States for several years in the Peace Corps and that, in fact, he should come to the airport and stop her from leaving. She told me, in fact, that she didn’t really expect to go to Morocco and that Harry, who disapproved of the whole thing, would stop her from embarking on this mission.
Storm’s Ein Doppelgaenger makes use of what the German’s call a Rahmengeschichte – that is, a framing narrative that encloses the principal story. Often, I think the “frame” story is better than the material that it surrounds. This is my impression of Storm’s novella.
A middle-aged lawyer from a provincial city in north Germany travels to Jena. It is “high summer” and the attorney spends the day touring the town, visiting its attractions including the famous medieval Fuchsturm (or “Fox Tower”), a battlement overlooking the city in its deep, beautiful vale. (There is a famous and melancholy poem about Jena by Gottfried Benn that begins with the words “Jena, in its lovely valley...”) Exhausted by his exertions, the lawyer returns to the Inn where he is staying at the Sign of the Bear, an ancient place famous for a visit from Martin Luther about four-hundred years earlier. After consuming a bottle of the local wine, a refreshing Ingelheimer, the first-person narrator falls asleep in his chair behind the “cold” oven in the Inn’s Bierkeller. A little later, the narrator awakes and sees an older man berating a youth about the boy’s propensity to write poetry instead of pursuing his studies. When the young man, evidently the older fellow’s son, departs, the narrator strikes up a conversation with him. The men discuss the fact that poetry is a vice of the young and the narrator says that he was once much addicted to verse when he was a student and, in fact, memorized half of the works of Ludwig Uhland (a lyric poet). The men enjoy another bottle of wine. The lawyer has identified the other man as an Oberfoerster, that is, a forester or, perhaps, better identified as a “Head Game Warden.” (The man, who is said to be about 50, is colorfully dressed in hunting garb.) In the course of their conversation, the men become friends and the Game Warden invites the lawyer to his home, a rustic estate in the forest about an hour distant from Jena. The Game Warden says that he is certain that his wife will enjoy meeting the narrator. “After all,” the Game Warden observes, “the two of your grew up in the same town.” The narrator remarks that there is something familiar about the Oberfoerster and asks him how he has discovered that the lawyer is from his wife’s native city. “It’s in the Inn’s registry,” the Game Warden says. This statement explains why the long expository sentence commencing the novella includes the detail that the narrator has written in the Fremdenbuch (Guest Registry) not only his name and profession but also his address. Apparently, north Germans are a convivial group and the Guest Registry is available for inspection, presumably to foster friendships among the patrons. The narrator is pleased to spend a couple days with the Game Warden – apparently, he’s on vacation – and he agrees to visit his new friend’s forest retreat. The Forester whistles for his hunting dog, an animal that has been inconspicuously sleeping in a corner of the Bierkeller and departs.
The next day, the lawyer travels to the Forester’s lodge, a picturesque retreat in the woods. Dogs come out to greet him and the lawyer is introduced to the Game Warden’s attractive wife. She also seems familiar to the narrator, but he can’t identify her lineage in his hometown and her accent is slightly uncouth. The narrator watches the woman feed birds with crumbs of bread. Then, he walks with the Game Warden through the velvety green forest. The men encounter a stag with sixteen point antlers and some does. Storm describes the woods with lyric intensity. After their stroll, the narrator again takes a nap. There is something dream-like about this part of the tale, the lawyer’s peregrinations in a strange place interrupted by long periods of sleep.
When the narrator awakens, it is early evening. The Game Warden has vanished into the woods on some official business. The lawyer encounters Christine, the Oberfoerster’s wife, and they also walk in the woods. Christine mentions that her husband has been gone for quite awhile and, then, blushes. (There is a tiny implication that the novella might develop into a love story involving the lawyer and Oberfoerster’s wife, but this is a misdirection.) While they are walking, the lawyer presumes to violate the stillness of the woods by asking Christine about her life in the small city where he was raised and now resides. Christine says that she is the daughter of a man named John Hansen. When the woman is asked about her father, she responds with a strange contradictory description: her father had large kind and lovely eyes and was very gentle, but was, simultaneously, a brute who beat her and her mother. The lawyer is unable to understand how Christine can recall her father both with warmth and horror. (It is John Hansen’s double aspect that imparts the name Ein Doppelgaenger to the novella.)
The narrator probes Christine’s memories and she recalls a freezing Winter night, when the stove in their little cottage was cold and dark. Her father carried Christine through the icy streets and she saw the stars above them. When a tear from her father’s eyes fell on her face, John Hansen said that God was weeping over them. But, then, Christine says that she has horrific memories about the man and recoils from them. The narrator inquires as to whether perhaps these bad memories are fantasies of some sort. Christine seems unclear. She stoops to gather wild flowers that she twists into a wreath. As he watches her “skillful” hands knitting the wreathe, the narrator wonders if the death of her parents hasn’t perhaps colored her memories and made them unreliable. Christine recalls that her mother died first and, then, her father, John Hansen. She was raised, she tells the lawyer, by the kindly parents of her husband who saved the orphan from begging on the streets of the little city. Christine is grateful that she was treated so kindly and isn’t certain herself about the details of her early childhood.
At this point, the Forester appears. He admits that he has been eavesdropping on their conversation. When Christine goes into a nearby clearing to pick some more wildflowers, the Game Warden suggests that the lawyer’s discussion with his wife has inadvertently troubled her and that, perhaps, the conversation should not continue. The narrator says that he doesn’t recall any one named John Hansen and that, therefore, he can’t place Christine’s family in his memories of his home town. The Game Warden says that it’s best to leave the past in peace and not talk about it. Christine was literally saved from the dust on the side of the road and, undoubtedly, experienced terrible things as a child and that it’s preferable not to speak of such things.
At the game lodge, the men eat and drink and the Forester regales the narrator with exciting hunting stories. Christine goes to bed. When the lawyer withdraws to his bed-chamber, he stands next to the windowsill looking into the dim, lustrous, and enchanted-looking forest. His mind ranges back to his own youth and he recalls once chasing butterflies at the outskirts of town. During that foray, he came to a place where there were the ruins of a knacker’s yard, that is, a place where decrepit horses were slaughtered and their hides salvaged for leather. The place was overgrown. Nearby, the narrator recalls a noisome well, the deep shaft covered with rotting boards. An indefinable sense of despair and horror afflicts the lawyer – it seems that there is some part of this childhood memory that he can’t exactly access. (In this way, the narrator is like Christine – there are things in his childhood that he can’t recall and interpret.) Across a field from the knacker’s yard, a small house stood, a straw-thatched roof falling into the interior of the “liliputian” cottage. The narrator recalls that the tiny hut was a place of ill-repute. He recalls hearing a man roaring with rage inside the cottage, a woman screaming and a child whimpering. Then, the narrator realizes that John Hansen is another name for a man, now long vanished, that he knew as John Glueckstadt (or John from Glueckstadt – the German word designates a town in Schleswig-Holstein, but, also, means “Lucky City,” an ironic appellation as we will see.) Identifying John Hansen as John Glueckstadt triggers a swarm of memories in the narrator. These memories comprise the so-called Binnenerzaehlung (or “inner story” bracketed by the frame narrative).
John Hansen was a spirited, powerfully built young man who served with distinction in the army. There’s an ominous note sounded at the outset – it was only the intervention of a comrade that kept Hansen from striking down a commanding officer who had insulted him. Returning to his home town, the young man fell in with bad company, a scoundrel named Wenzel. One day while drinking on the dike protecting the city, Wenzel encourages Hansen to join him in a burglary. (During this encounter, the John is shown pulling up clods of earth and grass to pitch them at some nearby swallows – for Storm, a dweller among villages retrieved from the fierce North Sea and sheltered by dikes, anything that threatens these levees signifies catastrophe. Indeed, the failure of dikes in Storm’s masterpiece Der Schimmelreiter (“The Pale Rider”), written around the same time as Ein Doppelgaenger, is a central element in the calamitous flood that climaxes that tale.) Needless to say, Hansen’s sortie into crime is disastrous. He’s apprehended and sent to prison for six years in Glueckstadt.
Emerging from prison, Hansen, now nicknamed “John Glueckstadt” returns to his hometown. Although he’s disgraced, the locals seem inclined to give him some opportunities for gainful employment. John manages a crew of women harvesting chicory in the swampy fields near the town. (Chicory is an herb that can be used as a substitute for coffee – it’s a sort of poor man’s java.) Although the townsfolk don’t trust John and consider him “dangerous-looking,” he seems the ideal choice to serve as foreman supervising the gang of women gathering the herb – it’s thought that his intimidating demeanor will keep the large gang in line; he supervises 60 women.
Among these women is a 16-year old girl, Hanna. (Storm defers naming her – at the outset, she’s just one of slatterns grubbing in the swamp.) The narrator has seen Hanna before, as a beautiful, if filthy, child begging near the stairwell of the middle class home where the lawyer was raised. He recalls her pale skin and tiny hands and may have touched her once when he doled out some pennies to her. Again, there is a trace of an erotic impulse directed at Hanna by the courtly and repressed lawyer, at least as he recalls events from his own youth. The lawyer recalls the women in chicory gang as Dirne –literally “whores”, but here used in a more mild and less derogatory sense: the term is midway between “slut” or “bitch” and “broads”. (If I were translating the story, I would use the general word “gals” or “girls” for Storm’s locution.) One afternoon, three women on the crew begin taunting Hanna. They accuse her of “making eyes” at John. A fight ensues and Hanna flees into the nearby field, running in the direction of the derelict tannery and its dangerous well. Hanna threatens to throw herself into the deep cistern. John seizes her, taking Hanna in his arms. The inevitable ensues and Hanna becomes John’s common-law wife.
John and Hanna live in a tiny cottage with a thatched roof at the edge of town. This little hut is where Hanna dwells with her elderly and ailing mother. At a town dance, Hanna waltzes with John and everyone admits that they make a lovely couple. However, the censorious folks in the city, including the hypocritical mayor and his wife, denigrate the couple – they seem to envy them their pure, unmitigated happiness. “He won’t be able to regain his lost honor,” the Mayor remarks to his wife.
Hanna’s mother is sickly and, soon enough, the couple are quarreling. But Hanna becomes pregnant. She has a difficult labor and, when John summons the midwife, the woman contemptuously says that she has other, more profitable, business and Hanna will do fine without any assistance. This enrages John and stirs in him dangerous emotions of revenge. When the midwife finally makes her belated appearance, she says that the child is a Dirne and will have a difficult life because she’s a “convict’s daughter.”
After the birth of the child, the couple is happy for a time. But John has become increasingly paranoid – with some reason, he believes the townsfolk are scheming to destroy him. One night, the baby is crying. Hanna is too exhausted to rock the child to sleep and her mother is unable to help her because of an attack of gout. Hanna tells John that they need a cradle that he can rock to soothe the baby. But they can’t afford any wood from which to fashion a cradle. John says that he could saw off the legs of some furniture and rebuild the baby’s little bed into a cradle. The narrator says that the cradle is merely an occasion that Hanna exploits to mock her husband as weak and ineffectual. This leads to a bitter quarrel and John strikes Hanna with his fists. Hanna shrieks: “Woe to you! With that blow you’ve smashed to pieces all of your luck!” John is appalled by what he has done and falls on his knees next to the baby’s crib. “As he involuntarily approached the baby, she flung her hands and head backward, and the child’s shrill cries seemed to announce an unbearable misfortune.” (Here Storm is using the word “Glueck” – that is “good fortune” – and “Unglueck”, “misfortune” in the context of John Hansen’s nickname as John Glueckstadt.) Hanna runs out of the house. John is afraid that she is going to fling herself into the abandoned well. He finds her on the brink of the cistern, again takes her in his arms, and there is brief reconciliation. Storm’s narrator says: “And, so, good fortune quietly returned to his side; he hadn’t yet driven it away.”
But respite is short. Hanna and John begin fighting again. Hanna melodramatically presents John with a knife and urges him to stab her to death. She cries out that she has been the cause of his misery. But again there is a reconciliation. An old beggar frequents the edge of town and, sometimes, takes care of the little girl. This man is also a convict, who’s present employment is hauling wheelbarrows of sand from the heath into the city. (It seems possible that John knows the fellow from the penitentiary). The old man makes wooden shoes for the little girl. Then, he is out of the story – it seems that Storm uses the figure of the kindly convict as a balance to the wicked Wenzel who will make a reappearance later in the novella.)
Hanna’s mother dies. John has cut down a big ash tree that shades one side of the cottage, planning to sell the wood to support the increasingly impoverished family. (The chicory gang rebels when John begins his relationship with Hanna and the ex-con loses that job.) John engages a kindly carpenter who lives in nearby cottage to make a coffin for Hanna’s mother from the ash tree’s wood. Throughout the novella, Storm repeatedly devises episodes involving wood – at this lowest strata of society, apparently, access to a source of wood is necessary for life. And, indeed, the denouement of the novella involves an instance of (mis)appropriation of timber. The ash tree’s wood won’t yield a profit if it is buried with a corpse and, so, the family sinks into desperate poverty after Hanna’s mother dies. Hanna, who was raised as a beggar, proclaims that she will go downtown and gather some money in that way. Hanna has a sharp-tongue and says: “You knew full well that you liberated a beggar-whore when you took up with me.” The implication seems to be that Hanna may be inclined to do a little bit more than begging in order to support the family. This enrages John and there is another domestic battle. In the course of the struggle, John knocks Hanna down and, as she falls, Hanna’s head is impaled on a screw protruding from the oven in the corner of the room. (The reader will recall the narrator’s location behind the “cold oven” at the Sign of the Bear in Jena.) Hanna dies and John stammers: “I’ve – I’ve murdered her.” Looking up, he sees the carpenter in the doorway. The carpenter drily remarks: “I guess I’ll have to make another coffin,” adding for a good measure “you didn’t deserve her anyway.” Nonetheless, the carpenter reasonably concludes that no good will come from John going to prison again. So the two men agree to conceal the death. The carpenter constructs another casket, Hanna is swiftly and unceremoniously buried and, upon returning to the cottage, John contemplates suicide. But his little daughter, now three years old, stretches her tiny hands toward her father and he decides to live.
An old beggar woman joins the household. This lady is an accomplished beggar, well-known to all the best families in town and she can sometimes acquire enough food to feed the little family. The old woman drags herself about town on a crude crutch and, through her efforts supports John and the child. The transaction is simply described: the old woman has lost her dwelling under someone’s stairs and needs a place to keep out of the rain and snow. In exchange for this abode, she sometimes brings home soup and scraps of meat to share with the family. Despite this arrangement, the three inhabitants of the little cottage are dangerously near starvation. Reduced to eating roasted potatoes, the family ekes out a living. They are too poor to afford butter with their potatoes and have to content themselves with a pinch of salt. John, however, tells the child that the potatoes are a fine delicacy and, when the little girl complains of hunger, he assuages her pangs by telling her stories about fantastic castles and princesses.
Two years pass and the old beggar woman teaches Christine (the child’s name as we now know) to read. Christine has dreams of a kind woman bringing food to her. She asks her father if this woman is her mother. John describes Hanna as the “most beautiful woman in the world” as far as he was concerned and says that the child was only three years old when she died. Hanna confesses that she has no clear memory of what her mother looked like. John says the family had no money to have a picture taken of Hanna. John tells Christine that Hanna is a kind of guardian angel protecting her. This alarms the old beggar woman who says that spirits of the night are deadly and that they carry small children away. John thinks that Christine is probably doomed. He recites a little poem to himself: Better an early grave / If from starvation you are saved.
Winter is harsh and cold. Birds fall frozen from the sky. The family has no fuel – they’ve been burning scraps of peat in the oven -- and they huddle together in bed, hungry and cold. Christine is freezing to death. John has to rub her hands and feet to keep them from becoming frost-bitten. The old beggar woman tells the two of them to waltz around the cottage so that they don’t succumb to the cold. “Dancing will warm you up.” Then, the beggar woman goes to a wealthy patron and comes back with a little food and a pot of cold coffee. It’s Christmas Eve. Desperation drives John into the snowy fields. In the darkness, he creeps up to the dangerous well in the decaying tannery yard. He tears up the rotting boards covering the well and brings them home for firewood. This act is described obliquely – in the deadly cold, people hear the crack of an axe cutting wood and, then, a cheerful fire sizzles in old oven in the cottage. John has a premonition that doom is at his heels, but, for the time being, the family is saved.
In early Spring, the wicked Wenzel appears and insinuates that he and John should commit a few crimes together. John staunchly refuses this invitation to larceny, but he is seen talking with the jailbird. The Mayor summons John to his chambers and tells him that he has been observed consorting with this well-known criminal and that people now suspect him of plotting with the man. The rumor spreads through town that John has returned to his felonious ways. No one will hire him as a day-laborer and, again, he and his daughter are faced with starvation.
Christine says that she will support them by begging. This is unacceptable to John. He tells her that they will just have to tighten their belts and eat a little less. Christine insists that she can beg so that they can eat. Hallucinating with hunger, John sees an apparition of Hanna and tells her that it would be better if he had died as well. During his efforts to find work, John has walked by a field next to the Knacker’s Yard and noticed a few potatoes remaining in the furrows. This is near the well where he committed “robbery” by cutting up the lathe covering the opening to the deep cistern and burning it for fuel. John decides that in the middle of the night, he will go to the field and snatch the remaining potatoes left in the field. Whispering to himself that he’ll find work on the morrow, John waits for nightfall.
“He sat for a long time, several hours, until the moon had set and everyone, as he thought, was asleep. Then, he stepped out of the room and the cottage. The air was sultry – just a breath of breeze and darkness lay impenetrable over the earth. But John knew the way well and, finally, he perceived by the weeds around his ankles that he had reached the potato field. He didn’t stop there, because he feared that he had been seen and, instead, went further, squatted, and hid himself under some bushes, twitching with fear as something brushed against him. But it was only creatures stirring there: a centipede and a toad had crept over his hand. His little sack was half full of potatoes that he had taken from the field. He stood and weighed the sack in his hands: it would be enough —“
“John stood and listened, as if a voice was calling to him from above in the night; then, he gripped the sack and he ran, farther, always farther; he scarcely noticed that he was now running through the grain fields and the ears of wheat, with their raw heads brushed against his face; no star showed him the way; he ran back and forth and couldn’t find his way out of the wheat. It occurred to him that he had passed this way before, a decade earlier – it couldn’t be far from where he had taken the 16 year old girl in his arms. With a sickly-sweet shudder, he forged ahead: the wheat rustled against his face and a bird cawed at him, either a partridge stirred up underfoot or a black bird. He scarcely heard it, running farther and farther as if he could never stop running...”
“A weak glimmer twitched on the horizon; a thunderstorm was approaching. For a moment, he stopped and considered his situation: he had seen dark clouds earlier in the evening. So he suddenly grasped where east and west were. So, he turned and hastened his steps; he wanted to get back home to his daughter. But there was something under his feet, he felt himself stumble, and, before he could take another step, there was nothing underfoot at all – a shrill scream echoed through the darkness. Then, it was as if the earth had swallowed him.”
“A couple birds screeched in the air and, then, everything was still: no human footfalls sounded in the grain field. The ears of wheat whispered and a million insects, scarcely audible, gnawed at the roots and shafts of the crop, until the heavy, humid air erupted in storm with echoing thunder and unloading torrents of rain so that no other sounds could be heard.”
“In the cottage at the end of the northernmost street, a small child was aroused from her sleep. She had dreamed that she had come upon a loaf of bread. But when she bit into it, the bread turned into a stone. The little girl reached out in the bed for her father’s hand. But her fingers only encountered the edge of the pillow but, then, she was sleeping peacefully again.”
John is never seen again. The locals gossip that he may have fled to America. Others think that he went back on the dike to plot deviltry with Wenzel, fell into a sluice with weir gate, drowned and was washed out to sea.
The Mayor pronounces the moral of the piece: “After John served his debt so society, he was, as is customary in these cases, persecuted to death by our dear fellow citizens. They hounded him to death because our society is without mercy. If you want my opinion, he should rest in peace – now he belongs in the court of another Judge.”
The Mayor’s interlocutor says: “Really? You have some peculiar opinions about our John Glueckstadt.”
“His name was John Hansen,” the Mayor says.
The narrator who has told this story has been lost in reverie. He returns to consciousness, looking from the window of the Game Warden’s lodge. The moon is shining over the dark forest.
The lawyer recalls that when he was a boy, he went into the wheat field near town to catch butterflies. The ground was still wet from a great thunderstorm that had passed over the city the night before. The boy sees a death’s head moth fluttering through the wheat, some of it knocked over by the gale. As he pursues the moth, the boy senses that someone is calling out. He hears the word “Christian” coming from under the earth and is frightened. Returning to his family, the boy (who is our narrator as a youth) says that he heard a ghost crying out from underground. No one pays any attention to him.
A season later, the boy returns to the wheat field and sees a carrion bird flying up out of the open mouth of the well that is no longer covered with boards. There’s a bad smell.
The next morning, the narrator recognizes that the voice crying out from underground was saying “Christine”. After breakfast, he looks at the pictures on the wall of the Oberfoerster’s chalet. There’s an image of the deposition of Christ by Rubens and a portrait of Martin Luther. Near those pictures, there is an old photograph showing a handsome young man in a soldier’s uniform.
The lawyer returns home. He sends a letter to the Oberfoerster. The Game Warden writes back to him and says that his wife wept when receiving the attorney’s message, but, later, she was glad that her father had been restored to her, not as a legend, but as a man in full. The Game Warden says that a wreath of roses now encircles the old photograph of the courageous-looking and high-spirited soldier.
The Game Warden invites the lawyer for another visit. He says that his errant son, the young man infatuated with poetry, has successfully completed his exams. “My wife looks closely at his face and says that she can see the features of her father in the boy.”
“Our joy would be complete if you would come for another visit,” the Game Warden writes.
“– certainly,” the lawyer responds: “if God’s sunshine wakes me tomorrow, I will come.”
Storm didn’t have long to live. He died two years later. The novella was made into a movie in 1974. It has what might be considered a happy ending. John doesn’t die in the well. He’s rescued and, with Hanna, departs for America, perhaps, Minnesota.
KS told me that she waited for Harry at the airport until final boarding call. She was the last person to walk down the jet-way to the waiting airplane. Of course, Harry didn’t appear.
She ended up in Morocco in a dusty village somewhere to the west of the ruins of Carthage. Roads were bad and it took hours to reach the capital. I don’t know if Harry wrote to her. However, I corresponded with KS and, even, I think sent her some books, all novels if I remember correctly. KS wrote to me on occasion. She had many adventures in north Africa and, even, ran afoul of the regime. I think she was briefly jailed for infractions against the government, retaliation for some misbegotten intimacy with a scion of the royal family.
The Peace Corps rescued KS. She had more adventures and, later, became the mistress of a very famous artist. For a time, KS used her beautiful voice as an announcer for a rhythm, blues and soul show on a college radio station. Then, she moved back to her home town in rural Minnesota where she lives today.
Harry lived with a woman with whom he smoked marijuana. It wasn’t clear that the relationship involved much sex. It was more a matter of convenience. About five years later, Harry drove a hundred miles to see me in Austin. We went to eat at the McDonald’s about two blocks from my law offices.
Harry took a napkin and diagramed the world of my wishes and dreams. This space was sketched as a circle about the size of a silver dollar. Then, he made a tiny dot on the page – this mark represented my means, that is, my ability to achieve my hopes and aspirations. I expected that some sort of profound philosophical utterance would follow, perhaps, something about reducing my wishes to match my means or a stoic declaration that one should really have no aspirations at all. Instead, Harry drew a much larger circle around the round silver-dollar-sized mark.
“I think your wishes and dreams are less than your means. What if you had the ability to expand your means to encompass what you desire?”
“That would be very good,” I said.
He told me that this was possible but that, in order to accomplish this feat, I would have to agree to become an AMWAY distributor, that is, a purveyor of soaps and other household disinfectants as part of a pyramid scheme. I told Harry that I would have to think about this proposal, finished my hamburger and that was the last time I ever saw him. A friend, later, told me that the woman with whom he was living became terribly ill and that Harry tenderly nursed her and that, perhaps, she recovered, although this was uncertain.
The symphony by Dvorak ended and the audience rose for a standing ovation. Such responses are obligatory in the small town where I live. I thought of Antonin Dvorak spending high-summer in Spillville, Iowa, a hamlet with a little square in the center of town where there was an ancient lathe and shingle bandstand, not a bandshell but more of a wooden gazebo. An enormous Bohemian-Catholic church named after St. Wenceslaus stood a block uphill from the square that was lined by small taverns and little cafes serving Czech food. The cemetery was full of grave-markers in the shape of crosses made from cast-iron. The crosses were hard to keep vertical; they tilted left and right like the harpoons stuck in back of the great white whale.
I felt a little disoriented after the symphony. I listen to classical music with my eyes shut and the auditorium with its red plush seats, too narrowly spaced for obese modern buttocks, seemed strange to me, a disorienting venue full of people wearing masks tightly fastened around their lower jaws.
I didn’t see the doctor’s widow or her sister-in-law as I stepped out onto the sidewalk and found my SUV, now drowned in a long casket-shaped shadow cast by the facade of the High School. It was Halloween and a chill wind was blowing down the avenue, scattering leaves as the breeze ran through alleys and lawns.
Later, there would be ghosts and the walking dead, vampires and tramps and little mermaids, all traipsing along the cold sidewalks.
I thought that I would write a book report on Storm’s tale, Ein Doppelgaenger. Otherwise what would be the point of having laboriously deciphered the book from the German. I transform everything in my life into literature except that I have it on good authority that this is not literature at all but a self-indulgent botch of things.
The next morning would be the Day of the Dead, Dios la Muertos. In Oaxaca, people would decorate graves. When relatives cease to decorate a grave, the deceased suffers a kind of second death – he or she is forgotten. The dead person makes the trip from Heaven or elsewhere to the bright meadows of the living. But there is no one to greet to traveler. The world of the living is colder even than death to the disappointed spirit and the ghost sadly departs this life never to return.
November 11, 2021
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