The Dykemaster (Angel Classics) [Paperback]

Theodor Storm (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0946162549 | ISBN-13: 978-0946162543 | Publication Date: December 18, 1996

First English translation in thirty years of Storm's Der Schimmelreiter, one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century German fiction. ""This tremendous tale, with which Storm made his conception of the Novelle the epic sister of drama..."" - Thomas Mann. The Dykemaster (1888), is the tale of a legendary young dykemaster at odds with his community. Innovative and creative, he designs a new form of dyke. While supervising his work, he rides his grey horse along the dyke. When he is unwilling to engage in a sacrificial ritual of a dog to celebrate completion of the work, villagers think he is in the hands of evil powers. The passing of time and tides contributes to this misconception and he becomes a legend, a phantom riding his grey along the dyke whenever the sea threatens to break through. Storm's highly sophisticated narrative-within-a narrative structure is far in advance of its time. Denis Jackson's brilliant translation of Der Schimmelreiter recreates the full impact of Theodor Storm's masterpiece. ""There is plenty of eerie Germanic mood here, but there is also a fine and tragic story of a man who follows his own path to its final, terrible end."" _Publishers Weekly.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Like Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest, Storm's book combines a story of societal pressures with a touch of the supernatural and plenty of mood. Originally published as Der Schimmelreiter in 1888, the year of Storm's death, the main story takes place in mid-18th century. On riding past the dykes on the Friesian coast during a storm, the narrator believes he sees a pale rider on a gray horse (the Schimmelreiter). At an inn, he happens to mention his vision, which sets the schoolmaster off on his yarn of dykebuilder Hauke Haien, who eventually became this phantom. The son of a small landholder, Hauke was almost morbidly fascinated by the dykes that protected his community from the sea. When the old dykemaster died, the community grudgingly gave him the position, while the dykemaster's daughter, Elke, rather more happily gave him her hand. Hauke is scrupulous in his duty, forcing the lax citizenry to keep the dyke sound and eventually beginning work on a new dyke that will recover 1500 acres of fertile soil. Not everyone appreciates his efforts: resentment and narrow-mindedness mix with the indefinable sense that something is not quite right about Hauke or his household: his simple daughter; the old crone who once served his wife's family; or his gray horse, an abused creature Hauke acquired around the same time that a horse skeleton vanished from the waterside. There is plenty of eerie Germanic mood here, but there is also a fine and tragic story of a man who follows his own path to its final, terrible end and people who fail to recognize sacrifice.

Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

This tremendous tale , with which Storm made his conception of the Novelle the epic sister of drama ..." --Thomas Mann

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 156 pages
• Publisher: Angel Books (December 18, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0946162549
• ISBN-13: 978-0946162543
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #917,670 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars classic German romantic (not love, art period) novel, January 31, 2003

By 

Lisuebie (Southwestern Germany) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Dykemaster (Angel Classics) (Paperback)

My son, who attends a German gymnasium, had to read this book for his 9th grade German class as an example of a novel from the romantic period. I picked it up, too, and found it fascinating. I have not read Denis Jackson's translation, but I bought it for my brother in the US who says he greatly enjoyed it.

It is the tale told by an innkeeper to a chance traveler, of a mysterious rider of a white horse who appears on stormy nights when the dykes are in danger. (the original title is 'Der Schimmelreiter' - not 'Der Deichmeister'). The tale segues into the rider's history, his development, his goals and his struggles against nature and man to achieve them, his personal limitations and their resultant failures, and the tragedy that comes of them which leads to his ghost haunting the dykes of northern Germany.

It is an excellent book, absolutely exotic in character and setting for a modern American, rich in detail and mood.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars German Legend of Sleepy Hollow?, May 25, 2004

By 

wendybird "Wendy" (Omaha) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Dykemaster (Angel Classics) (Paperback)

The schoolmaster of a northern German coastal town narrates the tale of Hauke Heien, the highly driven dykemaster who haunts the road along the dyke that bears his name.

As the story begins, it is earthly and normal: young Hauke Heien becomes the apprentice to the former dykemaster, secretly woos his daughter, and eventually inherits the prestigious position himself (raising a few eyebrows in the process). Hauke's latent sinister side is forshadowed as a boy by the killing of a cat, and later manifests itself in the growing cruelty that eekes from his seemingly sensitive character. His idea to create an enormous new dyke causes the locals (who provide the physical labor) to despise him all the more.
Elements of the supernatural emerge later when Hauke aquires a bony, starved white horse from a mysterious man (the devil?). The eerieness of a horse skeleton coming to life at the dead of night is the pinnacle of the story.

This is a beautifully drawn portrait of man and the pathological changes he undergoes, which are expressed outwardly by the supernatural. Though it has its (few) humorous moments, it is not an uplifting book. I HIGHLY recommend reading this book in its original German, but even the English version won't sacrifice the high drama of this book.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Modern Parable, April 15, 2008

By 

Paul Raymont "praymont" (Toronto, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Dykemaster (Angel Classics) (Paperback)

Storm's novella presents the legend of Hauke Haien as told to a traveler by an old teacher, a `rationalist' who doubts the supernatural elements of the tale. The teacher depicts Hauke as a great innovator whose engineering prowess gave him superior powers over nature, enabling him to design a better dyke to protect the community. The people respond with suspicion and rumors that he's in league with the devil.

In the teacher's version of the tale, the supposedly supernatural elements figure only ambiguously. So, e.g., there is a seemingly spectral horse, which is sold to Hauke by someone who laughs like `the devil' (p. 72). But nothing much comes of this. In the rest of the story the horse is like a natural, though somewhat wild, horse, one that only Hauke can tame (just as he alone can tame the sea with better dykes). Then there's Trin Jans, who is presented not as a real witch but rather as ... well, as the sort of character who becomes a witch in more fanciful legends. Thus, while the old teacher is aware of the supernatural aspects of the tale, he reigns them in to make them fit into a naturalistic interpretation.

The resulting narrative is in places quite eerie. Examples include the narrator's partly anthropomorphic characterization of some birds on the tidal flats (pgs. 22 & 99) and Trin Jans' uncanny story about a mermaid, which actually makes the mermaid seem terrifying, like something more and less than human (p. 98). In both cases the author embeds fragmentary human traits in strange, alien creatures that are, like nature itself, cold and inhuman, utterly oblivious of humanity.

More generally, the tale charts a mundane landscape suffused with potentially supernatural elements that appear fleetingly in ambiguous forms, never quite surfacing as truly supernatural phenomena but, instead, appearing to be quite at home in the confines of nature. There is thus an ongoing juxtaposition of the world as (on the one hand) a natural order that fits the technical-scientific templates of reason and (on the other hand) a chaotic abyss from which wild, non-rational forces periodically erupt with cataclysmic effect.

These unpredictable natural forces find their echo within the human psyche. Hauke Haien, a paragon of reason, isn't alert to these destructive elements in his own soul, and so he's unaware of how they have eroded and weakened his foundations over the years. Eventually, they catch him totally unawares, welling up from within and casting him into the abyss. This work is the epitome of Freud's claim that in fiction, the uncanny grows in a realistic, ordinary setting into which strange, unworldly elements intrude.