Customer Reviews

The Dykemaster (Angel Classics)

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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.

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.

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.