Theodor Storm, born in 1817, was at first a poet of the bleak North Sea plains, but emerged after the liberal revolutions of 1848 as a major German writer of novellas. Though considered a social realist, Storm also asked more introspective questions, bordering on the tragic and the mysterious. In his final novella Der Schimmelreiter, 1888, which Thomas Mann greatly admired, the rider on the white horse of the title is in fact a young dyke-master, struggling to rebuild his remote village’s flood defences: a matter of life and death, and his white horse is believed by superstitious locals to be the ghost of a skeleton once unearthed nearby. This landmark study of Storm’s novellas is divided into three parts: Rogers considers first how loneliness is presented in Storm’s fictional worlds; then, how stories are told by far-from-omniscient narrators, or by minor characters whose identities are disguised; and finally, how the writer turned in his last and most troubled years to the question of human responsibility.
This book, originally published in 1970 and later given the ISBN 978-0-900547-05-8, was made Open Access in 2024 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.
This dissertation, drawn from T. J. Rogers’s Cambridge doctoral dissertation of 1967, was published posthumously following his tragic death in a car accident little more than a year after taking up his first academic post at the University of Durham.
To suggest that Storm’s early work (or for that matter the bulk of his work) is ‘about’ loneliness is to say nothing very new; the best of Storm criticism makes the point, and so does the worst. But opinions are less united when we come to ask the more interesting questions which the ‘suggestion that’ brings with it; in what, if anything, lies the uniqueness of Storm’s enactments of the lonely condition? Does his creative concern with that condition legitimise it, make it worth while, as a subject for art? Does it show through to us convincingly as another possible or actual way of being alive? What is it like to be lonely, and why do people become lonely, in Storm’s world? An adequate answer to this last pair of questions will take us, I think, most of the way towards answering the others; so I shall try in what follows to give an account, based on a number of his early stories, of ‘what it is like and why it happens’ in the world of Storm’s fiction at this time. The state seems to me to be delineated in a curiously pure way in the first story; and the others enlarge upon it, adding new aspects and above all hinting at reasons, which run deep into the nature of human living. Note: The endnotes to Part I are in the end matter of the book, not in this PDF.
As one reads Storm’s stories, one becomes increasingly aware of certain distinctive and fairly consistent qualities of style and narrative technique; one comes to accept and expect these qualities, and in the end they are indissolubly linked with the image of Storm which one retains. The fact that they are Storm’s techniques is, of course, one thing that draws them together and makes them of a piece in the mind; but there is the sense of another denominator between them, a unity of function which is not immediately clear. They seem to complement each other and to serve some common end, but one isn’t quite sure how they do it or what the end is. External evidence is not much help: there is no specific discussion of the problem in the correspondence or theoretical writings, and Storm’s critics have not, to the best of my knowledge, arrived at any satisfactory explanation. Note: The endnotes to Part II are in the end matter of the book, not in this PDF.
During the last three years of his life, Storm’s manner of work changed somewhat. He had previously been in the habit of writing his works one after the other, waiting until one story was completely off the stocks before starting on the next. But Der Schimmelreiter was different. The idea of such a story had been with him for years already, and by 1885 he was ready to begin work on it. First notes were made in February 1885, and he hoped to write the story down in 1886; but various factors intervened to postpone the final composition. His health was deteriorating, and he was often gravely ill; he was shattered by the death of his beloved but profligate son Hans in December 1886; and he seems to have felt a curious apprehension about the material of Der Schimmelreiter and his own ability to treat it. Whenever a less demanding or more malleable theme came his way, he turned to it almost with relief and left Der Schimmelreiter in order to write another story. This is how Ein Fest auf Haderslevhuus, Bötjer Basch, Ein Doppelgänger and Ein Bekenntnis came to be written. Note: The endnotes to Part III are in the end matter of the book, not in this PDF.
Appendix A - a table of the 46 Novellen, categorized as mainstream or departures; Appendix B - the Novellen, categorized by the form of narration; Appendix C - and by how names are established; Appendix D - Storm’s use of David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature.
To see how to cite this article in standard MHRA style, follow this link.
To see how to cite this article in author-date MHRA style, follow this link.
Bibliography entry:
Rogers, Terence John, Techniques of Solipsism: A Study of Theodor Storm’s Narrative Fiction, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 1 (MHRA, 1970)
First footnote reference:35 Terence John Rogers, Techniques of Solipsism: A Study of Theodor Storm’s Narrative Fiction, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 1 (MHRA, 1970), p. 21.
This title is distributed on behalf of MHRA by Ingram’s. Booksellers and libraries can order direct from Ingram by setting up an ipage Account: click here for more.
