When Heinrich the old cellist was still a young poet, he and his fiancée Maria liked to spend their spare time together reading the same book cheek to cheek, as we know from a poem written by Maria. She didn’t reveal what book they were reading, but fortunately I discovered a book which they both signed after reading it.
It first attracted my attention because in Heinrich’s first inscription (presumably when he bought the book) he identifies as a musician, which is the earliest evidence we have for his musicianship. He had just turned 18 three weeks earlier. His inscription is:
Heinrich Groß Musiker
1. Oktober 1900
Bielefeld
He read it within two months, as he reveals with a different pen:
Gelesen 30. November 1900
Bad Warmbrunn
Im Rosenheim
(Bad Warmbrunn, Riesengebirge, is today in Poland, and I have no idea what he was doing there, nor for Bielefeld either)
Maria then signed after reading it nearly three years later:
Gelesen Ende Oktober 1903
M. Pfersching
which incidentally is the earliest evidence that links her to Heinrich. She only arrived in Strasbourg the same year, so Heinrich must have thrown that book at her pretty swiftly after first setting eyes on her. Three weeks later, 18.11.1903, Heinrich is crazy in love with her, as documented in his poems. On 18.4.1904, Maria's 23rd birthday, they get engaged.
Anyhow, moving on to the book itself, it is a collection of six stories, volume 3 out of 3 of the “selected stories” of W. O. von Horn (1798-1867), published by J.D. Sauerländer in 1892. Incidentally, the author, real name Wilhelm Oertel, hailing from Horn near Simmern, comes from a location and background that makes it highly likely he has shared ancestry with my grandmother, the future daughter-in-law of Heinrich and Maria. I am slightly spooked by this coincidence, but will look at his family history in a separate blog entry and stick with Heinrich and Maria and their shared book for now.
W. O von Horn was a highly successful writer of novels, stories and non-fiction for young readers and “the people”. Hailing from the Simmern area, notorious for the stories of the robber Schinderhannes (who gets a mention in the book, too), he spent much of his life in the upper Middle Rhine region, where all those romantic ruins of medieval castles are lined up. Accordingly, most of his stories are set in this area, and some are just dripping with its romantic spirit, and also spiced up with the kind of robber stories that Schinderhannes personified.
Reading the stories I also note that those set on the Middle Rhine give me a strong sense of place, with detailed descriptions of the landscape seen from this castle or from that rock. The non-Rhineland stories by contrast, don't have anything similar. In one case, the story of a man who loses his home and love after being forced to join Napoleon's army, the absence of geography may be a clever device used to illustrate his loss of Heimat.
The first story, in particular, a love story set against the backdrop of Sooneck Castle, shown below, and its demise in the 13th century, brings the medieval fortresses back to life and indulges in the charm of the ruins that the author appears to have known first hand in the 19th century (quite a few, including Sooneck, were repaired or rebuilt during the 19th century in the spirit of reviving German glory rather than historic authenticity). The castle being flattened for its role in armed highway (and river) robbery is the backdrop for a very romantic love story, so in view of Heinrich’s romantic poetry, we can see how that story fitted the young poet’s frame of mind.
Steel engraving from "Views of the Rhine" by William Tombleson (around 1840): Ruins of Sooneck Castle
source: Wikipedia
I’m more intrigued by the geographic factor though. Heinrich was the son of a railway man from Breslau (Silesia), born in Thuringia, and schooled in Stendal/Tangermünde where his father’s career found its final stop. From there to the ruined castles of the Middle Rhine it’s quite a long distance, whereas for Maria, from Bruchsal, it was just down the river.
So I’m wondering whether it was perhaps the romantic ideas of the Rhine, first acquired from literature like this book and possibly others, that helped to attract him to Strasbourg and/or to Upper Rhine native Maria. Rhine romanticism was all the rage in the 19th century, so he would have been trailing the zeitgeist a bit, as he did with his romantic poems. Note that in later life, Heinrich and Maria settled at Elberfeld, which then became Wuppertal, and isn’t too far from the river Rhine, whereas Heinrich’s sister Gertrud and her descendants stayed in the watershed of the river Elbe.
The last of the stories, which I haven't quite finished yet as this entry goes live, is the only one with an explicit musical connection. Pegged on the premise that many of the inhabitants of 19th century Elz (Hesse) became travelling musicians (a historical fact, according to the German Wikipedia entry), it tells the story of the first musician in this tradition and his daughter. Elzer Musikanten are still very active today. The first page of this story is the only one in the book that has come loose, suggesting that this particular story was opened more often than the others. Yet another clue that this old book gives us about Heinrich and Maria.
Here's a recent photo of the book:
The odd stripes at the corners show where the brown-speckled paper cover has been glued on such as to overlap the grey linnen corners. Wondering whether the paper is original.
Contents of the book:
Soneck. Historisch-romantische Erzählung aus dem dreizehnten Jahrhundert
Aus dem Leben eines Vogelsbergers in Krieg und Frieden
Das Original. Ein Stücklein
Das Mühlchen in der Morgenbach. Eine Begebenheit aus dem Jahre 1716
Der Apostelhof. Eine Geschichte aus der Vorzeit Bacharachs. (12 Teile)
Die Elzer. Eine Geschichte aus dem Nassauer Land
Intriguingly, the very same stories are available from Google Books as the scan of a volume marked as vol 3 of the Complete Works in 12 volumes, whereas my edition is vol 3 of the Selected Works in 3 volumes. Same publisher, but published postumously. Maybe they just selected to re-publish the first three volumes of their 12-vol opus? Also, my vol 3 doesn't tell that it's meant to be a set of three (but antiquarians sell it as such). Maybe the publishers were just republishing as "selected" volume by volume to see how it sells and gave up when it ran out of steam? Anyhow, enjoy!
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