Short stories
The Black Spider
Die schwarze Spinne
Jeremias Gotthelf · 1842
Synopsis
On a summer Sunday, a child is being baptised on a farm in the Emmental. A guest wonders at a blackened window post, the only old part of a new house, and the grandfather begins to tell its story. Centuries earlier, a Teutonic knight, Hans von Stoffeln, burdened the peasants with forced labour: he demanded that they plant an avenue of a hundred large trees in a single month. A hunter dressed in green offered them his help in exchange for an unbaptised child. The men hesitate; Christine, a woman from Lindau, persuades them to accept.
Context
In 1842 the novella opened the first of the six volumes of a series of Swiss pictures and legends, published in Solothurn by Jent and Gassmann until 1848. Within the frame of the christening, the grandfather tells two stories, one very old, the other from a few centuries later. A Christian allegory of good and evil, the tale has also been read as a reflection on collective guilt and on the place of women, and as a forerunner of the fantastic of the twentieth century. Heinrich Sutermeister made an opera of it in 1936, Judith Weir another in 1983.
Who it is for
In German, about a hundred pages. It is better to know that the grandfather is speaking to people who have the object he describes before their eyes, and that the warning is aimed first at those who listen to him.
Prizes and reception
Unnoticed when it appeared, it is now ranked among the peaks of the Biedermeier; Thomas Mann admired it. Three English translations since 1958.
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