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At the same time it is thoroughly Romantic in subject-matter and treatment. The word Schlemihl is a Hebrew word variously interpreted as "Lover of God," or as "awkward fellow."
He wrote several important books on botany, topography, and ethnology, but became even more famous through his poems, ballads and romances. "Peter Schlemihl," which was written in 1813 was published in the following year by Chamisso's friend Fouqué, and achieved so great a success that it was translated into most languages. Chamisso died in Berlin on August 21, 1838. I. The Grey Man
To this guardian angel I commit our "Schlemihl." And so, adieu! Neunhausen, May, 1814. My Dear Child, The story you love so much in German I dedicate to you in English. It was in compliance with your earnest wish that other children might share the delight it has so often afforded you, that I translated it; so that it is, in some sort, yours of right.
Underneath were two rows of letters in smaller characters, which I was too feeble to connect together, and closed my eyes again. I now heard something read aloud, in which I distinctly noted the words, "Peter Schlemihl," but could not collect the full meaning.
He was always a Schlemihl. 'But can one pay too much attention to the Talmud? That is a strange saying for a Rabbi's daughter. 'King Solomon tells us there is a time for everything, returned the Rabbi's daughter. 'Yossel neglected what the wise King said, and so now he comes trying to wheedle your poor grandmother out of her money.
"You will be the new Peter Schlemihl, Weener; from now on you will go forth without a ghost and any revision essential to your puny assault upon the Republic of Letters will be done by me and God help you if I find much to do, for my life is passing and I must have time to read the immortal Hobbes before I die."
He looked at the letter, then scrutinised me, and said, "Do you happen to know, my lord, a certain Peter Schlemihl, who lost his shadow?" "Oh, my foreboding!" cried Mina. "I knew it; he has no shadow!" "And you dared," continued the verdurer, "to deceive us? See how she sobs! Confess now how you lost your shadow." Again I was forced to lie.
Stupid his enemies would have called him, only he was too unimportant to have enemies, the roughs and the children who mocked his passage being actuated merely by impersonal malice. "I suppose he's such a Schlemihl no father would ever look at him!" said a father, with a bunch of black-eyed daughters.
Like Hoffmann, Chamisso takes his reader into the midst of current life, but, unlike Hoffmann, his moods are not the dissolving views which leave the reader in doubt as to whether the whole is a phantasmagoria and a hallucination. Schlemihl is genuinely and consistently realistic. It is a story in the first person and has a rigidly logical arrangement of episodes leading up to its climax.
It is often said that his sense of isolation between interests of the land of his forefathers and the land of his adoption makes itself felt through all the wild playfulness of "Peter Schlemihl," which was at this time written, when Chamisso's age was about thirty-two. A letter of his to the Councillor Trinius, in Petersburg, tells how he came to write it.
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