United States or New Zealand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Schreiber has only one supporter, despite the fact that the evidence, external and internal, is as strong as it can be without Heine's ever having made some such remark as the following: "Yes, in 1823 I knew only Schreiber's saga and borrowed from it." But Heine never made any such statement.

The most plausible theory in regard to the source of Heine's ballad is the one proposed by Oscar F. Walzel, who says: "Heine hat den Stoff wahrscheinlich aus dem ihm wohlbekannten Handbuch für Reisende am Rhein von Aloys Schreiber übernommen." The only proof that Walzel gives that Heine knew Schreiber's manual is a reference to it in Lutetia.

As to internal evidence, there is only one slight difference between Heine's ballad and Schreiber's saga: where Heine's Lorelei combs her hair with a golden comb and has golden jewelry, Schreiber's "bindet einen Kranz für ihre goldenen Locken" and "hat eine Schnur von Bernstein in der Hand."

"If it wasn't you that killed him, it was one of that murderous gang of cutthroats and anarchists that was with you. If it wasn't you, then it was Schreiber's son that Prussian jail-bird, or one of his friends." Zalnitch's eyes blazed. "You call us anarchists and cutthroats. You, who are a product of the rotten government that has ground down and oppressed the people I represent.

I could not see the force of this reasoning, remembering Herr Schreiber's room, and how long the sword had been in it; and allowing that there is no porosity in tempered steel, still, the black velvet casing of the handle might have absorbed a considerable amount of Schreiberian bacteria, bacilli, or whatever it is that physiologists assert to be so nasty and so ubiquitous, and so set on finding out our weak places and hitting us there, as swordfish "go" at whales.

But there is nothing in Loeben that Heine could not have derived in more inspiring form from Schreiber; and Schreiber contains essentials not in Loeben at all. Indeed, a general study of Schreiber's manuals leads one to believe that the influence of them, as a whole, on Heine would be a most grateful theme: there is not one Germanic legend referred to in Heine that is not contained in Schreiber.

But what came of the London lady's or of Mrs. Schreiber's Spartan discipline? Did the little blind kittens of Gracechurch-street, who were ordered by their penthesilean mamma, on the very day of their nativity, to face the most cruel winds did they, or did Mrs. Schreiber's wards, justify, in after life, this fierce discipline, by commensurate results of hardiness?

Pull off your boots," said he, "and if you open your fool head to any living soul until I give you leave, py Gott I'll gill you!" It was Schreiber's way, like Marryatt's famous Boatswain, to begin his admonitions in exact English, and then, as wrath overcame him, to lapse into dialect.

It is an old story, and Heine could have derived his material from a number of places, but not from Grimm's Deutsche Sagen, indeed from no place so convenient as Schreiber. Heine knew Schreiber's Handbuch in 1823. The situation, then, is as follows: Heine had to have a source or sources, There are three candidates for Heine honors; Brentano, Loeben, Schreiber.

The one episode in Loeben not found in any of Schreiber's Rheinsagen is the story of the castaway ring miraculously restored from the stomach of the fish. This Loeben could have taken from "Magelone" by Tieck, or "Polykrates" by Schiller, both of whom he revered as men and with whose works he was thoroughly familiar.