When half a century ago now, I was taught German literature at school and university, Hebel was never on any syllabus. Though appreciated and praised by generations of writers who were, from Goethe onwards and downwards, Hebel was relegated to the status of a ‘popular’ writer, not part of the ‘high’ literary culture that had begun to be institutionalized and monumentalized even before Germany became a nation state. If, as it seems, no book of Hebel’s work was published in England before John Hibberd’s present selection and translation from the Schatzkästlein, which first appeared in 1811, it must be for related reasons, though the book reached readers well beyond not only its Alemannic region, which includes Alsace and parts of Switzerland, but any subsequent borders of the German-speaking countries. Tolstoy was among its admirers.footnote＊

Hebel, the son of a weaver, orphaned at the age of thirteen, but given a thorough education thanks to the patronage and subsidies available to potential clergymen or civil servants, was born in 1760 in the Black Forest. He died in 1826, on his way from Mannheim to Heidelberg, just as his mother had died while commuting from Basel to her home village, Hausen. Under the enlightened rule of Karl Friedrich—Margrave, then Grand Duke of Baden—Hebel became a Lutheran pastor, headmaster of his former school and, for a time, Professor of Theology and Hebrew. As an ecumenical churchman and educationalist, he became an influential figure, active in the policies that led to the merging of the Lutheran and Reformed Churches in Baden—his parents’ marriage had prefigured that union—and, earlier, to the abolition of serfdom there in 1783, the emancipation of the Jews in 1809.

As an author Hebel emerged in 1803 with his Alemannische Gedichte, poems in the Alemannic dialect that became no less popular in his linguistic region, and beyond it, than his later prose, and as widely ranging in kind, form and affinity. (Ancient and mediaeval poets were among his models.) With no ambition to be a professional writer, let alone a ‘great’ one, Hebel added little to later editions of the poems; and the prose pieces collected for the Schatzkästlein were written for an almanac edited at his school, mainly for readers who owned no books other than the Bible and perhaps an edifying tract or two. The first edition of the poems appeared anonymously.