Kafka’s Reading – The German Writer Hebel

Johann Peter Hebel was a traditional German poet whom Kafka particularly admired. In 1916, for instance, he advised his fiancée Felice that “Hebel would be very good for a while. Have you got him?” He also considered that he was particularly suitable for reading aloud with children. We know from Max Brod that Hebel’s Das Schatzkästlein des Rheinischen Hausfreundes / Treasure Chest of the Rhineland Home Companion was one of Kafka’s favourite books: Hebel, born in Basel in 1760, published these simple and humorous short stories in the Rhineland Home Companion almanacs, and by the nineteenth century they had been collected into an anthology which became one of the most popular in German literature. The short stories, anecdotes, and traditional comic tales still retain their magic, even today. 

There was, for example, the story of the miner’s sweetheart, who followed her lover to the edge of the pit, never to see him alive again. […] Kafka loved that story because of its “completeness”, because it was so natural, as great things always are.

Dora Diamant