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Hansjürg Baumgartner, Marion Treby and Val Scullion outside the Hebelhaus Museum
 in Hausen i. W. / Germany, where Hebel spent part of his childhood. Picture: Andy Treby

Marion, a retired associate lecturer for the Open University, as was Val.

Marion explains: “Hebel was a contemporary of Hoffmann but wrote very differently.

They both wrote a story in response to a real event: the discovery of a perfectly-preserved miner’s corpse in Falun, Sweden, in 1719, 50 years after the accident in which the miner was killed. Hebel’s concise story, Unexpected Meeting, focuses on how the miner’s fiancée was ‘reunited’ with him. Hoffmann’s much longer story about the same event, which is called The Mines of Falun, adds to the facts, emphasising its uncanny, almost horrific aspect.

The starting point of our interest in Hebel was comparing how differently they wrote about the same events.”
Commenting on her successful writing partnership with Val, Marion says: “I’m really the one who does a lot of the research, and she’s the one who really focuses on the literary theory – so we complement each other.
But when we began this study of Hebel, we hadn’t planned to involve a third co-author.”

She elaborates: “Our association with Herr Baumgartner began when, in the course of our research, we came across his website on Hebel, which he first created in 2004. Working purely online, we asked his permission to use some of the information on his excellent, comprehensive website. This led to further email exchanges, when we asked him if he would like to become a third co-writer, and we were very pleased when he accepted.”

Marion notes that, despite all of them working together on the book, she and Val didn’t meet Hansjürg face-to-face until June last year, “when we travelled by train to spend a few days in the area of Germany where Hebel had lived and worked”. She adds: “Hansjürg had meticulously planned a very full schedule for our visit, taking in the key locations which had inspired Hebel’s poems and our book. These included a ruined castle, the source of the River Wiese, a trip up a mountain, and a journey by boat across the Rhine in Basel, under the watchful eye of the Minster."

“Before we met Hansjürg face-to-face, we had written to him in German and he had replied to us in English, so we had no idea how well we would be able to communicate with each other. So it was with some trepidation that we met him for the first time, on Basel railway station. But we needn’t have worried; we negotiated the language barrier and soon became, and remain, good friends. There can’t be many other people who have had a writing journey like this.”

Marion, a former secondary school teacher who is also heavily involved with Cambridge Folk Club, says the trio’s study of Hebel has been “favourably received academically”. She reveals: “One of our endorsements, from Dr Ernest Schonfield of Glasgow University, states: ‘This book, the first on Hebel in English for 30 years, offers a brilliant introduction to the master storyteller and his distinctive voice. Like Hebel himself, a pleasure to read’. On how the book was picked up by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Marion says: “In 2014, Val and I had already contributed a chapter – ‘The Female Musical Uncanny in the Fiction of ETA Hoffmann’ – to the book Women and Gothic, edited by Maria Purves, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. So we sent them our proposal for a full-length book about Johann Peter Hebel, and it was accepted.

During Hebel’s time, ordinary households would have owned two books: the Bible and an Almanac, a self-help book of practical information about the weather, astronomical events, when to sow crops, and basic first aid.

It also contained news items. Hebel expanded its range by adding short stories, as he was concerned about the standards of literacy."