BOOK REVIEW

“Tyll” by Daniel Kehlmann. Translated from the German by Ross Benjamin. New York: Pantheon Books, 2020. 344 pages, $26.95 (hardback).

Daniel Kehlmann is a German novelist who had one of his previous books, “Measuring the World,” translated into 40 languages. In “Tyll,” he takes a famous trickster figure in German folklore and uses him as the focus for examining attitudes, values and lifestyles of various figures who lived during the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War that devastated many of the German states and lasted from 1618 to 1648. Tyll Ulenspiegel may have actually lived some three centuries earlier and became a figure in folklore at least a century earlier. He is first seen in the novel as a boy growing up as the son of a miller, Claus.

Tyll practices walking on a rope repeatedly and one day he appears in the church tower window and steps out on a tightrope as a crowd gathers below. Tyll urges them to take off their shoes and throw them away. Most follow his command and then have a difficult time retrieving them from the pile that builds up. Tyll berates them for their gullibility: “You half-wits. You crumb-heads. You tadpoles. You good for nothing beetle-brained oafs.” The trickster has taken advantage of the people, but they do not appreciate his humor.

One day, two Jesuit scholars come to the village. Dr. Oswald Tesimond and Dr. Athanasius Kircher, both historical figures, come to the village and are invited to join the scanty meal that the miller can provide. The scholars explain that they study the nature of dragons and that dragon blood can make a person invulnerable, but that the scarcity of these shy dragons compels them to seek medicinal substitutes, such as earthworms and grubs, which resemble dragons. When the Jesuits notice the pentagrams engraved over the miller’s door frame, Claus explains that they, along with the right words and spells, keep away demons. He also mentions to the scholars that he has a book in Latin that he cannot read. Claus is soon asked to accompany the Jesuits into the village “to talk further.” He is then accused of being a warlock who led a witches’ Sabbath and put on trial. His confession is coerced and the book is entered into evidence as forbidden to possess, even if he couldn’t read it, because he could have shared it with others.

Claus receives his last meal before his execution and Tyll and his friend Nele join the traveling people. From one village to another, wagons bring various trades to town – the cloth merchant, some fruit merchants, scissors grinders, a kettle mender, a spice merchant, a healer and a barber. Life for the traveling people is fraught with danger and marginal at best for “anyone who robs or kills them is not prosecuted.” Tyll and Nele dance for coins to live on and Tyll learns to juggle. The storyteller in the group relates the tale of the flight of the Winter King from the burning city and his becoming a burden to Europe’s Protestant princes.

Although violence between Catholics and Protestants was ongoing following the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, especially in the numerous German states, the Thirty Years’ War ultimately witnessed Catholic France supporting Protestant Sweden, among other Protestant states, to defeat the Catholic Kaiser in Vienna. The Winter King is Friedrich, one of the Austrian Kaiser’s electors, who is married to Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of the English King James I. Friedrich made the mistake of accepting the monarchy of Bohemia and quickly lost his army when Prague was sacked and burned by imperial forces. Friedrich thus served as king for only one winter and he and his wife, Liz, fled to Holland and other Protestant courts to beg for assistance. Liz says of her husband: “She had always known that he wasn’t the cleverest.” Princes did nothing and relied on their subordinates. This was the way of the world that there were only a few real people who mattered. Tyll presented Queen Liz with a magic white canvas that he assured her could be seen by no one stupid, no one born out of wedlock or by “bastards and dolts and villains and men ripe for the gallows,” all of whom could see absolutely nothing in the framed picture on the wall. Visitors of course stood helplessly before the white picture, but were afraid to admit that they saw nothing lest the Queen consider them to be ”illegitimate, stupid or thieving.”

The author relates the story of Martin von Wolkenstein, whom he calls “the fat count,” who is sent by the Kaiser on a mission to travel to the remote monastery of Andechs in Bavaria to find “the most famous jester in the Empire” and bring him to the imperial court. Martin witnesses the horrors of the war close up and would later write his memoirs 50 years later. At the monastery, the abbot tells him that imperial and Protestant armies had both periodically sacked and looted the abbey and left it with little to survive on. Long after Friedrich’s death, Queen Liz continues to play her role at Protestant courts. Although Liz longs for the “good theater” she had treasured growing up in England, she presses on even during the negotiations of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, trying to secure her husband’s former role as imperial elector for her remaining son. She also offers Tyll a place at the English court.

Kehlmann reflects accurately the difficulties of living and raising a family in the 17th century in Europe even without the extreme disruptions caused by wartime. When darkness falls, everything ceases because candles were too expensive to use on a daily basis. At night there is always the fear that wolves will prowl, as well as other frightening creatures. Days are also fraught with fears of starvation and death. Claus thinks to himself that it is a good custom “not to love your own children too soon” because his wife Agneta “has given birth so often, but only one of the babies survived, and even he is thin and frail.” Claus thinks to himself: “You always have to keep a distance between you and your children, they simply die too quickly. But with each year that passes, you get more used to such a being. You begin to trust, you allow yourself to be fond of them – and suddenly they’re gone.”

The author also has Nele reflect the position of women in the 17th century: “Girls don’t go to other places. They stay where they were born. So it has always been: you’re little, you help in the house; you get bigger, you help the female hands; you grow up, you marry a Steger son, if you’re pretty, or else a relative of the smith, or, if things go badly, a Heinerling. Then you have a child and another child and more children, most of whom die, and you continue to help the hands and in church sit somewhat farther toward the front, next to your husband and behind your mother-in-law, and then, when you’re 40 and your bones ache and your teeth are gone, you sit in your mother-in-law’s old seat.”

“Tyll” is an outstanding, very creative piece of literature. On the back cover, Salmon Rushdie calls it “a brilliant and unputdownable novel.” I cannot be sure that readers who know nothing of the history of the Thirty Years’ War and the attitudes and values concerning religion, science and medicine of that period would enjoy this fine book as much as I do, but I suspect that they will. A quick search of Wikipedia can provide plenty of historical background concerning the individuals mentioned and I think that even without this Kehlmann’s literary talents will be obvious. Although following characters through a devastating war can be depressing, the fool provides humor throughout and the story offers valuable insights to any reader. I recommend it very highly!

– Reviewed by Richard Weigel, Western Kentucky University History Department.