It is hot. The sun scorches the fields, "the air is all fire", the water hissingly evaporates. The plants have withered, the streams have dried up, the cattle are dying of thirst. The world is dying of heat.
Theodor Storm confronts us with this paralyzing weather problem in his 1863 fairy tale “Die Regentrude”. Ill around Christmas, he wrote it himself in a fever that became "production fever".
But the climatically tricky situation is not the only temperature problem that the villagers are grappling with. In addition, tempers heat up because the meadow farmer refuses to give his daughter Maren in marriage to Stine's son, Andrees. A ludicrous condition stands in the way of love: only if the two succeed in conjuring up rain within 24 hours does the farmer promise his consent to the marriage.
Luckily, the youngsters have already heard about the rain trudge, a nature goddess who has recently not been given enough respect by mankind. With a ruse, Andrees wrested the magic spell from the Feuermann: “Haze is the wave / Dust is the source! / The woods are dumb, / Fireman dances across the fields! / Watch out! / Before you wake up, / take your mother / home into the night!”
Having reached the underworld via a dry willow trunk, Maren - a maiden is in demand - overcomes one obstacle after the other. Mark Twain, who famously complained that everyone talked about the weather but nobody did anything about it, is taught otherwise. Because Maren and Andrees give everything. And are rewarded: with double fertility. The water is flowing again, the love connection is sealed.
As later in Storm's Schimmelreiter novella, which is to be understood as a counter-catastrophe, in which the storm tide does not save the world but destroys it, the local poet lets superstition and science collide in his fairy tale. Is the Regentrude just a “spooky thing” and a “pipe dream”? Or can faith move clouds?
Maren's rebellion is accompanied by a sacrifice, as her rich father is the only one in the village to benefit from the drought. For a short time she has a guilty conscience - she can't even cook his warm beer on the day she spends with the maid - but then she pulls herself together and bravely emphasizes that you have to think of others too. Does Storm's Meteorological Regime Foresee the Climate Crisis? And is his heroine a Fridays for Future fighter avant la lettre?
As bushfires, heat waves and record temperatures wreak havoc across Europe, North and South America, India, South Asia and Africa, Storm's tale of an unbalanced nature becomes a grand parable once again.
Or you stick with your contemporary, the other Theodore among the realists. Fontane wrote – probably also to upgrade a pop genre that was suspected of being entertainment in the 19th century, just like fairy tales: “God, who reads novellas in this heat.”
