A German Christmas: Festive Tales From Berlin to Bavaria (Vintage Christmas Tales, 2)

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I enjoyed almost all and a couple were outstanding! Merry Christmas with some sad and happy endings.

the dog howled by the hour together, so that my grandmother, herself very worn and weary by then, said, “You mark my words; there’ll soon be somebody dying in our neighborhood now, when the dog howls like that! God comfort the poor soul!” And a little while after that Moss-Maggie fell ill, and when winter came she died. In her last moments she held both my father and mother by the hand and uttered the words, “May God requite you a thousand and a thousandfold,THE LOAN Wolfdietrich Schnurre-A poor father and son borrow a Christmas tree from a park and return it soon after for it to grow. 1881 Very Good!

nose wrinkled up, his face drawn and anxious. “You see, as usual I have to stop,” he said. “The same old punishment. I can never have a little fun without paying for it. It’s not a pain, really, it’s an ache, a vague ache, because all these nerves here are too short. They’re all simply too short.” But his relatives took his complaints no more seriously than his jokes and said little or nothing in reply. They casually drifted away again. Christian sat staring mutely at the theater for a while, blinking

With this key figure of German literature, the movement of Weimar classicism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries coincided with Enlightenment, sentimentality (Empfindsamkeit), Sturm und Drang, and Romanticism. The author of the scientific text Theory of Colours, he influenced Darwin with his focus on plant morphology. He also long served as the privy councilor ("Geheimrat") of the duchy of Weimar. However, there are some production choices which confused me, taking me out of the reading experience, and thus preventing me from giving this a 5/5 star review. I was very confused as to why works from Austria and Switzerland are included in this "A Very German Christmas" collection, so an explanation or confirmation that these had originally been published in the German language would have helped. I defer judgement to Austrian and Swiss readers as to whether presenting their country's works in this way is offensive or not.