JOHANN

PETER

See also:

• JOHANN PETER REBEL (176o-1826)

REBEL (176o-1826)  , German poet and popular writer, was born at Basel on the loth of May 1760 . The father dying when the child was little over a year old, he was brought up amidst poverty-stricken conditions in the village of Hausen in the Wiesental, where he received his earliest education . Being of brilliant promise, he found friends who enabled him to complete his school education and to study theology (1778-1780) at Erlangen . At the end of his university course he was for a time a private tutor, then became teacher at the Gymnasium in Karlsruhe, and in 18o8 was appointed director of the school . He was subsequently appointed member of the Consistory and " evangelical prelate." He died at Schwetzingen, near Heidelberg, on the 22nd of September 1826 . Hebel is one of the most widely read of all German popular poets and writers . His poetical narratives and lyric poems, written in the "Alemanic" dialect, are " popular " in the best sense . His Allemannische Gedichte (1803) " bucolicize," in the words of Goethe, " the whole world in the most attractive manner " (verbauert das game Universum auf die anmutigste Weise) . Indeed, few modern German poets surpass him in fidelity, naivete, humour, and in the freshness and vigour of his descriptions . His poem, Die Wiese, has been described by Johannes Scherr as the " pearl of German idyllic poetry "; while his prose writings, especially the narratives and essays contained in the Schatzkastlein des rheinischen Hausfreundes (Tubingen, 1811; new edition, Stuttg . 1869, 1888), belong to the best class of German stories, and according , to August Friedrich Christian Vilmar (1800-1868) in his Geschichte der deutschen Literatur are " worth more than a cartload of novels " (wiegen ein gauzes Fuder Romane auf) . Memorials have been erected to him at Karlsruhe, Basel and Schwetzingen .

A complete edition of Hebel's works—Sdmtliche Werke—was first published at

Stuttgart in 8 vols . (1832—1834); subsequent editions appeared in 1847 (3 vols.), 1868 (2 vols.), 1873 (edited by G . Wendt, 2 vols.), 1883-1885 (edited by O . Behaghel, 2 vols.) and 1905 (edited by E . Keller, 5 vols.), as well as innumerable reprints . Hebel's correspondence has been edited by 0 . Behaghel (1883) . See G . Langin, J . P . Hebel, ein Lebensbild (1894), and the introduction to Behaghel's edition .