The years 1834 and 1835 mark the peak of Tieck's Dresden novellas. Not only were the partly extensive novellas in this volume created during these two years; Tieck also completed the Young Master Carpenter, which he had begun in 1811. Alongside the Vittoria Accorombona published in 1840, this is perhaps the work in which the writer summed up his socially relevant, critically aware, yet entirely poetic urban art. Whether it is the partly pronounced rejection of the emerging industrial age in the Master Carpenter, or the sharply polemical reckonings with the spirit of the times in The Water Man or Stubbornness and Whim, Tieck always critically and polemically engaged in the debates of his time, without contradicting his own past. The Scarecrow - this work, especially noted by Arno Schmidt for its...