The story of Peter Schlemihl, who sells his shadow to a strange man in a gray coat, is a fairy-tale-like account of the sufferings of a marked individual. It also resonates with Chamisso's own story, that of a French emigrant who was never fully accepted in his host country, Germany. Schlemihl's sufferings are, in this light, less the result of a reckless trade than of exclusion by society at large. The striking illustrations by the Leipzig graphic artist Karl-Georg Hirsch focus on the cruel confrontation of the individual with a hostile society in this novella, where the fantastic appears in the guise of the most natural.