The historical setting, religious rituals, and characters like Big Hat (a regional folk hero, sort of like Paul Bunyan, rather than a character invented specifically for the novel) are all sufficiently unfamiliar that it's difficult to separate the canny from the un. Most Germans might not recognize the folktale characters, but plot elements like the children playing the three wise men or the concept of a period 'between the years' will be familiar, as they still have modern cultural currency.Įnglish-speaking audiences will likely have a different experience, understanding Krabat as an entirely fresh story rather than simply one telling. According to the friend who first introduced the book to me-a German academic with an active interest in folklore-audiences familiar with the source material read it as a strong, 'faithful' presentation of a common narrative, perhaps with political overtones especially resonant for its time. This recent 'reprint' is available via HarperCollins's Library of Lost Books, which specializes in ebook and print on demand editions of 'lost' works. The book is a beloved classic in its homeland, but didn't fare so well in translation. Krabat, by Czech-German writer Otfried Preußler, is a 1971 novelization of an old central and east European folktale. No one can truly escape the mill, and every New Year one of the Master's men dies in mysterious circumstances. When Krabat transitions from mundane apprentice to pupil in the Master's Black School and learns more about his situation, he begins to realize that the power the apprentices wield and the relative safety of their lives at the mill come at a terrible price. Dark magic, at first visible only in furtive glimmers, sustains the isolated enterprise.

Summoned across Saxony, a province in the east of Germany on the Polish border, by repeated dreams of a strange mill, Krabat becomes its Master's twelfth apprentice. This is the only life he can conceive of.

The conflict that will eventually be called the Thirty Years' War (though it pushed at either side of that perimeter) has been going on for over a generation. In the late seventeenth century, after the end of the world, a fourteen-year-old orphan boy named Krabat walks from town to town begging with a troupe of friends.

Preussler krabat