Jeremias Gotthelf: Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe (HKG)

In letters announcing Jacobs. Wanderungen Gotthelf already emphasised that he had set out “to put craftsmen’s apprentices over my knee”. The novel, written between 1844 and 1846 and published in 1847 by the Zwickau Volksschriftenverein focuses on the German apprentices who not only endangered morals by excessive drinking and the seduction of good Bernese girls but also naively allowed themselves to be exploited by Communist groups. In the mid-1840s the Jesuit question and the anticlerical polemics of radical groups drove Gotthelf, still a convinced republican, towards conservative, even reactionary circles. The commentary interprets this novel in the context of polemical political debates and of the historical and generic aspects of ‘Handwerkerliteratur’.