The Caravan (original: Die Karawane) was written by Wilhelm Hauff. Hauff (1802-1827) was a German tutor who entertained his pupils with a storytelling hour after their lessons were done. The pupils' mother, the Baroness von Hugel, insisted that Hauff write down the stories. He did and had them published, to immediate and overwhelming success. One critic called Hauff “the darling of the gods,”¹ and Hauff’s book went through numerous reprintings. Hauff then turned to writing full-time. He published fairy tales, a historical novel (Lichtenstein, 1826) which did much to establish the legitimacy of the historical romance genre in Germany, and plays and song lyrics, two of which became popular folk songs.

The Caravan is a collection of fairy tales showing not just the influence of E.T.A. Hoffmann (see: “The Sandman”) but also of The Arabian Nights, which was Hauff's favorite childhood reading. Hauff wrote The Caravan before Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm Brothers produced the best of their work, and Hauff drew on different, earlier sources than later fairy tale writers would. The framing story of The Caravan is of a stranger who joins a caravan crossing the long desert. The stranger persuades the five merchants who co-own the caravan to tell stories at night as a way to pass the time. What follows are stories in the Arabian Nights vein: “The Caliph Stork,” about a Caliph and his Grand Vizier (who is, unusually for viziers, a good guy) who are turned into storks through a scheme of the wicked magician Raschnur; “The Ghost Ship,” about a pious Muslim merchant who finds himself on a ghost ship and has to free the ship, its ghosts, and himself from the curse upon it; “The Dwarf and the Goose,” about a twelve-year-old who makes the mistake of sassing a witch and is turned into a dwarf for his troubles; “The Red Cloak,” about a Greek doctor who gets involved in some nasty business in Paris and loses his hand; “The Rescue of Fatima,” about a man going to great lengths to rescue his sister and his betrothed from slavery; and “The Tailor and the Prince,” about a cocky young tailor who learns to accept his lot in life.

The stories in The Caravan are not kunstmärchen but are nineteenth century German versions of Arabian Nights stories and contes oriental (see: “Smarra”). Hauff expertly creates the tone of the Arabian Nights stories, both narrative and atmospheric, and The Caravan never fails to entertain. It can be argued that Hauff is appropriating Arabic culture with the stories in The Caravan, but the end result is so well done and so entertaining, even today, that most readers will not find the appropriation to be particularly offensive.

The degree to which Hauff’s tales, especially The Caravan, were popular in both Germany and England is not to be underestimated:

Although the Brothers Grimm and Hans Andersen came to dominate the world of fairytales in the second half of the nineteenth century, pushing Perrault and Madame d’Aulnoy from centre stage, they were not the only collectors or authors of fairytales to gain an English-speaking public during this period...of those writers who composed their own tales Wilhelm Hauff heads the list. His Märchen, whether published as a book or separately, have kept a firm place in German children’s reading from the time of their appearance right to the present day. Equally, there has been a steady stream of English editions over the same period. During the Victorian and Edwardian periods Hauff’s tales were better known than Hoffmann’s Nutcracker or Brentano’s fairytales.²

an overt audience of bourgeois children, the “sons and daughters of the educated classes”...to whom Hauff dedicated the three fairy-tale “almanacs,” and an implied audience of aesthetically and politically sophisticated adults, whom he expected to be alert to his strategies of ironic reversal and indirection.³

Modern readers will find this to be the case: they can enjoy The Caravan while they read them to their children, taking pleasure in aspects of the stories which will elude the children.

Print: Wilhelm Hauff, Tales of the Caravan, Inn, and Palace. Dinslaken, DE: Anboco, 2016.

¹ Hans Hoffman, Wilhelm Hauff: eine nach neuen Quellen bearbeitete Darstellung seine Werdeganges (Frankfurt: Moritz Diefterweb, 1902).

² David Blamires, Telling Tales: The Impact of Germany on English Children’s Books, 1780-1918 (Cambridge: OpenBook Publishers, 2009), 181.

³ Maureen Thum, “Misreading the Cross-Writer: The Case of Wilhelm Hauff’s Dwarf Long Nose,” Children’s Literature 25 (1997): 1.