Novelle

Novelle [no‐vel‐ĕ] (plural ‐ellen), the German term for a fictional prose tale that concentrates on a single event or situation, usually with a surprising conclusion. The term, adopted from the Italian (see novella), was introduced in 1795 by J. W. von Goethe. The outstanding German tradition of Novellen includes works by Tieck, Kleist, and Thomas Mann, most of which conform (in terms of length) to the English sense of ‘novella’.

Novelle became prominent in German literature both as a term and as a genre of fiction at the end of the 18th c. It was introduced by Goethe with Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten in 1795, which is modelled on the novella as it occurs in Boccaccio's Decameron, from which it adapted the cyclic frame (see Rahmen). Prominent features of the Novelle are the concentrated presentation of an action which arouses suspense and contains an element of surprise leading to an unexpected ending. This element of surprise is the ‘new’ (novella) feature of the narrative, exposing seemingly inexplicable aspects of reality which are inaccessible to reason.

The Romantics favoured supernatural motifs to convey irrational experience (Novellenmärchen), the first example being Tieck's Der blonde Eckbert (1797). The various Novellen inserted in Goethe's novels substantiated the association of the genre with society and its moral values. This is likewise a feature of the narrative work of Heinrich von Kleist, the first important exponent of the German Novelle, who is noted for the metaphysical content of his stories. Kleist, like many writers who are generally referred to as the authors of Novellen, published his stories as Erzählungen. A variety of definitions of the genre emerged from the turn of the 19th c., at first based on non-German models, especially Boccaccio (e.g. Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel), but, in view of the proliferation of the genre during the first two decades of the 19th c., on German models as well. Mindful of this as well as of the need for a title for one of his own creations, Goethe pronounced a simple solution (see Novelle, below), which by its forceful wording has become an indispensable reference for the definition of the genre, the ‘sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit’ (1827). A. W. Schlegel had regarded turning-points in the narrative as a formal requirement; L. Tieck (1829) stressed the need for a point (Wendepunkt) at which the story took an unexpected, decisive turn, a theory which has been compared with the Aristotelian peripety, so suggesting a parallel with drama, which was emphasized by Th. Storm (1881). P. Heyse in his introduction to the Deutscher Novellenschatz (1871-6) claimed that the Novelle should have a definite silhouette contained in a brief summary distinguishing it from all others, quoting the falcon image deriving from the Decameron (V. 3) as an exemplary feature of the symbolical allusiveness of the narrative (Falkentheorie).

The development of the German Novelle as a major genre of fiction is above all due to the high level achieved by writers associated with Poetic Realism (see Poetischer Realismus). Prominent authors writing in the German language in the late 19th c. and in the early 20th c. have applied the term Novelle to works whose diversity accounts for continued attempts at detailed definition.