The tailor Christoph Eusebius Mandel spins tales to occupy his son, Amadeus, but the songs which Amadeus weaves over his father and step-mother have an enchantment all their own.

It led him cautiously out of his fear into the world which he had not yet seen, and when he sang, regardless of what it was, sky or clouds or forest or his father or his mother, everything became as it had been and yet much, much more beautiful.

Hermann Stehr (1864-1940) was a Silesian author of over thirty novels and novellas. He was awarded the Bauernfeld Prize (1910), the Fastenrath Prize (1919), the Schiller Prize (1919), the Rathenau Prize (1930), the Wartburg Rose (1932), the Goethe Medal for Art and Science (1932) and the Goethe Prize of Frankfurt-am-Main (1933); appointed as a founding member of the Prussian Literary Academy (1926); and also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.

Germany possesses in Hermann Stehr an artist of profound clarity. That which is in motion in his works, and that which stands still, seems eternal. His people are creatures who have nothing finished in themselves, but still seem to exist at the dawn of creation, unreleased in God’s iron forging hand. And there is still no plentiful sunlight over their world. … They suffer, as it were, the act of creation. - Gerhart Hauptmann, Nobel Laureate in Literature (1912)