Immermann, Karl Leberecht
"Münchhausen unter den Ziegen" by Karl Leberecht Immermann is a satirical novella written in the early 19th century. It follows the fantastical childhood of Münchhausen, whose misadventures on Mount Helicon and later in Holland lampoon moral crusades, fashionable philanthropy, and cultivated “good taste,” all in a playful, mock-heroic tone.The opening of the story finds the precocious child carried in his father’s coat pocket from Germany toward Thessaloniki, escaping just as a lammergeier snatches him—only for a cool English sportsman to shoot the bird and abandon him. Thirst drives the boy to the Hippocrene, which turns him into a compulsive poet and soon into the protegé of a herd of kindly wild goats on Helicon. As he adapts to their life—running on all fours, nibbling grass, even ruminating—he realizes with alarm he is becoming a young buck. Immermann then sketches a sharp satire of the goats’ philanthropic mothers and their mates’ moral-improvement club, culminating in a farcical attempt to “reform” a dung beetle and a blowfly and marry them off, which collapses the moment instinct calls. In the chaos that follows, the boy dreads being handed over to the males for further “education,” when a Dutch rentier, grimly completing a doctor-prescribed straight-line journey, arrives and sits to “view nature,” setting up the next turn of the tale. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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