Aus Dem Leben Eines Taugenichts: Novelle

The good-for-nothing son of a miller has no interest in honest work. When his father despairs of him, the young man takes up his violin and walks out into the world, following nothing but the call of the open road and his own restless heart. Through enchanted forests and moonlit encounters with two mysterious noblewomen traveling to Vienna, through fortune and famine, thieves and strange good luck, he drifts through life as if dreamed into being. Eichendorff's 1826 masterpiece pulses with the lyrical melancholy and fierce joy of German Romanticism - a prose poem to wanderlust, to youth unburdened by consequence, to the peculiar freedom of having nothing and desiring everything. It is the novel that gave the German language its word for wanderlust, and it remains the most tender portrait of someone who simply cannot stay still.