The Pied Piper Dyk Viktor (2018)

This English-language novel by Viktor Dyk, inspired by an old Saxon legend, tells of a mysterious wanderer who cleanses the Hanseatic town of Hammeln of rats with his pipe at the citizens request. Disillusioned by the councillors narrow-mindedness and betrayed in love, he turns the pipe against them and leads the entire town to destruction. Opposing the doomed Pied Piper, a restless and isolated dreamer embodying the world of rebels, is the fisherman Sepp Jrgen, who accepts reality and allows new hope to grow by saving an infant. Reflecting the neoclassical direction of Dyks later work, the novella uses its traditional source to create a major prose work about the conflict between illusion and reality, while its mysterious atmosphere anticipates the balladic prose of the 1930s.