The Temptation of Power

Lessons from ‘Krabat,’ Otfried Preussler’s tale of magic and mastery

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Krabat and the Sorcerer’s Mill
by Otfried Preussler
(trans. Anthea Bell)
New York Review, 256 pp, $13.99

TWO TRADITIONS, THE CLASSICAL AND THE CHRISTIAN, combine to create Western culture. At the head of each stands a martyr. Socrates died for the sake of philosophy, Jesus for the redemption of humanity. Both warned their followers against the corrupting influence of earthly power. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates spends a long evening attempting to persuade his young interlocutors “that justice is better than injustice,” even if it requires forsaking power and success. He would later show that he meant what he said, refusing to escape prison when offered the opportunity and contentedly drinking the hemlock instead.

Jesus accepted a still more painful and humiliating death, refusing to be rescued by either earthly or heavenly power. When Peter cut off the ear of one of those who had come to arrest Jesus, Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Put your sword back into its place.” He reminded Peter that he had far greater forces at his command, if he desired to use them: “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” But, as he was later to tell Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world.”

The stories of both Jesus and Socrates remind us that a willingness to renounce power is among the defining ideals of Western civilization. It is also the central lesson of Otfried Preussler’s children’s classic Krabat and the Sorcerer’s Mill, recently rereleased by New York Review Books under its “NYRB Kids” label in a translation by Anthea Bell. Preussler (1923–2013) was one of Germany’s best-loved children’s authors. He wrote other novels well-known to German readers, such as Der Räuber Hotzenplotz (The Robber Hotzenplotz), Die kleine Hexe (The Little Witch), and Das kleine Gespenst (The Little Ghost), each of which Bell also translated into English. But Krabat is perhaps Preussler’s finest work, and thanks are due to NYRB for keeping it alive for a new generation of English readers.

Based on an old Sorbian folktale, Preussler’s 1971 novel tells of a wandering young beggar named Krabat, who apprentices himself to a mysterious miller with a patch over one eye. Krabat quickly discovers that this is no ordinary mill. On one night each month a stranger visits, drawn by a team of black horses and wearing a hat with a feather glowing bright red, “bright enough to light up the whole front yard of the mill.” The apprentices, twelve in all, work feverishly through the night, grinding the unknown contents of heavy sacks and reloading them on the sinister guest’s cart before daybreak. After an initiation period, Krabat joins his fellow apprentices in a surprising weekly ritual: Every Friday evening they transform into ravens and join the miller in his private study, where he reads to them from his Book of Necromancy, giving lessons in black magic.

These are not the only strange goings-on at the mill. Every year the apprentices spend the night of Easter Saturday outdoors, in pairs, keeping watch until the Easter bells ring out from the nearby villages. Then they mark each other’s foreheads with their special sign, a pentagram, pledging loyalty to the “Secret Brotherhood” before returning home. There the miller strikes them on each cheek, proclaiming “Remember you are my pupil!” and “Remember I am the Master!,” after which they must promise to obey him “in all things” forever.

There is worse to come. As Krabat’s first year draws to a close, the apprentices become grumpy and irritable. Tonda, the head journeyman, who had taken Krabat under his wing and become his friend, tells him that they are all afraid, though he does not say why. During the night of New Year’s Eve, Krabat and the others hear a terrible cry. The next morning, they find Tonda “lying face downward at the foot of the attic stairs,” his neck broken. Just as Krabat had joined the mill a year earlier, a new young man arrives to take Tonda’s place among the twelve. But a year later, another apprentice, Michal, also dies mysteriously. Krabat soon learns the reason from his fellow apprentice Juro, whom everyone regards as rather dimwitted but who turns out to be much cleverer than he lets on: In order to maintain his position and his power, the Master must either kill one of his apprentices every New Year’s Eve or be killed himself.

There is only one way to break this spell, explains Juro—to be loved by a young woman. “If you have a girl who loves you,” Juro says, “she can come to the Master on the last night of the year and ask him to let you go free. If she passes the test he will put her to, then he himself must die on New Year’s Eve.” The test: She must identify her beloved from among the twelve apprentices. If she fails, she must pay with her life. If she succeeds, the miller will die that very night, his power broken. The apprentices, however, will also pay a price for their freedom: They will lose their magic powers forever.

This knowledge confronts Krabat with an opportunity, but also a danger. On that first Easter Eve outdoors, when he and Tonda had marked one another with the brotherhood’s secret sign, Krabat had been entranced by a singer’s voice. It belonged to the young woman leading the yearly procession of village maidens through town early on Easter morn, singing a hymn: “Christ is risen! Hallelujah!” Since then, Krabat has used his growing knowledge of magic to communicate with her secretly. First he reveals himself to her in dreams. Eventually he arranges to meet her in person on a subsequent Easter Eve, after renewing his vow to the brotherhood but before returning to the mill. “I know you,” she says upon seeing Krabat. “I have dreamed of you.” Before departing, “she dipped an end of her shawl in the pitcher of Easter water, and without a word she wiped the pentagram off Krabat’s forehead.” Krabat felt “as if she had wiped some taint from him.” Would she release him—could she—from his bondage to the Master? Dare he ask her to take such a risk?

As he weaves his suspenseful tale, Preussler carries the reader along with a direct, straightforward narrative style. The book’s relatively short chapters are mostly self-contained, relating single episodes that build upon each other, gradually informing readers of the mill’s secrets while building tension by raising new questions and fears about what may come: Who is this stranger that arrives one night every month, to whom even the Master is subservient? Why does first Tonda, then Michal die under mysterious circumstances, and why do the apprentices never speak of them thereafter? Who will be next? Is there any way to escape the mill? How much does the foolish Juro really know of the Master’s secrets? Strand by strand, Preussler skillfully spins his web. He permits the reader to hope that a happy ending is possible without ever feeling that it is assured.

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ANTHEA BELL’S TRANSLATION nicely captures the forward momentum of Preussler’s unadorned approach. Bell was one of the twentieth century’s great translators; her German translations include works by W. G. Sebald, Stefan Zweig, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Franz Kafka. But she also worked in children’s literature, ranging from Asterix comic books to fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen. NYRB has made some of her other Preussler translations available as well. Only one line from her Krabat translation jumped out to me as a blunder. At a dramatic moment, the miller is recounting to the apprentices tales of his earlier adventures with the best friend of his youth, Jirko. One of them asks what later became of this friend. “What became of Jirko?” repeats the Master. “Den hab ich umgebracht,” writes Preussler: “I killed him.” Bell offers a much vaguer and weaker version: “I brought him to his death.” Preussler’s original is more abrupt, shocking, and direct—a directness that Bell otherwise maintains admirably in the English.

Krabat is a deeply moral tale about the temptations of power. Krabat feels its allure. Early in the story he realizes that “a man who knew the Art of Arts had power over other men, and to have power—as much as the Master had, if not more—struck him as a fine thing to aim for. It was to achieve that aim that he was studying and studying and studying.” The attraction of such power grows even stronger after Krabat accompanies the Master on a visit to the Elector of Saxony, where the miller, disguised as a nobleman, persuades the Elector to continue a war with Sweden. As they return home, Krabat is silent, lost deep in thought. The Master asks what he is thinking about. “I’m thinking of all a man can do with a knowledge of the Black Art,” Krabat replies. “Why, the Black Art gives you power even over kings and princes!”

Krabat thus faces a difficult decision when he discovers the secret of the mill and learns what it would take to end the Master’s dominion. Even if the girl he loves were prepared to risk her life for him, and even if she could pass the Master’s test, is he really prepared to abandon his hard-earned magical powers forever? The Master makes him confront this choice directly. Aware, as the year draws toward a close, that Krabat may be plotting to challenge him, he makes the young man an offer. He has decided to leave the mill, he says. Krabat could be his successor, inheriting his power along with the Book of Necromancy. When Krabat refuses, the Master employs one last scheme: For the week preceding New Year’s, Krabat will forget all the magic he has learned. After slaving away as he had done upon his first arrival, working each night to the point of exhaustion, perhaps he will think twice about giving up his power.

When the day comes, however, Krabat refuses. He will not become the miller’s successor, even if he is the one fated to die this year—about which the miller leaves no doubt. “Make whoever you like your successor!” says a defiant Krabat. “As for me, I refuse your offer.” In reply, the Master sends him out into the cold to dig a fresh grave.

It would spoil the book’s ending to reveal whether Krabat’s beloved singer shows up that evening to free him by passing the miller’s test. That final question supplies the story’s dramatic climax, but the essential moment of moral choice has already occurred in Krabat’s response to the Master. For the sake of love and friendship, he is prepared to renounce all the Black Art has to offer him—all that power for which he has been “studying and studying and studying,” power “over other men,” power “even over kings and princes.”

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KRABAT MAY BE A STORY FOR YOUNG READERS, but its lesson reverberates today for all of us, young and old alike. Its political implications—hinted at in that line about kings and princes—are especially relevant. Those implications were very much alive for Preussler himself, who learned from bitter personal experience about the dangers of those who insist, “Remember I am the Master!” and who enchant their followers. He had been a soldier for the German army in the Second World War; after five years in Soviet prisoner of war camps, where he suffered typhus and malaria, he finally returned to a homeland devastated by Hitler’s lust for power. Krabat, a children’s book of unusual seriousness, is sometimes described as Preussler’s attempt to describe, in story form, the immense effort it took for Germans finally to break free of Hitler’s spell.

The attractions of power are all too obvious. The moral ideal of its renunciation, therefore, needs perennial reinforcement. We have not entirely lost sight of that ideal; we still honor a figure like George Washington, our American Cincinnatus, who served his two terms as president and then relinquished power to return home to Mount Vernon. But perhaps Washington’s model is honored more in the breach than the observance. The figure who currently dominates American politics like no other, a certain orange-haired former president who haunts our public life like a spell of black magic that can’t be shaken, appears to think that power is always worth seizing, at any price, and should never be relinquished. All too many of his followers are eager to accept the same logic—even if it means that every so often one of their number must be sacrificed.

Needless to say, this is not the lesson that Jesus taught. When Satan showed him “the kingdoms of the world” and said, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me,” Jesus responded, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” Nor is it the lesson that Socrates taught. He knew that most people desire power, pleasure, and riches. Nevertheless, “if a city of good men came to be,” he insisted, “there would be a fight over not ruling, just as there is now over ruling.” Krabat teaches its young readers—and also its old ones—to side with Socrates and Jesus. Preussler strengthens our resolve, when we are tempted to become complicit in evil for the sake of power, to say, “As for me, I refuse your offer.”