Christian Reuter's importance as an author is based mainly on one work, the innovative and humorous novel Schelmuffskys wahrhafftige curiöse und sehr gefährliche Reisebeschreibung zu Wasser und Lande (1696, 1697; translated as Schelmuffsky's Veritable Curious and Very Dangerous Travel Account by Sea and Land, 1962). While Reuter also published several comedies, a satire, an opera libretto, and a few occasional poems, it is Schelmuffsky that attracted readers when it first appeared and has done so again since the time of the Romantics. Reuter creates in this novel a world in which the protagonist's outrageous adventures in many different countries are revealed again and again as mere products of his own imagination. Thus, Schelmuffsky is the first German novel to stress its own fictionality.

Reuter's family had at one time been fairly well-to-do on both sides. His father, Steffen, came from a long line of farmers; the grandfather...