Ernst Wiechert was a famous teacher and writer whose books were essentially extensions of his classes. Wiechert's collected novels, short stories, fairy tales, plays, lectures, and poetry total approximately 10,000 pages, of which only a few major novels and some short stories and speeches are of lasting interest. His language, rich in imagery and evocative of landscape and man's paradise regained in nature, engages the reader in a dialogue whose central topic is Germany. Like Thomas Mann, Wiechert saw Germany's role as mankind's educator through Goethean Bildung (self-realization). Also like Mann, Wiechert felt that the German preference for power politics over Bildung since the time of Bismarck constituted a national self-betrayal that was the cause of both world wars. But unlike Mann in Der Zauberberg (1924; translated as The Magic Mountain , 1927) and in Doktor Faustus (1947; translated as Doctor Faustus, 1948), Wiechert did not limit himself to an analysis of German inauthenticity...