ZEHN JAHRZEHNTE 1860-1960.

By FrankG. Ryder. New York: Henry Holt, 1959.200 pp.

Professor Ryder of the Department of German has edited a fine selection of German stories. As the title indicates, one story is taken from each decade, 1860-1960. The coverage is broad, while the chronological sequence makes possible a sampling of a century of literary production.

This is primarily a classroom text, carefully edited and annotated, with a reliable vocabulary. The format is imaginative, each page of German framed, as it were, in a broad gray margin that gives ample space for notes, explanations of idioms, etc. The type is roman; you will not have to struggle with Gothic.

A four-page introduction gives the essential background for understanding the literary development of these hundred years. Each story, in its turn, is preceded by a brief foreword on the author and a page on the story's literary meaning. As Mr. Ryder also explains, this is more than a text; it is an anthology of literary significance, for the student of intermediate German.

Most of the stories are short, ranging from five to seventeen pages. There is one exception, Raabe's Else von der Tanne (1864), a tale of the Thirty Years' War, some fifty pages long. The next three round out the Nineteenth Century: Keller's Die Jungfrauals Ritter (1872), von Ebner-Eschenbach's Krambambuli (1883), and Thomas Mann's Tobias Mindemickel (1898). The following two cover the decades through World War I, Rilke's early work, Die Weise von Liebe undTod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (1904), and Kafka's Das Urteil (1916). Der Geraubte Brief (1929) by Ernst and Wiechert's Der Todes-kandidat (1933) fill in the decades between the wars. Two stories written after World War II complete the collection. They are Borchert's Lesebuchgeschichten (1949) and Gaiser's Fehleisen (1956).

These are good reading. I recommend them to you who once studied German here and desire a pleasant "refresher."