The Excursion to Tilsit

The title story in this collection by the German writer Hermann Sudermann is the basis for F.W. Murnau's great film Sunrise. Sudermann's ending is more poignant: The husband accidentally drowns after, full of regrets, he abandons a plan to drown his wife. In the film they both live happily ever after. The stories, set in Prussia's borderlands where Germans and Lithuanians mix, are full of strange, harsh elements. In Jons and Erdma, a couple builds a home and life in a marsh, rising literally out of the muck. They survive half through hard work and half through pilfering and cunning. These are the European Snopses and Bundrens.