Station: [18] The Great Social Novel: "Ut mine Stromtid"

F: He's a familiar figure to everyone in Mecklenburg: the quirky, kind-hearted man with his inspector's cap and his red drinker's nose: Enspekter Zacharias Bräsig is the most archetypal character in the novel widely seen as Reuter's major work.

M: The three volumes of his magnum opus "Ut mine Stromtid" were published in quick succession in 1862, '63 and '64. They depict rural life in Mecklenburg during the decades before the failed Bourgeois Revolution, what Reuter called the "time of innocence before '48". The plot revolves around the tenant farmer Karl Hawermann, a young widower who has to stand up to his hard-hearted adversary, the landowner Samuel Pomuchelskopp. But above all, it's about the little everyday events of rural life and the absurdity of the relentlessly backward conditions throughout Mecklenburg.

F: Inspector Bräsig, who repeatedly, and in typically clumsy fashion, tries to help events along, is one of the supposedly educated members of the rural population. To avoid speaking the Low German of the peasants, he speaks "Missingsch": an improvised jumble of High and Low German, interspersed with a few scraps of French, the language of scholars.

M: Bräsig, probably the most famous creation among Reuter's cast of characters, is helpful, humane and has plenty of life experience. A self-portrait, perhaps?

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