Only a Schlemiel Gives Up His Shadow
“‘A shadow is after all nothing but a shadow,’ I said, “‘one can just as well do without it, why make such a fuss?’ And yet I felt profoundly the insincerity of my words.”1
“Schlemiel, schlimazel!”2
The year 1814 saw the publication of a novella entitled Peter Schlemihls Wundersame Geschichte or Peter Schlemiel’s Miraculous Story. Although ostensibly written for kids, the tale became something of a sensation with adult readers in Europe and England.3 It possesses the charm and humor of a traditional fairy story, complete with magic purses, seven-league boots, wizardry, and (as his Yiddish name suggests) a rather clueless hero. Two centuries after its appearance, it’s still an entertaining yarn.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ab5954d-28da-4860-832e-d49a631aae0a_1016x1176.jpeg)
But there’s another reason for its popularity. At a deeper level, the story of Peter Schlemiel is a tantalizing philosophical puzzle. Peter is a guy who sells his shadow—not his soul, mind you, but his shadow—to a creepily cadaverous gray man (aka the Devil), only to quickly rue the transaction. On the surface, the faux-Faustian situation is comical. After all, how much can a mere shadow be worth? Why would Old Nick want it in the first place, and why was selling it such a schlemiel move on Peter’s part? But riding on the humor is a puzzling mystery: what does the shadow stand for? What does it signify in the story? More broadly, what does its loss tell us about the human condition?4
In short, the story of Peter Schlemiel is a vehicle for rich reflection.
The Author and the Story
The character Peter Schlemiel is a wanderer. So was his creator, Adelbert von Chamisso.
Although he wrote in German and adopted a German name, he was born Louis Charles Adélaïde de Chamissot, the son of a French nobleman obliged to flee revolutionary France with his wife and children in 1790, when Louis Charles was only nine. The family eventually settled in Berlin. Louis, now Adelbert, joined the Prussian military in 1801. But his heart was never in soldiering, and during his years of service he threw himself into studying natural history, particularly botany.
Leaving the army in 1807, von Chamisso found himself at loose ends. He ping-ponged for a couple of years between France and Switzerland, occasionally teaching and displaying enough talent and wit to earn himself a place in the intellectual salon of Madame de Staël. It was during these unsettled years that he wrote his tale about the man who sold his shadow.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F65072c88-ce65-4b4a-a535-cded0341275c_992x812.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1860c43-fc25-4823-b25a-439e99979038_400x393.jpeg)
A year after its publication, von Chamisso joined a Russian-sponsored voyage around the world as the expedition’s botanist. He was away for three years, and on his return was appointed head of Berlin’s botanical gardens. Before his death in 1838 he wrote several accounts of his scientific journeys and even tried his hand at composing poetry. But well received though his travel books were (not so much his verse), none of them proved as popular as Peter Schlemihls Wundersame Geschichte.
As I said, both author and character are wanderers. We meet Peter just as he’s disembarked from a journey: “Following a fortuitous if less than pleasant voyage, we finally pulled into port.”5 Everything is mysterious. Why “fortuitous”? In what way “less than pleasant”? From where did Peter depart? For that matter, where has he landed? Nothing is made clear. From the very start, there’s a disorienting sense of displacement, of things left up in the air.
The uncanniness quickly escalates with the appearance of the thin gray man who, at a party hosted by a wealthy entrepreneur named Thomas John, extraordinarily proceeds to pull out of his pocket objects as large as pavilion tents and Turkish carpets. Following these displays of legerdemain, the story’s crucial moment arrives: the strange man sidles up to Peter with a bizarre but seductive offer.
“I was struck several times—please permit me to remark upon it—with inexpressible admiration for the lovely, lovely shadow you cast, that shadow you fling to the ground with a certain noble disdain and without the least notice, that lovely shadow lying even now at your feet. Forgive the admitted audacity of such a bold presumption. I wonder if you might possibly consider parting with it—I mean, selling it to me.”6
What he offers is a magic purse that perpetually refills with gold coins, no matter how many times it’s emptied. “Sold!” Peter immediately exclaims. “It’s a deal; in exchange for the purse, you can have my shadow.”7
The bargain seems a sweet one; after all, what good is a shadow? But almost immediately Peter realizes he’s made a mistake. When children observe that he casts no shadow as he strides by them, they mock and jeer him. Adults, alarmed at his absence of a shadow, call him cursed and avoid him as something unclean or unholy. Forced to seek out the company of others only at nightime, when his lack of a shadow is least noticeable, Peter finds himself increasingly isolated and lonely. He falls in love with two women, only to have his hopes for happiness dashed in each case when his peculiar affliction of shadowlessness is discovered. Despite the inexhaustible wealth that flows to him from his magic purse, Peter is a desperately unhappy man.
One year and a day after the initial bargan was struck, the thin gray man reappears with another temptation. He offers to return Peter’s shadow in exchange for Peter’s soul.
“And if I may ask, what sort of thing is that, your soul? Have you ever seen it? What possible use do you intend to make of it once you’re dead? You ought to be pleased to have found a collector during your lifetime who’s willing […] to take that tenuous trifle off your hands in exchange for something real, namely, your shadow.”8
Recognizing, even if only dimly, that this second offer is even worse than the first one, Peter wants to know the opportunity cost of asscepting it. So, he asks if a similar deal was struck with Thomas John, the wealthy entrepreneur we met at the tale’s beginning. The thin man, now openly revealing himself as Satan,
“put a hand in his pocket and, plucked up by his hair, there dangled the pale distorted figure of Thomas John, whose corpse-blue lips opened and closed, pronouncing the solemn words: ‘Justo judicio Dei judicatus sum; justo judicio Dei condemnatus sum.’ [I am judged and condemned by the just judgment of God.]”9
Horrified, Peter refuses Satan’s offer. Even a schlemiel catches on after a certain point. No, he’ll henceforth make his peace with shadowless solitude, wandering the earth with no settled home or helpmate, studying the natural world, and bowing to necessity. Looking back years later on his decision, he observes,
“I finally made peace with myself. I first had to learn to respect necessity—what’s done is done, what’s happened has happened, the past is a fait accompli. And then I learned to respect this necessity in and of itself as the wise and providential force that holds sway over the whole grand scheme of things, the machinery in which we are but inconsequential cogs, driven and driving through no will of our own; what must be must be, and what had to happen happened, and all is governed by that providential force that I finally learned to honor as the master of my destiny and the destiny of those who crossed my path.”10
Shadow and Soul
The genius of von Chassimo’s story is that we never quite know how to interpret it. There are so many intriguing possibilities.
One is that everything going on in the story is a fantasy of Peter’s fevered brain. We’re told in several places that he “tottered on the brink of madness,” that his “mind was a blur, I had lost all capacity to judge or comprehend,” that he feels “as though a fog had descended over my head.”11 This would place von Chassimo’s tale in the same camp as Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846), Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Henry James’ Turn of the Screw (1898). and Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980).
But even if the story is a psycho-drama, the question about the significance of the shadow remains. Why does trading it away mark Peter as a schlemiel? Why is the possession of a shadow so important that his life takes a downward turn when he loses his? And what’s the difference between shadow and soul, such that he draws a line at giving up the latter?
The shadow, I would suggest, signifies at least three things: substance, groundedness, and moral integrity.
Only objects which have substantial being cast shadows. Someone can be a person of substance—that is, possess a great deal of wealth—but still not be a substantial person. This seems to be the situation in which Peter finds himself. He has no inner core, no center of gravity, when it comes either to principles or life trajectory. Put another way, he has no settled identity. There’s a kind of nebulousness to him. I wouldn’t be surprised if Peter also sees no reflection, or at most a very hazy one, when he gazes into a mirror. How could it be otherwise with a person so unsolid as to cast no shadow?
Peter also lacks groundedness. There’s literally no place under the sun for him because all objects under the sun cast shadows. He dwells in a kind of atmospheric fog that shields him from sun and suspends him above earth. A shadow pins one firmly to the earth; it designates its owner as someone with both feet on this particular bit of the globe, here-and-now: a way of affirming some place we can call home. Shadowless Peter is adrift, a kind of Wandering Jew who enters the story with no fixed abode and leaves it in the same condition: alone and destinationless, with not even the thin companionship of his shadow.
Pathetically, he tries to convince himself that he does have a place in the world by calling himself a cog in the universal clockwork. Substance and groundedness are assigned him by mechanical necessity. But as he himself confesses, this really amounts to an “inconsequential” sense of place and identity. His embrace of “the wise and providential force that holds sway over the whole grand scheme of things” is scarcely an enthusiastic one, and his grim determination to find grounding in the brutal fact that “what must be must be” is unconvincing. He sounds like a man desperate to convince himself of something he doesn’t really believe.
And then there’s the issue of moral integrity. In giving away his shadow for a mess of pottage—the magical purse—Peter demonstates that he values the trappings of worldly wealth above character. The allure of gold and the power and luxury it brings coarsens his sensitivity to what’s really valuable: a life well-lived, a stable identity, the companionship and love of others. Wealth can’t really substitute for any of those desiderata. “What good would wings do a man shackled in iron chains?” Peter too late realizes. “I lay like Faffner beside his hoard, far removed from the balm of any human consolation, fondling my gold, not lovingly but cursing it all the while—that wretched stuff for the sake of which I had cut myself off from life.”12 And so he concludes his unhappy history with this bit of hard-won wisdom: “To you, my dear friend, I say that if you wish to live among your fellow man, learn to value your shadow more than gold.”13
No wonder the thin gray man wanted Peter’s shadow. He anticipated that giving it up would ruin the hapless man’s life.
Poor Peter. What a schlemiel. And a schlimazel to boot.
And yet, perhaps not entirely. After all, Peter refuses to trade his soul, that spark of the divine within, for the return of his shadow, the symbol of substance, identity, grounding, and integrity: of wholeness. Moreover, after his refusal, he throws away the magical purse, preferring to make his way in the world bereft of both inner and outer wealth.
Perhaps the lesson here is one that’s taught by all the world’s great religious traditions, as well as a few of its philosophical ones: that we can only really begin to come to terms with our own humanity when we strip away everything that masquerades as a good but in fact is an obstacle to well-being. Lest a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies …
Money, or at least the insensate desire for it, is an obvious candidate for repudiation. But perhaps our need to feel substantial, which too often comes at the expense of others, or our urge for a stable identity, which can become a malignant egoism, or our longing for grounding, which can encourage complacency, or even our desire to be virtuous, which can encourage us to follow rules and norms in a kneejerk, unreflectively intolerant way, likewise needs to be jettisoned or at least thoroughly examined. Perhaps the traumatic loss of his shadow propelled Peter headlong into a process of stripping-down that enabled him to realize, at the end of the day, that the one important thing to safeguard is the soul, and that everything else, represented by the shadow, is dross at best, toxin at worst.
Maybe it takes a schlemiel to cotton on to this. Wilely Satan, confident that robbing Peter of his shadow would destroy him, certainly didn’t get it. There’s a lesson for us here. To paraphrase St. Paul, “If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become schlemiels so that you may become wise.”
###
Adelbert von Chamisso, Peter Schlemiel: The Man Who Sold His Shadow, trans. Peter Wortsman (New York: Fromm International, 1992), p. 41. The German text is accessible here.
Part of a hopscotch chant from the opening of the old sitcom “Lavern and Shirley.” A schlemiel is a bumbler, and a schlimazel is unlucky. Both are captured in a traditional Yiddish saying: A schlemiel is somebody who often spills his soup and a schlimazel is the person it lands on.
It was so popular that Marx, in his screechy The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), felt comfortable referring to it without attribution, knowing that his readers were likely to get the reference. In a particularly tiresome passage in which Marx excoriates bourgeoise culture, he writes: “Men and events appear as reverse Schlemihls, as shadows, the bodies of which have been lost.” Daniel de Leon, the editor of the edition (New York: International Publishing, 1898, p. 22) from which I pull this quote, provided a footnote reference to Chamisso. Apparently he realized that the book’s plot was no longer common knowledge, at least on the American shore.
Another casual reference to the story appears in Maurice Leblanc’s 1905 story “The Escape of Arsène Lupin.” Lupin, a master criminal who pulls off extraordinary robberies, has just disguised himself as a derelict to evade the police. “I feel exactly as I imagine the man who lost his shadow must have felt,” he says. The story is in The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar, trans. George Morehead (New York: Dover, 1977), p. 44. I hope to devote a future Cassiacum article to Leblanc’s wonderful and clever stories.
The sheer volume of scholarly literature exploring these questions is overwhelming. But here are some of the articles I found particularly helpful. Christa Knellwolf King’s is, in my estimation, the best, and Lončar-Vujnović’s and Šoškić’s the most creative. Curiously, given his interest in the shadow, C.G. Jung seems not to have discussed von Chamisso’s tale. At least I haven’t been able to track down any references. I’d be most pleased to be corrected by readers.
Max Zeldner, “A Note on ‘Schlemiel’”. The German Quarterly 26/2 (March 1953): 115-117. Ralph Flores, “The Lost Shadow of Peter Schlemihl.” The German Quarterly 47/4 (Nov 1974): 567-584. Colin Butler “Hobson's Choice: A Note on ‘Peter Schlemihl’”. Monatshefte 69/1 (Spring 1977): 5-16. Marko Pavlyshyn, “Gold, Guilt and Scholarship Adelbert von Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl.” The German Quarterly 55/1 (Jan 1982): 49-63. John Herdman, The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction: The Double Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). David Sanford, “Review of Peter Schlemihl.” Goethe Yearbook 7 (1994): 281-283. Christa Knellwolf King, “Adelbert de Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl and the Quest for Self,” in Lorna Fitzimmons (ed), Faust Adaptations from Marlowe to Aboudoma and Markland (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2016), pp. 31-45. Mirjana N. Lončar-Vujnović and Radoje V. Šoškić. “The Ingenious Art of Mephistopheles Faust’s Forgetting and Peter Schlemihl’s Life without a Shadow Collective Memory.” pdf (2018).
Wortsman (trans), Peter Schlemiel, p. 1.
Ibid., p. 7.
Ibid., p. 8.
Ibid., pp. 43-44.
Ibid., pp. 68-69.
Ibid., p. 58.
Ibid., pp. 42, 49, 52.
Ibid., p. 19.
Ibid., p. 87.