Bernd's study shows how Storm's Novellen are made purposeful by the operations of a fictional intelligence, haunted by the fear of passing time. The author challenges the traditional belief that Storm's narratives are products of a sentimental mind. No other discussion of Storm's tales, be it analysis of an individual narrative or collective treatment of several or all of them, seeks to interpret them with such specific emphasis upon their fictional, omniscient narrator. This concentration on the fictional narrator also leads into a study of Storm's subjective narrative form.

This book offers a new understanding of the nineteenth-century German author Thodor Storm, taking seriously, for the first time, the heritage of the Danish muse in his life and major works. Bernd offers a Dano-German portrait of Storm, tracing the youth of the author in the bicultural borderland of Schleswig, where Storm lived under a succession of Danish monarchs until he was 36 years old, and learned to refer to the German states as Ausland (foreign territory). Highlighting the German nationalism that has prevented previous biographers, beginning with Storm's own daughter, from drawing attention to the importance of Danish culture and literature in forming the author, Bernd then details Storm's education and reading in the Danish language and literature, showing how he added a distinct Danish tone to his German poetry and also refashioned the German novella in the manner of Danish practitioners, and thus became a unique representative of a Danish literature situated in the German-speaking world. These achievements, inflected by transnational influence, should now help us to recognize Storm as a figure of exceptional importance in European letters.