September 14, 1817

The New Yorker says of a recent translation of Theodor Storm's masterpiece, The Rider on the White Horse (Der Schimmelreiter):

The novella was a form beloved of nineteenth-century Germans, who favored the spooky variety. This, from 1888, is one of the greats. Hauke Haien, a young Frisian man, builds a new dike for his town, to shield it from the furies of the North Sea. The townspeople are against him; in the end, so is God, or nature. Like other novellas, “The Rider” is short on psychology but long on atmosphere; no one has ever described storms like Storm. (Hauke on his white horse, gazing at the sea: “Where was the other shore? He stood there face to face with sheer mountains of water.”) Hauke is defeated. Yet in the dark and stormy night outside the inn where this tale is told around the hearth, a ghost rider gallops past on a ghostly white horse.

And, elsewhere we read: The Rider on the White Horse is:

.... the story of any community and the sacrifices by which it ensures its survival; the story of the isolated souls that constitute all communities and of their deaths. Storm, ...was unsure he would live to complete it, and in the background of the story you can hear something like the dead saying to the living (as the living suppose), You are who we were and will be who we are. One of the mysterious effects of this extraordinary work is that at some point the modern reader realizes with a shock that he too is included—included already—in this ghostly chorus. It is ghost story in which, you could say, ...[t]he reader is the ghost.

The reviews do not mention that a key part of the story, set in this cold land, has to do with a white Angora cat. You just have to read it. Theodor Storm's dates are September 14, 1817 to July 4, 1888.