Minus an occasional moral at the end of one of his short stories, few of which are longer than a couple of pages, Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826) strikes me as a kindred soul. The shorter the story, the less likely he is to explain it away in the last few lines. So far, my favorite is “Der Rekrut” (“The Recruit”), which is only a few lines long. The year is 1795. A well-built and good-looking fellow from Swabia is among the recruits in some barracks. An officer asks him his age. “Twenty-one,” he replies. “I was ill for a whole year,” he adds, “otherwise I would be twenty-two.” No moral needed. Or even possible.