This article examines the place of hope in Hebel's Kalendergeschichten, both as a theme and as a mode. Many of the stories have an anticipatory flavour: both natural growth and human self-development are signifiers of hope. Moreover, a number of the texts stimulate critical engagement on the part of the reader, which constitutes a first step towards agency and potential (self-) improvement. Yet the depiction of human nature in these short prose texts oscillates between the loving and the grotesque, a dichotomy which has unsettled literary criticism on Hebel for some decades. This article draws on the early theological work of Jurgen Moltmann to suggest that the negative elements of the texts are essential to the particular variant of hope to which Hebel subscribes. Both thinkers were concerned to rehabilitate eschatology in their own time. For both, earthly life has the capacity for considerable self-renewal; but it also has severe limitations, through which only a divine redemptive force can break. Facing up to the ugliest aspects of human existence is a precondition for the engaged, eschatological hope which underpins Moltmann's theology and which, arguably, is also reflected in Hebel's writing.
