The story opens with the delivery to a crowd gathered in Rotterdam of a manuscript detailing the journey of a man named Hans Pfaall. The manuscript, which comprises the majority of the story, sets out in detail how Pfaall contrived to reach the moon by benefit of a revolutionary new balloon and a device which compresses the vacuum of space into breathable air. The journey takes him nineteen days, and the narrative includes descriptions of the Earth from space as well as the descent to its fiery, volcanic satellite. Pfaall withholds most of the information regarding the surface of the moon and its inhabitants in order to negotiate a pardon from the Burgomaster for several murders he committed as he left earth (creditors of his who were becoming irksome). After reading the manuscript, the city authorities agree that Pfaall should be pardoned, but the messenger who brought them the text (apparently a resident of the moon) has vanished and they are unable to restore communication with him.
100 Meisterwerke der Weltliteratur - Klassiker die man kennen muss
Franz Kafka, Fjodor Michailowitsch Dostojewski, Rumi, Platon, Tacitus, Homer, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, Alfred Adler, Marcus Aurelius, Arthur Schopenhauer, Walt Whitman, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Karl May, Alexandre Dumas, James Fenimore Cooper, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, O.Henry, Stefan Zweig, Charles Dickens, Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Joseph von Eichendorff, Klaus Mann, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Else Lasker-Schüler, Heinrich Heine, Herman Melville, Iwan Sergejewitsch Turgenew, Gustav Freytag, Thomas Wolfe, Jonathan Swift, Walter Scott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gustave Flaubert, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Galsworthy, Iwan Alexandrowitsch Gontscharow, Oscar Wilde, Lew Wallace, Voltaire, Lewis Carroll, Johanna Spyri, Mark Twain, Selma Lagerlöf, Rudyard Kipling, Jules Verne, Jack London, Miguel de Cervantes, Honoré de Balzac, Emile Zola, Guy De Maupassant, Moliere, Theodor Fontane, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoi, Anton Pawlowitsch Tschechow, Dante Alighieri, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, E T A Hoffmann, Heinrich Mann, Kurt Tucholsky, Heinrich von Kleist, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Gottfried Keller, Sophie von La Roche, Theodor Storm, William Shakespeare
