The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen (or Baron Münchhausen's Story of his Marvellous Travels) by Rudolf Erich Raspe - is an assortment of stories published in 1785, in view of the German adventure Karl Friedrich von Münchhausen. The stories were adapted and re-published in German by Gottfried August Bürger in 1786.The tales were made into films in 1911 (Les Aventures du Baron de Münchhausen), 1943 (Münchhausen, script by Erich Kästner), and 1961 (Aristocrat Prášil by director Karel Zeman). His most popular adventures feature in the 1979 movie The Very Same Munchhausen by Russian director Mark Zakharov, which portrays Münchhausen as a grievous person, battling against the conformity and hypocrisy of the world around him.An eighteenth-century German respectable ventured abroad for military services and got back with a series of amusingly outrageous stories. Baron Munchausen's astounding feats included riding cannonballs, going to the Moon, and hauling himself out of a lowland by his own hair. The audience was delighted to know about these unlikely adventures, and in 1785, the tales were gathered and published as Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia. By the nineteenth century, the stories had been transformed by several notable authors and had been translated into many languages.
