Teufelsdröck, the hero of “Sartor” and prototype of the author as a thinker and a man in relation to the spirit of the time, which is such that it rejects him as its servant, and he rejects it as his master; the word means “outcast of the devil,” and the devil is the spirit of the time, which the author and his prototype here has, God-compelled, risen up in defiance of and refused to serve under; for a time the one or the other tried to serve it, till they discovered the slavery the attempt more and more involved them in, when they with one bold effort tore asunder the bands that bound them, and with an “Everlasting No” achieved at one stroke their emancipation; a man this born to look through the show of things into things themselves.
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Tetzel, John * Teutonic Knights