Carl Spitteler

Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler was born in 1845 in Liestal, near Basel; his father was a federal official. At the Basel gymnasium he was taught by Jacob Burckhardt among others, and he went on to study law and then theology at Zurich, Heidelberg and Basel, but declined the pastorate he was offered, convinced that his vocation was epic poetry. From 1871 he spent some eight years as a tutor in Russia and Finland, then taught school in Bern and La Neuveville and worked as a journalist and as an editor at the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

His first book, Prometheus and Epimetheus (1881), published under the pseudonym Carl Felix Tandem, is a mythic prose poem setting the integrity of the soul against conventional conscience; Carl Jung later examined it at length. His major achievement, Olympian Spring (1900–05), is a cosmic epic in iambic hexameters that follows the gods’ ascent to Olympus and their reign under the rule of fate, blending myth, fantasy, satire and natural observation. The novel Imago (1906), which probes the unconscious conflicts of a creative mind in a narrow bourgeois world, lent its title to an early psychoanalytic journal, and Two Little Misogynists (1907) draws on memories of childhood.

During the First World War Spitteler’s address “Our Swiss Standpoint” urged German-speaking Swiss to resist identifying with Germany. He received the Nobel Prize in 1919, the first Swiss writer to do so, and in 1924 published a reworking of his first book as Prometheus the Sufferer. He died in Lucerne in December 1924. Little read now, he remains a singular figure in German-language literature.