Paul Heyse

Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse was born in Berlin in 1830, the son of a distinguished philologist; his mother came from a Jewish family. Well connected and precociously gifted, he entered the city’s artistic circles early, finding a mentor and lifelong friend in the poet Emanuel Geibel, and joined the literary society Tunnel über der Spree, where he came to know Fontane and Storm. He studied classical and Romance philology in Berlin and Bonn, took a doctorate on the troubadours, and a Prussian scholarship sent him to Italy, a country that would shape his imagination for the rest of his life.

Italy gave him his first fame: L’Arrabbiata (1855), a brief, vivid novella of a proud young woman of Sorrento, became his best-known work. In 1854, at the invitation of King Maximilian II of Bavaria, he settled in Munich, where he became a leading figure of the literary circle known as Die Krokodile. Over six decades he wrote some 177 novellas, novels including Children of the World (1873), around sixty plays, of which the patriotic Kolberg (1865) was the greatest success, and a great deal of verse. His theory that a novella should turn on a single, sharply defined motif, the so-called falcon, became a touchstone of German criticism. His translations in the Spanish Songbook and Italian Songbook were set by Hugo Wolf, among others.

A declared opponent of naturalism, he was attacked by younger critics as the representative of an outworn idealism, yet he remained widely read, was ennobled in 1910 and received the Nobel Prize that year, the first German writer of fiction to be so honoured. He did not travel to the Stockholm ceremony. He died in Munich in April 1914, months before the outbreak of war. His reputation has since faded, but his best novellas keep their poise and economy.