Annette von Droste-Hulshoff
born Jan. 10, 1797, Schloss Hülshoff,
near Münster, Westphalia [Germany]
died May 24, 1848, Meersburg, Baden
poet and prose writer, among the most
important poets of 19th-century Germany
and the author of a novella considered a
forerunner of 19th-century realistic
fiction.
Born into a family of Roman Catholic
aristocracy, she was educated by tutors
and lived most of her life in isolation.
She owed her introduction to literature
to a young novelist, Levin Schücking
(1814–83), for whom, despite their
difference in age, she developed a deep,
suppressed, and unreciprocated passion.
Her first collection of poetry, Gedichte
(1838; “Poems”), included poems of a
deeply religious nature. Between 1829
and 1839 she wrote a cycle of religious
poems, Das geistliche Jahr (1851; “The
Spiritual Year”), which contains some of
the most earnest religious poetry of the
19th century and reflects the inner
turbulence and doubt of her spiritual
life.
Her fame rests chiefly on her poetry
dealing with her native Westphalian
landscape. An extremely sensitive and
acute observer, she created detailed and
evocative descriptions of extraordinary
poetic beauty, capturing the atmosphere
of her homeland, particularly its gloomy
heaths and moorlands. Her only complete
prose work, a novella, Die Judenbuche
(1842; The Jew’s Beech), is a
psychological study of a Westphalian
villager who murders a Jew. For the
first time in German literature, the
fate of the hero is portrayed as arising
from his social environment; the crime
becomes understandable within the
context of the life in the village.
