Joseph Eichendorff
born , March 10, 1788, near Ratibor,
Prussia
died Nov. 26, 1857, Neisse
poet and novelist, considered one of the
great German Romantic lyricists.
From a family of Silesian nobility,
Eichendorff studied law at Heidelberg
(1807), where he published his first
verse and became acquainted with the
circle of Romantics. Continuing his
studies in Berlin (1809–10), he met the
leaders of the Romantic national
movement. When the Prussian war of
liberation broke out in 1813,
Eichendorff enlisted in the Lützowsche
Freikorps and fought against Napoleon.
The French Revolution appears in the
novella Das Schloss Dürande (1837;
“Castle Dürande”) and in the epic poem
Robert und Guiscard (1855). The
Napoleonic Wars, which brought about the
decline of the Eichendorff family and
the loss of the Lubowitz castle, are the
sources of nostalgia in his poetry.
During these war years he wrote two of
his most important prose works: a long
Romantic novel, Ahnung und Gegenwart,
(1819; “Premonition and Present”), which
is pervaded by the hopelessness and
despair of the political situation and
the need for a spiritual, rather than a
political, cure for moral ills; and
Novellen des Marmorbilds (1819;
“Novellas of a Marble Statue”), which
contains supernatural elements and is
described by Eichendorff as a fairy
tale. After the war he held posts in the
Prussian civil service in Danzig and
Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia)
and, after 1831, in Berlin.
Eichendorff’s poetry of this period
(Gedichte, 1837), particularly the poems
expressing his special sensitivity to
nature, gained the popularity of folk
songs and inspired such composers as
Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Richard
Strauss. In 1826 he published his most
important prose work, Aus dem Leben
eines Taugenichts (Memoirs of a
Good-for-Nothing, 1955), which, with its
combination of the dreamlike and the
realistic, is considered a high point of
Romantic fiction. In 1844 he retired
from the civil service to devote himself
entirely to his writing, publishing his
history of German literature and several
translations of Spanish authors.
