(Christian) Friedrich Hebbel - Biography, Works

Playwright, born in Wesselburen, N Germany. He studied in Hamburg from 1835, and after stays in Heidelberg, Munich, and Copenhagen, settled in Vienna (1846). His only contemporary play is Maria Magdalena (1844), his favourite settings being of a legendary, historical, or biblical character, as in Herodes und Marianne (1850) and his masterpiece, the Nibelungen trilogy (1862). He constantly portrayed the inherent Hegelian conflict between individuality and humanity as a whole.

Christian Friedrich Hebbel (March 18, 1813 – December 13, 1863), was a German poet and dramatist.

Biography

Hebbel was born at Wesselburen in Ditmarschen, Holstein, the son of a bricklayer.

A year later he went to Heidelberg to study law, but gave it up and went on to the University of Munich, where he devoted himself to philosophy, history and literature. In 1839 Hebbel left Munich and walked all the way back to Hamburg, where he resumed his friendship with Elise Lensing, whose self-sacrificing assistance had helped him over the darkest days in Munich. In the same year he wrote his first tragedy, Judith (published 1841), which in the following year was performed in Hamburg and Berlin and made his name known throughout Germany.

In 1840 he wrote the tragedy Genoveva, and the following year finished a comedy, Der Diamant, which he had begun at Munich. On his return from Italy Hebbel met at Vienna two Polish noblemen, the brothers Zerboni di Sposetti, who in their enthusiasm for his genius urged him to remain, and supplied him with the means to mingle in the best intellectual society of the Austrian capital.

Hebbel's old precarious existence now became a horror to him, and he made a deliberate breach with it by marrying (in 1846) the beautiful and wealthy actress Christine Enghaus, giving up Elise Lensing (who remained faithful to him until her death), on the grounds that "a man's first duty is to the most powerful force within him, that which alone can give him happiness and be of service to the world": in his case the poetical faculty, which would have perished "in the miserable struggle for existence".

Long before this Hebbel had become famous.

Works

Besides the works already mentioned, Hebbel's principal tragedies are:

Herodes and Mariamne (1850) Julia (1851) Michel Angelo (1851) Agnès Bernauer (1855) Gyges and His Ring (1856) the magnificently conceived trilogy Die Nibelungen (1862), his last work (consisting of a prologue, Der gehornte Siegfried, and the tragedies, Siegfrieds Tod and Kriemhilds Rache), which won for the author the Schiller prize.

Of his comedies Der Diamant (1847), Der Rubin (1850) and the tragi-comedy Ein Trauerspiel in Sizilien (1845), are the more important, but they are heavy and hardly rise above mediocrity. In many of his lyric poems, and especially in Mutter und Kind, published in 1859, Hebbel showed that his poetic gifts were not restricted to the drama.

His collected works were first published by E. SFB and “Literarisches Berliner Kolloquium” – Production Plot: Werner Brunn plays Friedrich Hebbel, who is confined to his sickbed on his 50th birthday, and recalls his youth in his feverish dreams.