  Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar. TimeSearch |
|
Gottfried Keller (1819-1890) |
|
German-Swiss short-story writer and novelist of the late 19th century, master of Poetischer Realismus (Poetic Realism). Originally Gottfried Keller wanted to become a landscape painter. Of his fiction, Green Henry, a story of a failing artist, has been called by some critics the greatest Swiss novel. Keller regarded his works as belonging to German literature. "The people of Seldwyla have furnished proof that a whole townful of the unjust or frivolous may, after all, continue for ages to exist despite changes of time and traffic; the three combmakers, though, demonstrate as clearly that not even three decent human beings may manage to live for a long stretch under one roof without getting their backs up. And with decent, with just, is not by any means meant heavenly justice, nor even the natural justice of the human conscience, but rather that vacuous justice which from the Lord's Prayer has struck the plea: And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors!" ('The Three Decent Combmakers,' in Seldwyla Folks: Three Singular Tales by Gottfried Keller, translated by Wolf von Schierbrand, New York: Brentano's Publishers, 1919, p. 1) Gottfried Keller was born in Zürich, the son of Rudolf Keller
and
Elisabeth Scheuchzer, the doctor's daughter from Glattfelden. His
father was a lathe-worker who died when
Keller was five years old. The second marriage of Keller's mother was
unfortunate; he left the home after some years. Keller attended
Armenschule zum Brunnenturm; Landknabeinstitut to the age of 13, and
then Industrieschule (1832-33). At the age of 15 he was expelled from
the school for a very small prank, and forced to find an occupation. In
1834 he apprenticed himself to the landscape painters Peter Steiger and
Rudolf Meyer (1837). About this time he began a diary. Perceiving Zürich as backward, Keller went to Munich to
study
painting at the Academy. Through the efforts of the Bavarian king
Ludwig I, the city was developing into a centre of German art and
increasingly attracted Nordic artists, too. Living on a meagre
allowance and on his mother's money, Keller was unable to take lessons
from renowned teachers, and he went hungry for days at a time. After two years, Keller returned to Zürich, where he abandoned
art for writing in 1842. During this period he did not have a paid job.
Later he referred to these years as the lost years of his life. For a
period he had a studio in his mother's house. "Trinkt, o Augen, was die Wimper hält, Keller's first collection of poems, which came out in 1846,
went unniticed. In his poetry Keller identified God with nature; there
is an order in everything: "Fischlein im Rheine, / Röslein im Garten, /
Vögel im Haine / Vielerlei Arten, / Sternlein am Himmel, / Glänzend
Gewimmel / Schwimmen und blühen, / Singen und glühen, / Und auf den
Bergen der Quellen Schatz— / Jegliches ist an dem besten Platz!" ('Lebenslust,' 1843; quoted in Basic Concepts in the Philosophy of
Gottfried Keller by Herbert W. Reichert, Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1949, p. 22) Inspired
by the democratic ideals that swept through Europe in the 1840s, Keller
associated with German political refugees and participated in
demonstrations against the Catholic reactionary leaders of Luzern. A
number of his early works were written in the manner of such liberal
political poets as Georg Herwegh (1817-1875) and Ferdinand Freiligrath
(1810-1876), who later became a strong admirer of Bismarck. With the help of his new friends, Keller received a stipend of 800 from the Zürich government to study abroad. From 1848 to 1850, he studied at Heidelberg where he attended the lectures of Ludwig Feuerbach, a German materialist philosopher and critic of religion. This period marked Keller's shift from poetry to prose. Feuerbach's influence is seen in Sieben Legenden (1872). It treated the early period of the Christian era and focused on all kinds of temptations, sexual mostly. In 'Eugenia' a young Roman woman
refuses the offer of marriage by Aquilinus, a young proconsul. She
chooses philosophy instead of love, dresses as a man and becomes a
monk. When a pagan woman falls in love with her, Eugenia rejects her
advances. The woman accuses her of rape. Eugenia secret is revealed,
and she marries Aquilinus. Keller's writings attracted the attention of
Friedrich Nietzsche, who admired the
author's fight against romanticism
and and
saw in this a sign of strength and inner wellbeing. However, Keller
never adopted Feuerbach's atheism, but held to his deep regard for nature and Christian
humanism, which he had inherited from his mother. Émile Zola
(1840-1902), the great French naturalist writer, who
observed the nasty side of humanity, Keller considered a mean person. Between the years 1850 and 1855 Keller studied at the
University of
Berlin. Keller's economic situation was difficult, but with literary
hackwork, he managed to keep starvation at bay. These years saw the
maturing of his first major work, the long autobiographical Der
grüne Heinrich
(Green Henry). It appeared in 1854-55; the revised edition, in which
Henry does not die at the end, was published in 1880. The first reviews
of were mixed. Hermann Hettner, wrote on the first three volumes,
recognized the originality of the novel. He became one of Keller's
promoters. They met in Heidelberg, where Hettner lectured on aesthetics
and literature and art history. Green Henry is customarily identified as a Bildungsroman,
in succession to the seminal work, Johan Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm
Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-1821, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship).
Keller greatly admired Goethe, but Green Henry has been placed
rather in the company of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure
(1895). Moreover, the novel
has connections with Balzac's La
Recherche de l'absolu
and the short story 'Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu'. Green Henry is partly an
autobiographical story of the frustration and defeat of an artist. The
protagonist, Heinrich Lee, is called green because all of his boyish
clothes were made from his father's green uniforms. Heinrich loses his
father at an early age, he is fired from the school, and he studies
painting in Munich. Heinrich has wavered between two women: Anna
represents for him heavenly love, and Judith, a widow, the earthly
needs. He finally discovers that he can never achieve more than a
moderate competence as an artist. After the death of his
self-sacrificing mother, Heinrich dies of shame for having impoverished
her. In the revised version he lives on in dispiriting bureaucratic
service. Keller himself hated the early version, written in a third-person narration, and burned it. He improved the later one by using the first-person form, and tried to avoid any excessively melodramatic scene at the end. Whereas the first version had not gained much attention, the change of the tragic ending contributed later to the wide acclaim of the book. In 1855 Keller returned to Zürich and became a cantonal
secretary (Staatsschreiber)
(1861-76) without any legal or other training. To the satisfaction of
his supporters, he performed his duties of secretary of state,
custodian of documents and librarian with great dedication. His
mother, who died in 1864, lived long enough to witness her son's rise
to literary fame. Keller's acquaiantances included the German composer Richard
Wagner, who described him as strikingly helpless and fragile, but
honest and wise person. Much of his later life Keller spent without any
signs of Bohemian tendencies, although he was often seen in Weinstubes
of the city, sitting reticently at his table. Keller never married
after having had misfortunes in love. The most important person for
Keller was his sister, who took care of him, and whose life he made
miserable by his hypochondria. With Paul Heyse
he discussed writing, and often turned to him for advice. Heyse thought
that humorous perspective on life was Keller's basic strength. In 1882 Keller moved from a house know as the Bürgli in Enge
outside Zürich into an apartment in the city. Feeling displaced, Keller
wrote in a letter: "Our nest belongs to those boring points of
expansion, to which from all sides, in spite of all crises, new hordes
of idle and non-idle people flock." (quoted in Out of Place: German Realism, Displacement, and Modernity by John B. Lyon, New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, pp. 177-178) During his 15 years of service, Keller came to recognize the
deepening antagonism between soulless capitalism and artistic
individualism. "Nearly all of Keller's fiction issues from a single
basic situation: an ordinary person, seized by extraordinary ideals or
aspirations, constructs an alternative world of the imagination and
lives according to its values until he is enlightened or eliminated by
the "reality" he has chosen to ignore." (Gail K. Hart
in Seminar 23, 1987; quoted
in 'Gottfried Keller and the Fictionalization of Switzerland' by
Richard Hacken, Swiss American
Historical Society Review, Vol. 55, No. 1, February 2019,
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/facpub/2992/. Accessed 1 July 2025)
Keller attacked the sometimes brutal economic
development that transformed Swiss society and supported forces of
liberalism – "more than once a change of government and the expansion
of freedom have resulted from an unjust cause or untrue pretence," he
once wrote. "Indeed, Keller’s positive identification with Switzerland,
his pride in the accomplishments of Swiss democracy and his faith in
its future, characterized virtually all of his work. It also protected
it from the salient weaknesses of the German literature of his day
which, as a result of the failure of the revolutions of 1848, had lost
its confidence and its critical capacity and had shriveled into
provincialism and agrarian romanticism." ('A Swiss
Passion' by Gordon A. Craig, The New
York Review, June 25, 1987) Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe (1876), one of Keller's
best-known books, was an adaptation of Shakespeare's famous plot, but
set
in a Swiss village. "To tell this story would be an idle imitation,
were it not founded upon an actual occurrence showing how deeply rooted
in human life is each of those plots on which the great works of the
past are based. The number of such plots is not great, but they are
constantly reappearing in new dress, and then they constrain the hand
to hold them fast." (A
Village Romeo and Juliet by Gottfried Keller, translated
by Paul Bernard Thomas, New York: The German Publication Society, 2014;
from volume XIV of German Classics of the Nineteeth and Twentieth
Centuries) Keller insisted that his work was based on a
true-life incident: he had read a report in the Zürich newspaper Zürcher Freitagszeitung
on the suicide of two penniless Leipzig teenages, whose parents were
enemies. A Village Romeo and Juliet
tells of two families of farmers and their children,
who meet again as young adults and fall in love. To
save his bride, Vrenchen, from the violence of her father Marti, Sali
hits
him on the head with a rock. Marti is not killed but he becomes insane.
The lovers have a mock-wedding, one
day of
happiness. At the end they steal a hay-boat and drown themselves, their
bodies are found in the river. Keller don't reveal details of their last moments together. An early commentator of the story, the diplomat and writer Alexander von Villers, said in a letter that he found nothing tragic about their death – the motivation for suicide is just puzzling. Keller's novella aroused little interest when it came out. Martin Salander (1886), Keller's last novel, was about political corruption. The work expressed his disillusionment with contemporary Switzerland. His other works include Die Leute von
Seldwyla (1856; 1874, The People of
Seldwyla), a collection of
novellas all set in the fictional town of Seldwyla "somewhere in
Switzerland," Züricher
Novellen (1878), and Das Sinngedicht (1882). The poem Der Apotheker von Chamounix, included in Gesammelte Gedichte (1883), satirized Heinrich Heine. – Gottfried
Keller
died in Zürich on July 15, 1890. Due to his humor, intended to
entertain the reader, he was regarded in Germany as a story-teller, who
did not have to be taken too seriously. ('The
deification of Gottfred Keller' by Victor J. Lemke, Monatshefte, Vol. 48, No. 3, March
1959, p. 119) Nowadays Keller's fame rests mainly on
his short stories, in which he portrayed middle-class. The novella Kleider machen Leute (1874), adapted to screen by the German director Helmut Käutner, passed through Nazi censorship in 1940. Together with
Jeremias Gotthelf and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Keller is generally
regarded as one of the three major writers of 19th-century Swiss-German
literature. "Indeed, the most compelling charm of his [Keller's] genius
is his characteristic serene cheerfulness," the German literary critic
Erich Auerbach said, "which is able to play its game of benign irony
with the most incongruous and repulsive things." (Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in
Western Literature. translated from the German by Willard Trask,
Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1957, p. 458) For further reading: Allegories of Format: A Media History of Gottfried Keller's Unlikely Oeuvre by Malika Maskarinec (2025); Männlichkeit und soziale Ordnung bei Gottfried Keller: Studien zu Geschlecht und Realismus by Stefan Voss (2019); Gottfried Keller: ein bürgerlicher Aussenseiter by Ulrich Kittstein (2019); Gottfried Keller-Handbuch: Leben, Werk, Wirkung, ed. by Ursula Amrein (rev. ed.; 2018); Poietischer Realismus: zur Novelle der Jahre 1848-1888: Stifter, Keller, Meyer, Storm by Lars Korten (2009); Nietzsche-Spuren: zeitkritische Ordnungsreflexionen bei Gottfried Keller und Theodor Fontane by Sven Bergert (2004); 'Gottfried Keller' by Jeffrey L. Sammons, in Encyclopedia of The Novel, Vol. 1, edited by Paul Schellinger (1998); Gottfried Keller and His Critics: A Case Study in Scholarly Criticism by Richard R. Ruppel (1998); The Poetics of Scepticism by Erika Swales (1996); Nature, Science, Realism: A Re-examination of Programmatic Realism and the Works of Adalbert Stifter and Gottfried Keller by Thomas L. Buckley (1995); Gottfried Keller: eine Biographie by Emil Ermatinger (1990); Readers and Their Fiction in the Novels and Novellas of Gottfried Keller by Gail K. Hart (1989); Gottfried Keller by Richard R. Ruppel (1988); Artistische Schrift: Studien zur Kompositionskunst Gottfried Kellers by Winfried Menninghaus (1982); Gottfried Keller: Das gedichtete Leben by Gerhard Kaiser (1981); Gottfried Keller by Adolf Muschg (1977); Wirklichkeit und Kunst in Gottfried Kellers Roman 'Der Grüne Heinrich' by Hartmut Laufhütte (1969); Gottfried Keller: Life and Works by James Lindsay (1968); Gottfried Keller, Grundzüge seines Lebens und Werkes by Hermann Boeschenstein (1948); Gottfried Keller by Georg Lukács (1947); Gottfried Keller by Ricarda Huch (1904); Kellers Leben, Seine Briefe und Tagebücher by Jakob Berchtold (3 vols., 1894-97) Selected works:
|
