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Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse (1830-1914) | |
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German writer, head of the Munich circle of writers, who refused to portray the realistic side of life. Paul Heyse was very prolific – he published several collections of poems, six novels, over sixty plays, and some 120 short stories. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1910, especially because of his contribution to the development of the modern psychological novella. All his life, Heyse enjoyed immense popularity, but nowadays he is mostly remembered as an example of forgotten Nobel Laureates. "You forget," I broke in, "that people wish to enjoy fiction with the heart alone, not with the intellect, and that the heart refuses everything which is not closely akin to it. Therefore I feel very lenient toward the average reader. In real life he is interested only in certain things which he understands, prizes, and considers desirable; such as money and land, social reputation, family happiness, and more of the same sort. Consequently, he likes in books only such stories as deal with rich and poor, rogues and honest men, and, for a sort of relish, with a little of the so-called love necessary to complete a happy marriage. Whatsoever there is beyond that, is evil." ('A Divided Heart,' in A Divided Heart and Other Stories by Paul Heyse, translated into English by Constance Stewart Copeland, New York: Brentano's, 1894, pp. 33-34) Paul Heyse was born in Berlin, the son of Karl Ludwig Heyse, a notable philologist, and Julie (Saaling) Heyse, the daughter of a prominent Jewish family, a well-to-do court jeweler related to the Mendelssohns. Their home was a salon for artists and writers, one of whom, the art historian Franz Kugler, became a mentor for the young Heyse. He was instriduced to Kugler by the poet Emanuel Geibel. Heyse soon became engaged to his daughter, Margarete Kugler; they married in 1854 and had four children. Heyse was educated at the Friedrich Wilhelm-Gymnasium, Berlin, and at Berlin and Bonn universities, where he studied classical literature and philology. During this period he came into contact with Jacob Burckhardt, Theodor Fontane, Adolph Menzel, and Theodor Storm, joining their literary circle. 'Frühlingsanfang 1848,' his first poem, was published in the revolutionary year of 1848. "He began early; while yet a student, he entered on his literary career. Free from care as a pedestrian tourist who gayly whistles as he strolls along, never hurrying, pausing to drink at every spring, lingering before the bushes by the wayside, and plucking flowers as well as berries, resting in the' shade, and wandering along in the shade, he has gradually trodden a pathway of such extent that we could only expect to see it traversed by one who maintained a breathless march, with eyes fixed unwaveringly on the goal." (Creative Spirits in the Nineteenth Century by Georg Brandes, translated by Rasmus B. Anderson, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1923, pp. 55-56) In 1852 Heyse received his doctorate with his dissertation on the poetry of the medieval troubadours. With the help of a research grant by the Prussian Ministry of Culture Heyse went to Italy in 1852 for a year. During this journey he researched on Provençal manuscripts and planned to become a university lecturer. His studies were published by Wilhelm Hertz under the title Romanische Inedita auf italiänischen Bibliotheken (1856). At Emanuel Geibel's recommendation, the Bavarian king Maximilian II made Heyse a court poet with an annual salary of 1000 guilders, which enabled him to devote himself entirely to the writing of verse tragedies, novellas, and poems. Heyse's first story, Der Jungbrunnen, had appeared in 1850, but he had not published much, except a few romantic stories and verses, one tragedy, and one novella. Francesca da Rimini (1850) started his production of tragedies, and was continued with Meleager (1854), Die Sabinerinnen (1859), Elfriede (1877), Graf Köninsmarck (1877), and Alkibiades (1880). His other dramas include Elisabet Charlotte (1864), Hadrian (1865), Maria Maroni (1865), Kolberg (1865), Hans Lange (1866), Die Göttin der Vernunft (1870), and Die Weiber Von Schorndorf (1881). Heyse settled with his wife in a villa on the
Luisenstraße in Munich. Writers traveled there to meet him, just
as they once had traveled to Weimar to see Goethe. After the death
of Margarete in 1862, Hayse married in 1866 Anna Schubart, a young
woman from Munich. After King Maximilian II died suddenly in
1864, his successor Ludwig II
continued Heyse's stipend. With his friend Geibel he became the
leader of a group of writers who opposed the growing trend toward
realism. He could barely sit through a performance of Henrik Ibsen's Ghost, and complained to his friend
Georg Brandes that the writer "lacks a mature intellect that could
control, guide, and relieve the "phantasms" that oppress him." When Geibel's pension was revoked and he was dismissed from
the court after writing a poem in which he expressed his hope for a
united Germany under Prussia, Heyse resigned in protest but continued
to
live in Munich without particular adventures. During each winter he
migrated to Gardone Riviera, Lake Garda. There he stayed at a
house called villa Annina (today villa Itolanda). Noteworthy, the
Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 and major political events of the time did
not found their way to his dramas. Referring to writers such as Heyse, Fontane, and Gottfried Keller,
the Harvard University historian Kuno Francke wrote: "But it is
nevertheless true that literature in the decades preceding or
immediately following the Franco-German war had ceased to be a motive
power of highest national importance. . . . Not the thinker and the
poet, but the statesman and the general were now the men most needed." (Social Forces in German Literature: A´Study in the History of Civilization, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1896, p. 554) Though at first his plays did not gain success, the patriotic Kolberg brought him popularity on the stage, and he was eventually awarded in 1884 the Schiller Prize. Upon the publication of the Danish translation of Heyse's novel Kinder der Welt (1872, The Children of the World), the philosopher Georg Brandes wrote him saying that everyone in Scandinavia was reading it. Fridtjof Nansen's polar ship Fram stocked a wide selection of Heyse's books on its expedition to the North Pole in 1893. Heyse's religous drama Maria von Magdala (1899, Mary of Magdala) was attacked by the conservative press, but as a reaction antiestablishment critics praised it. After the Berlin Goethe League held a closed, private performance of the play, its artistic quality was examined from a more objective point of view. The story revolves around Jesus, who never appears. He is not presented as a sacred character by as a man. Mary of Magdala and Judas, portrayed as a Hebrew patriot and a hero, are lovers. The play was forbidden by the censors in Germany, but the American production, starring Minnie Maddern Fiske and Tyrone Power, Sr, was staged without accusations of sacrilege. Originally written in prose, this version was translated into verse. Other changes were made, too. In 1910, Heyse was made a nobleman by the King of Bavaria. He became a
honorary citizen of Munich in
the same year that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but many German
periodicals responded with silence to this honour. Paul Heyse died of pneumonia
on April 2, 1914,
just a few months before the outbreak of World War I, which destroyed
the world he had depicted, "the Golden Age of Security" as Stefan Zweig
called it. "But even though it was a delusion our father's served, it
was a wonderful and noble delusion, more humane and more fruitful than
our watchwords of today". (The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography by Stefan Zweig, London: Cassell and Company, fourth edition 1947, p. 15) Heyse's oeuvre was
forgotten by young critics with the rise of naturalism and such authors
as Henrik Ibsen and Émile
Zola. Even the Nazis did not explicitly ban his writings, despite Heyse had
Jewish ancestors on his mother's side. In the 57th edition of Kluge's Geschichte der deutschen
National-literature his plays and most of his Novellen were
labelled as "schon veraltet" (German Literature Through Nazi Eyes
by H.G. Atkins, London; New York: Routledge, 2010; first published in
1941). Heyse's villa was later turned into a lacquer factory. As a poet Heyse devoted himself to an ideal of beauty, which
seemed
outdated against impressionistic and naturalistic currents of
literature. Norwegian literary critic and theorist Toril Moi said:
"Heyse was the last highly respected,
widely successful, self-consciously idealist writer in Europe; his
works were doomed to land on the dustheap of history the moment he
died." (Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism:
Art, Theater,
Philosophy by Toril Moi, Oxford; New York: Oxford University
Press, 2006, p. 59). The German scholar
Christiane Ullman has argued that Heyse's
"delineation of the condition humaine belongs to the great realist
tradition of Balzac
and Keller." Heyse himself called Keller "ein Shakespeare der Novelle." Heyse's technical mastery of the novella form is seen in L'Arrabbiata
(1857), a love story set in Italy. He wrote the work in 1855 with
others and in 1858 separately. It depicts a fisher maiden who first
repulses the advances of a young ferry operator only to fall in love
with him. With H. Kurz and others he published Deutscher
Novellenschatz (1870-76, Treasury of German Novellas). In
'Einleitung' to the Deutscher Novellenschatz (1871) and his book of
memoir, Jugenderinnerungen und Bekenntnisse (1900, Memories
of My Youth and Confessions), Heyse put forth the popular "Falkentheorie" (Falcon Theory), the view that each Novelle should
have a distinguishable central image, "a silhouette" ("eine starke, deutliche Silhouette"), such as the falcon in Boccaccio's Decamerone (fifth day, ninth story), that differentiated a particular Novelle from a thousand others. (Realism and Reality: Studies in the German Novelle of Poetic Realism by Walter Silz, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954, p. 4) Moreover, Heyse required that this
motif recur throughout the story. "A novella of literary value," Heyse
said, "should represent an important human destiny. It must not be an
everyday occurence but should reveal to us a new side of human nature.
The narrow scope of the tale calls for strict concentration." (The Nobel Prize in Literature 1910; Presentation Speech by
C.D. af Wirsén, December 10, 1910,
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature. Accessed 1 July 2025) "Whoever casts a glance on the long row of closely printed volumes which form Paul Heyse's complete works, and remembers that the author was born in the year 1830, will first of all be apt to exclaim, "What industry!"" (Georg Brandes, p. 55) A mass-producer, Heyse himself wrote well over 100 Novellen, many of which were set in Italy or the Mediterranean generally, dealing with psychological problems. Often the central character reveals to an outsider, the narrator, a secret of his or her life. Heyse's major collections include Novellen (1855), Neue Novellen (1858), Neue Novellen (1862), Meraner Novellen (1864), Das Ding an Sich: Und Andere Novellen (1879), Troubadour Novellen (1882), Unvergeßbare Worte (1883), Himmlische und irdische Liebe (1886), and Novellen vom Gardasee (1902). Heyse also produced many translations from Italian, Spanish, and English literature. For further information: Rache im Realismus: Recht und Rechtsgefühl bei Droste-Hülshoff, Gotthelf, Fontane und Heyse by Dania Hückmann (2018); 'From Nobel to Nothingness: The Negative Monumentality of Rudolf C. Eucken and Paul Heyse' by Thomas O. Beebe, in German Literature as World Literature, edited by Thomas Oliver Beebee (2014); 'A Medea Called Wally: Race, Madness and Fashion in Paul Heyse's Novella Medea' by Heike Bartel, in German Life and Letters, Vol. 64; Issue 1 (2011); Paul Heyse: ein Schriftsteller zwischen Deutschland und Italien, edited by Roland Berbig and Walter Hettche (2001); Der Zensurprozess um Paul Heyses Drama "Maria von Magdala" (1901-1903): ein Beispiel für die Theaterzensur im Wilhelminischen Preussen by Andreas Pöllinger (1989); 'Heyse, Paul,' in Nobel Prize Winners: An H. W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, edited by Tyler Wasson (1987); Paul Heyse: Münchner Dichterfürst im bürgerlichen Zeitalter: Ausstellung in der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, 23. Januar bis 11. April 1981 by Sigrid von Moisy (1981); Paul Heyse: eine Bibliographie seiner Werke by W. Martin (1978); Realism and Reality: Studies in the German Novelle of Poetic Realism by Walter Silz (1954); Heyse's Novellen-Technik: dargestellt auf Grund einer Untersuchung der Novelle "Zwei Gefangene" by Paul Zincke (1928); 'Paul Heyse (1875),' in Creative Spirits in the Nineteenth Century by Georg Brandes (1923); Essays on Books by William Lyon Phelps (1914); Paul Heyse by Arturo Farinelli (1913); Heyse als Dramatiker by Erich Petzet (1904) Selected works:
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