Theodor Storm
Hans Theodor Woldsen Storm (German pronunciation: [ˈteːodoːɐ̯ ˈʃtɔʁm] ; 14 September 1817 – 4 July 1888), commonly known as Theodor Storm, was a German-Frisian writer and poet. He is considered to be one of the most important figures of German realism.
Theodor Storm
4 July 1888 (aged 70)
Hademarschen, German Empire
Lawyer, writer
Work[edit]
Storm was one of the most important authors of 19th-century German Literary realism. He wrote a number of stories, poems and novellas. His two best-known works are the novellas Immensee (1849) and Der Schimmelreiter ("The Rider on the White Horse"), first published in April 1888 in the Deutsche Rundschau. Other published works include a volume of his poems (1852), the novella Pole Poppenspäler (1874) and the novella Aquis submersus (1877).
Analysis[edit]
Like Friedrich Hebbel, Theodor Storm was a child of the North Sea plain, but, whilst in Hebbel's verse there is hardly any direct reference to his native landscape, Storm again and again revisits the chaste beauty of its expansive mudflats, menacing sea and barren pastures — and whilst Hebbel could find a home away from his native heath Storm clung to it with what may be called a jealous love. In Der Schimmelreiter, the last of his 50 novellas and widely considered Storm's culminating masterpiece, the setting of the rural North German coast is central to evoking its unnerving, superstitious atmosphere, and sets the stage for the battleground of man versus nature: the dykes and the sea.
His favourite poets were Joseph von Eichendorff and Eduard Mörike, and the influence of the former is plainly discernible even in Storm's later verse. During a summer visit to Baden-Baden in 1864, where he had been invited by his friend, the author and painter Ludwig Pietsch, he made the acquaintance of the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. They exchanged letters and sent each other copies of their works over a number of years.
Hungarian literary critic Georg Lukács, in Soul and Form (1911), appraised Storm as "the last representative of the great German bourgeois literary tradition," poised between Jeremias Gotthelf and Thomas Mann.
