Joseph Eichendorff
1788–1857
Biography
Joseph Eichendorff (1788–1857) was a German poet and novelist of the Romantic period. He was born at Lubowitz Castle in Upper Silesia, then part of Prussia, into an old noble family. He studied law and the humanities at Halle and Heidelberg, where he mixed with the young writers who were giving German Romanticism its shape. For most of his working life he was a Prussian civil servant, posted first to Breslau and then to Danzig and Königsberg, and in 1831 the family moved to Berlin. He died at Neisse in Silesia in 1857.
He ranks among the leading figures of Romanticism, both as a poet and as a critic. Many of his poems first appeared inside his stories, where a character often sings them, and his lyrics have been set to music more often than almost any other German poet's, with some five thousand settings. The themes of nature, night and wandering recur across his verse and his prose alike.
The book listed here under his name is Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts: Novelle, which came out in 1826 and is usually given in English as Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing. Its hero, a miller's son who turns his back on his father's trade, drifts into work as a gardener in Vienna and falls for a duke's daughter who seems out of his reach. After a journey to Italy he comes back to find that she is within his reach after all. The story mixes dreamlike wandering with plain realism, and critics have long placed it near the summit of German Romantic prose.
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Books
Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts: Novelle
by Joseph Eichendorff
A miller's idle son is sent out into the world with nothing but his fiddle and a cheerful heart. He drifts to a castle near Vienna, falls hopelessly in love with a lady he believes far above him, and wanders on to Italy through a tangle of disguises and misunderstandings. The…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.