Annette von Droste-Hülshoff

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Image:Deutsche Mark.jpg Image:Droste Haus.jpg Annette von Droste (January 10, 1797 – May 25, 1848) was a 19th century German author, and one of the most important German women poets.

She was born at the family seat of Hülshoff near Münster into an aristocratic, Catholic family in Westphalia, educated by private tutors, and began to write as a child, though she published no work until she was forty years old. Among her best-known works are the cycle of poems Das geistliche Jahr (The Spiritual Year) and the novella Die Judenbuche (The Jew's Beech).

Her early mental training was largely influenced by her cousin, Clemens August Freiherr von Droste zu Vischering, who, as archbishop of Cologne, became notorious for his extreme ultramontane views (see below); and she received a more liberal education than in those days ordinarily fell to a woman's lot.

Despite her withdrawn and restricted life she corresponded with intellectual contemporaries such as the Brothers Grimm. As her health continually worsened, earning a living through her writing was never an option. Despite this, she took her literary work very seriously.

Her break from her circumstances came with her trip to Lake Constance, originally only to visit relations. From 1841 she stayed with her brother-in-law, Joseph von Laßberg at Schloss Meersburg. In 1837 she became friends with the author Levin Schücking, who through her agency became the librarian at Schloss Meersburg.

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff is (according to the article in Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911) beyond doubt the most gifted and original of German women poets. Her verse is strong and vigorous, but often unmusical even to harshness; one looks in vain for a touch of sentimentality or melting sweetness in it. As a lyric poet, she is at her best when she is able to attune her thoughts to the sober landscape of the Westphalian moorlands of her home. Her narrative poetry, and especially Das Hospiz auf dem Grossen St. Bernard and Die Schlacht im Loener Bruch (both 1838), belongs to the best German poetry of its kind. She was a strict Roman Catholic, and her religious poems, published in 1852, after her death, under the title Das geistliche Jahr, nebst einem Anhang religioser Gedichte, enjoyed great popularity.

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff died in May 1848 at Schloss Meersburg, probably from inflammation of the lung.

Works

• Gedichte, 1838
• Die Judenbuche (novella), 1842
• Gedichte (Poems), 1844
• Westfälische Schilderungen (Westphalian Illustrations), 1845
• Das geistliche Jahr (The Spiritual Year, cycle of poems), 1851
• Der Knabe im Moor (The Lad on the Moor, ballad)
• Letzte Gaben (Last Gifts, poems), 1860
• Briefe von Annette von Droste-Hülshoff und Levin Schücking (Letters from Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and Levin Schücking)

References

• This article incorporates text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, which is in the public domain.

Some of the material for this article comes from the equivalent German-language Wikipedia article. It cites:

• P. Berglar: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek 1967
• Levin Schücking: Annette von Droste. Stuttgart 1964
• E. Staiger: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. Frauenfeld 1967

See also

• Biedermeier