The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX | Page 2

of the other two; each,
however, was a personality, and Hebbel one of the most powerful that
ever lived.
Hebbel's career is a long battle against all but insuperable obstacles.
Born at Wesselburen in the present province of Schleswig-Holstein on
March 18, 1813, he was the son of a poor stone mason--so poor that, as
Hebbel said, poverty had taken the place of his soul. Though Klaus
Hebbel was a well-meaning man, he was a slave to the inexorable non
possumus of penury. In winter, especially, lack of work made even the
provision of daily bread often difficult and sometimes impossible for
him. But Friedrich Hebbel's childhood, full of hardship as it was, was
not cheerless. The father did what he could; and the mother, at
whatever sacrifice to herself, could nearly always do something for the
children. The greatest hardship was caused by the father's hostility to
these maternal concessions to childish desires; for to him, whose life

was labor, unproductive use of time was a crime. He thought it a matter
of course that his son should become a laboring man like himself, and it
is little less than a miracle that this did not happen. The mother, to be
sure, fostered the boy's more ambitious hopes; the death of the father in
Hebbel's fourteenth year was perhaps a blessing in disguise;
undoubtedly the happiest chance in Hebbel's boyhood, so far as
external events are concerned, was the fact that he won the favor of a
real teacher in his schoolmaster Dethlefsen, who not only gave his
education the proper start, but also recommended him, as his best
scholar, to the local magistrate, J.J. Mohr.
For nearly eight years (1827 to 1835) Hebbel was in Mohr's employ,
first as an errand boy, and ultimately as a clerk, to whom more and
more official business was intrusted. He lived in the household of his
superior, continued in the magistrate's library the assiduous reading
which he had begun with Dethlefsen's books, and acquired, along with
the habits of official accuracy, something of the ways of a higher social
station than that to which he had been born. His contact with the world
of affairs and with litigation also considerably broadened his outlook,
though it was often the seamy side of life that he saw, and his own
early necessities had sharpened his sense of the essential tragedy of
existence. Among the young people of the town Hebbel was as active
and inventive as any; he wrote verses, took part in amateur theatricals,
and was a leader in many undertakings that had not amusement as their
sole object.
From the beginning Hebbel shows extraordinary sensitiveness to
esthetic appeal and a disposition to dreamy imaginativeness. The Bible,
the Protestant hymnal, pre-classical prose and poetry of the eighteenth
century, as well as contemporary romantic fiction, including Jean Paul,
Hoffmann, and Heine, touched his fancy and stirred him to emulation.
[Illustration: FRIEDRICH HEBBEL]
As a boy, he is said to have composed a tragedy _Evolia, the Captain of
Robbers_, which his mother confiscated and burned. His early poems
are echoes of Klopstock, Matthisson, Hölty, Bürger, and other
predecessors; but especially of Schiller, whose moral seriousness and
sonorous language alike inspired the serious and rhetorically gifted
youth. The influence of Schiller, however, marks no epoch in the poetic
development of Hebbel; it dominates the period of adolescence. The

sense of poetry was aroused in him as a boy, he said, by Paul Gerhardt's
hymn "The woods are now at rest" (_Nun ruhen alle Wãlder_); the
discovery of what poetry is he made in 1830, when he read Uhland's
_Minstrel's Curse_ and perceived that the sole principle of art is not to
write, like Schiller, eloquently about ideas, but "to make in a particular
phenomenon the universal intuitively perceptible."
Having published poems and stories from 1829 on in a local newspaper,
Hebbel, in 1831, seeking a wider audience at the same time that he
longed for a larger sphere of activity, submitted specimens of his work
to Amalie Schoppe in Hamburg, the editress of a fashion paper; and in
this and the following years she printed a considerable number of his
productions. Moreover, she took a genuine personal interest in his
ambitions; and after several plans had proved abortive, she succeeded
in collecting for him a small sum of money and the promise of other
material aid in a plan that should give a firm foundation for the
structure of his hopes: he should come to Hamburg and prepare for the
study of law. Accordingly, on the fourteenth of February, 1835, he left
his modest but secure position in Wesselburen for the alluring great
world where he felt that he belonged, but where he was destined to toil
and to suffer, in a struggle for existence which only