- Person
- Paul Heyse
- Lived
- 1830–1914
- Field
- Literature, translation
- From
- German
The story
Paul Heyse was born in Berlin in 1830, the son of a university philologist and of Julie Saaling, who, as he wrote in his Nobel autobiography, came from a Jewish family. Raised Protestant, he studied classical and Romance philology, discovered Italy on a research grant, and in 1854 settled in Munich at the invitation of King Maximilian II of Bavaria. He became one of the most prolific and widely read German writers of his century, with novels, about sixty plays and 177 short stories.
The novella, a compact story built around a single striking event, was the form he made his own. From 1871 to 1876 he and Hermann Kurz edited the Deutscher Novellenschatz, a 24-volume treasury of German novellas, followed by collections of foreign novellas and a further 24-volume New German Novella Treasury. These anthologies helped define which German short fiction readers and teachers regarded as essential.
In the introduction to the first treasury, Heyse set out a theory of the form. Drawing on a tale in Boccaccio’s Decameron in which an impoverished knight serves his prized falcon to the woman he loves, he argued that every good novella should have a strong, distinctive silhouette: a central image or turning point that the reader remembers. The idea became known as the falcon theory. According to the Neue Deutsche Biographie, his theory long counted as the model one, and it remains a standard reference in the teaching of German literature and in discussions of how short stories work.
Heyse’s other bridge between cultures was translation. His Spanisches Liederbuch (1852, with Emanuel Geibel) and Italienisches Liederbuch (1860) brought Spanish and Italian poetry into German, and Hugo Wolf set them as two of the great song cycles of the nineteenth century. In 1910 Heyse received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy praising his world-renowned short stories.
Why it matters
Heyse’s falcon theory and novella anthologies still shape how students analyse short fiction, and his translations live on in songs by Hugo Wolf and Robert Schumann performed worldwide.
About Paul Heyse
Berlin-born writer of 177 novellas whose falcon theory shaped how short fiction is taught, and whose translations became songs by Hugo Wolf and Schumann. Nobel 1910.
Sources
- Paul Heyse, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Heyse, Paul Neue Deutsche Biographie
- Paul Heyse Wikipedia
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