A Berlin childhood between two worlds
Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse was born on 15 March 1830 in Berlin, the second son of Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Heyse, a professor of classical philology and general linguistics at the University of Berlin, and his wife Julie, born Saaling. In the short autobiography he wrote for the Nobel Foundation, Heyse described his mother plainly as coming from a Jewish family. She was the daughter of Salomon Jacob Salomon, a Berlin court jeweller and banker, and through her the boy was related to the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family; Julie had become a Protestant in 1826, and Paul was raised in the Protestant church.
Learning ran in the family. His paternal grandfather, Johann Christian August Heyse, was a well-known grammarian and lexicographer, and his father had tutored both the youngest son of Wilhelm von Humboldt and the young Felix Mendelssohn. Paul received early artistic encouragement in the Mendelssohn household, and at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Gymnasium he was remembered as a model student. When he was sixteen the poet Emanuel Geibel, fifteen years his senior, introduced him to the circle of the art historian Franz Kugler, where he met Joseph von Eichendorff, Jacob Burckhardt, Adolph Menzel and Theodor Fontane.
From philology to poetry
Heyse studied classical philology in Berlin, then moved to Bonn in 1849 to study Romance languages under Friedrich Diez, the founder of Romance philology in Germany. He joined the Berlin literary society known as the Tunnel über der Spree, where he became a friend of Theodor Storm, and in 1852 he earned his doctorate with a dissertation on the refrain in troubadour poetry. A Prussian government grant then sent him to Italy to search libraries for old Provençal manuscripts. The scholarship came to little, and he was even banned from the Vatican Library after being caught copying unpublished texts, but Italy made him a writer.
Back in Germany in 1853, with the Italian landscape still vivid in his mind, he wrote the story that made him famous, L’Arrabbiata (The Fury), about a proud young woman of Sorrento. In 1854 King Maximilian II of Bavaria, at Geibel’s suggestion, invited him to Munich with an annual salary, a titular professorship and a place at the king’s weekly gatherings of scholars and poets. That same spring he married Kugler’s daughter Margarete, and the couple settled in Munich, where Heyse would live for the next sixty years.
Master of the novella
Heyse was astonishingly productive: novels, poetry, about sixty plays and 177 short stories, most of them novellas, the compact, tightly shaped form of short fiction that German writers prized. His novellas were read across Europe and America, and he became one of the dominant figures of German letters in the second half of the nineteenth century, with novels such as Kinder der Welt (Children of the World, 1873) adding to his fame.
His most lasting contribution to how literature is read and taught, however, came in an introduction. Between 1871 and 1876 he edited, with Hermann Kurz, the Deutscher Novellenschatz, a 24-volume treasury of German novellas, followed by collections of foreign novellas and a further 24-volume New Treasury. In the introduction to the first collection he set out a theory of the form that was long treated as the model. Taking as his example a tale in Boccaccio’s Decameron in which a poor knight serves his beloved falcon to the lady he loves, he argued that a good novella should have a single strong silhouette, a central image or turning point, which became known as the falcon theory. Students of German literature still learn it, and it remains a reference point in discussions of how a short story is built.
A bridge to Italian and Spanish poetry
Heyse was also a gifted and lifelong translator, above all of Italian literature. In 1852 he and Geibel published the Spanisches Liederbuch, a collection of translated Spanish poems and folk songs, and in 1860 he published the Italienisches Liederbuch, translations of Italian folk poetry. Between 1889 and 1905 he produced five volumes of translations and studies of Italian poets from the mid-eighteenth century onward, including Giacomo Leopardi and Giuseppe Giusti, and he finished his career with a collection of Italian folk tales in 1914.
These translations had a remarkable second life in music. Robert Schumann set poems from the Spanisches Liederbuch, and Hugo Wolf drew on both collections for two of the great cycles of the German art song, his Spanisches Liederbuch (1891) and Italienisches Liederbuch (1892–96). More than a century later, singers and students around the world still perform these songs, so audiences who have never read a word of Heyse hear his German versions of Spanish and Italian verse in concert halls and conservatories.
A life among writers
Heyse was a gifted friend and a generous colleague. In Berlin he belonged to the Tunnel über der Spree, which honoured his early ballad and his first short story, and to the smaller Rütli circle with Kugler, Fontane and Storm, whose work he praised when Storm was still unknown. In Munich he founded the literary society Die Krokodile with writers including Geibel, Hermann Lingg, Felix Dahn and Friedrich Bodenstedt, and he edited anthologies of Munich poets. He corresponded for years with Eduard Mörike and met Franz Grillparzer, Friedrich Hebbel, Gottfried Keller and Ivan Turgenev on his travels.
His house became a meeting place for writers, artists and musicians, and he knew Franz Liszt and Hans von Bülow, though he rejected Richard Wagner. On stage his greatest success was the patriotic historical play Kolberg, but his heart was in narrative. By 1888 he had published nineteen collections of novellas, and his stories, translated into many languages, were read across Europe and in America. The Swedish Academy would call them world-renowned. He also worked tirelessly to promote understanding between the nations of Europe.
Independence and principle
Heyse enjoyed royal favour but guarded his independence. When Geibel fell out with the new Bavarian king, Ludwig II, and left Munich, Heyse gave up his own royal salary in solidarity. In 1887, when clerical influence led the Bavarian regent to deny the Austrian playwright Ludwig Anzengruber the Maximilian Order for Science and Art, Heyse alone among his colleagues resigned from the order’s chapter. In 1891 he left the jury of the Schiller Prize when Kaiser Wilhelm II blocked the award to the dramatist Ludwig Fulda.
His own work was sometimes attacked as immoral for its frank treatment of love and religion, and in 1901 Prussian censors opposed the staging of his religious drama Maria von Magdala. Younger naturalist writers, for their part, made him the chief target of their revolt against what they saw as outdated idealism. Heyse defended himself in essays, a play and the novel Merlin (1892), and although his influence on new writing faded, his personal reputation for integrity grew.
Jewish heritage
Heyse was not raised Jewish and did not identify as a Jew, but he never hid his mother’s origins: he named them in the first sentence of his Nobel autobiography. The presentation speech at the 1910 Nobel ceremony also noted his Jewish mother, suggesting that he may have inherited his warm and lively temperament from her. His family story is a classic one of Berlin’s Jewish enlightenment era, when daughters of Jewish banking families such as the Salomons moved in the salons of the city, some converted, and their children entered the heart of German culture.
On his mother’s side he was connected to the Mendelssohns, and among his aunts were the writers Marianne Saaling and Regina Frohberg. He is counted among Jewish Nobel laureates by the Jewish Virtual Library.
Family, honours and the Nobel Prize
Heyse’s private life was marked by loss. Margarete died of a lung illness in 1862, leaving him with four young children, and he later lost several of them. In 1867 he married Anna Schubart, with whom he lived, he wrote, happily for more than four decades. Their house in Munich became a centre of literary and social life for decades, and from 1899 he spent winters at a second home in Gardone on Lake Garda.
Honours accumulated. Munich made him an honorary citizen in 1900, and on his eightieth birthday in 1910 the King of Bavaria raised him to the nobility. That December the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature “as a tribute to the consummate artistry, permeated with idealism, which he has demonstrated during his long productive career as a lyric poet, dramatist, novelist and writer of world-renowned short stories.” He could not travel to Stockholm and was represented at the ceremony.
Last years and legacy
Heyse kept writing to the end, publishing a last volume of novellas and a collection of Italian folk tales in 1914. He died in Munich on 2 April 1914, a few months before the outbreak of the First World War, and was buried in the city’s Waldfriedhof with full official honours but without church rites. Streets in Munich and Hamburg and a Munich underpass bear his name.
His novels and plays are little read today, but parts of his work have proved durable. His falcon theory remains a standard tool for analysing short fiction; his novella anthologies helped define the German canon of the form; and his translations, through the songs of Wolf and Schumann, keep carrying Italian and Spanish poetry to listeners everywhere. He was, in the Nobel committee’s words, a writer of world-renowned short stories, and he gave readers and teachers a lasting way to think about what makes a story work.
Sources & further reading
Paul Heyse, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Heyse, Paul, Neue Deutsche Biographie (Deutsche Biographie) · Award ceremony speech, Nobel Prize in Literature 1910, NobelPrize.org · Paul Heyse, Jewish Virtual Library · Paul Heyse, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.