Paul von Heyse · Arts & Literature
First German Nobel laureate in literature (1910); poet and novelist of Jewish paternal descent
1830, Berlin, Germany — 1914, Munich, Germany
Germany (Berlin · Munich)
Paul von Heyse is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — First German Nobel laureate in literature (1910); poet and novelist of Jewish paternal descent
Origins and early life
Paul Heyse was born in Berlin on 15 March 1830, into a household at the centre of the city's learning: his father Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Heyse was a philologist and professor at the University of Berlin who had tutored Felix Mendelssohn, and his grandfather was a well-known grammarian and lexicographer.
Work and career
His mother, Julie Saaling, came from a cultivated Berlin Jewish family, giving him maternal Jewish ancestry. Those connections opened the artistic circles of the city to him early; the poet Emanuel Geibel, fifteen years his elder, became his mentor and lifelong friend, and it was Geibel who introduced him to the art historian Franz Kugler, whose daughter he married. He read classical philology in Berlin and then art history and Romance languages in Bonn, and in 1850 settled on writing as a career.
What followed was one of the largest bodies of work in nineteenth-century German letters: novels, poetry, some sixty plays, translations from Spanish and Italian that Schumann and Hugo Wolf set to music, and above all a hundred and seventy-seven short stories. He is best remembered for a rule he drew from them, the 'falcon theory' of the novella: a good short story needs one hard, concrete central motif, as unmistakable as the falcon in Boccaccio's tale, around which everything else is organised.
Recognition
He was the presiding figure of the Munich literary circle for decades, and in 1910 became the first German writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature; one of the judges said Germany had produced no greater literary genius since Goethe. He died in Munich on 2 April 1914.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Jinfo.org — Jewish Nobel Prize winners in Literature
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First German Nobel laureate in literature (1910); poet and novelist of Jewish paternal descent
Source: Jinfo.org — Jewish Nobel Prize winners in Literature
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