Hebbel, Friedrich

(1813-1863)

   Playwright. Hebbel was born in poverty and worked at various jobs until the editor of a Hamburg newspaper named Amalie Schoppen published some of his poetry. With her encouragement and under her tutelage, he moved to Hamburg and attended some university lectures. He also attended classes at Heidelberg and Munich, but returned to Hamburg, where a poor seamstress named Elise Lensing supported him and bore him two illegitimate children. Supported by Lensing during the early 1840s, he completed several remarkable plays, including Judith (1841) and Maria Magdalena (1844). Both had successful runs in Hamburg and Berlin, and the latter is often considered a kind of forerunner to realism. At the time, critics saw it as an antidote to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's middle-class tragedy; later it was thought of as a German alternative to subsequent French models by Alexandre Dumas fils and others because it avoided the "typical" intrigues of seduction and the moral tone favoring the middle class.

   Hebbel abandoned Lensing in 1846 and married Viennese actress Christine Enghaus; under her protection in Vienna, he wrote several plays for the Burgtheater, the most noteworthy among them Herodes und Miramne, which Heinrich Laube reluctantly premiered at the Burg in 1849; Agnes Bernauer (1852); and the five-act verse tragedy Gyges und sein Ring (Gyges and His Ring, 1856). His most remarkable achievement in Vienna was the three-part Die Nibelungen (The Nibelungs, 1862), for which he won the Schiller Prize.

   Hebbel's plays often bespeak his preoccupation with psychological tension within an individual character. The dialogue he created, both in verse and in prose, is well crafted. The ideas of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) strongly influenced Hebbel. In his preface to Maria Magdalena, Hebbel discussed the "terrible dialectic" in his characters, who suffered the dilemma "between expansion and introspection" resulting in "an unbearable tension." Hebbel stated that dramatic art "can no longer stand outside social concerns," but those concerns do not include impecuniousness, hunger, class conflicts, love affairs, and other "surface" dilemmas. Hebbel's was a powerful intellect, and his theoretical works such as Mein Wort über das Drama! (My Word on the Drama!, 1843) and Über den Stil des Dramas (On Dramatic Style, 1847) are remarkable for their insights. He was convinced that art and history must conjointly provide a creative atmosphere of the times by taking disparate artifacts and making them comprehensible to an audience. Hebbel's diaries, collected in four volumes, also reveal a great deal about the German theater from 1835 until his death in 1863.