Carl (Friedrich Georg) Spitteler Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Carl (Friedrich Georg) Spitteler

A generation younger than Gottfried Keller and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the best-known nineteenth-century writers of German-speaking Switzerland, Carl Spitteler sits uneasily in the literary tradition his two older compatriots did so much to establish. Spitteler was inspired by a belief in the writer as a visionary, a notion that stood at odds with the pragmatic Swiss ethos. In Spitteler's view, it was precisely the contemporary belief in unfettered progress, with its emphasis on the practical application of the sciences, that helped to demystify and trivialize life. Spitteler is, therefore, associated less with the German-Swiss narrative literary tradition than with the cultural pessimism proclaimed by the German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. In his chosen medium of the epic poem--a form he revived as the only one compatible with his high calling--Spitteler drew on classical mythology to depict the suffering and folly of humanity within a misbegotten creation. The major redeeming feature in these somber works is the noble figure whose singleness of purpose in the face of humiliation and deprivation bears witness to an ideal beyond anything entertained by the common herd.

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