Spitteler's was an elitist view that set itself against contemporary styles such as realism and naturalism and against the genre of the novel. Yet, because the form and content of his major works do not appeal to a wide public, he is today better known for the narratives in the realist and modern manner that he undertook as mere exercises. Despite his undoubted literary strengths and his keen awareness, reflected in many essays, of the most significant forces at work in the contemporary world, Spitteler is a somewhat anachronistic figure in the German-speaking literary scene of the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth.
The first child of Karl and Anna Dorothea (Brodbeck) Spitteler, Carl Georg Friedrich Spitteler was born on 24 April 1845 in the small town of Liestal, some thirty miles southeast of Basel. In 1849 Karl Spitteler was appointed federal treasurer in the wake of the reforms that set up the Swiss Federation in 1848, and the family, which by this time included a second son, moved to Bern.
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