His major themes are love, family, death, and the transience of all things. Some of his stories have been adapted as films and television plays, and many of his poems have been set to music by eminent composers.
Storm's friend Ferdinand Tönnies outlined in his classic sociological text Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and Society, 1887) the dilemma of the individual in postagrarian, industrial German society of the late nineteenth century. Storm was aware of this loss of community and the isolation of the individual in the impersonal, abstract organization of the body politic, and he turns to near-absolute love or to an idyllic past to counteract isolation and loneliness. He also points to the psychological stress that the impersonal society of isolated individuals has caused.
Theodor Woldsen Storm was born in Husum in the duchy of Schleswig on 14 September 1817, the son of Johann Kasimir Storm and his wife, Lucie Woldsen Storm. Since Schleswig then belonged to Denmark, Storm was a Danish citizen. On his mother's side he was descended from one of Husum's old patrician families, and the stately rococo house of his maternal grandparents made a lasting impression on him; the vignettes Im Sonnenschein (1854; translated as "In the Sunlight," 1964) and Im Saal (1854; translated as In the Great Hall, 1923), which take place in the middle of the eighteenth century, were inspired by memories of his youth in the Woldsen house.
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