Albrecht Schaeffer, like his older contemporaries Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke, attempted to restore dignity to poetry in a time of spiritual decline. His literary art was informed by the intellectual traditions of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the romantic period. His writings were widely acclaimed because of their metrical precision, attention to form, and tremendous scope. His masterful shorter fiction includes short stories, novellas, legends, and parables.

Schaeffer was born on 6 December 1885 in Elbing, Prussia (now Elblag, Poland), to Paul Friedrich and Marie Antoinette Agnes Schäffer (all extant documents show this spelling of his parents' name). In 1890 the family moved to the northwestern German city of Hannover, where Schaeffer remained until his graduation from high school. He studied classical and modern philology at the universities of Munich, Marburg, and Berlin from 1905 to 1909. For a short time he worked as an unpaid employee for a...