Biography Essay

Neither Romantic nor purely realist, Franz Grillparzer has been difficult to place in the established periods of literary historiography. The foremost Austrian writer in the nineteenth century, a time when Austrian literature was trying to define its own identity separate from the rest of literature written in German, Grillparzer soon came to serve as the Austrian classic, comparable only to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, the twin heralds of German classicism. He himself unabashedly says in his "Selbstbiographie" (Autobiography, 1872; excerpt translated as "My Journey to Weimar," 1913), written in 1853, that "ich mich namlich derm doch, trotz allem Anstande, fur den Besten halte, der nach ihm [Goethe] und Schiller gekommen ist" (I consider myself, in all due respect, the best who has come after him [Goethe] and Schiller). To many anxious observers who had witnessed the collapse of European Enlightenment into Viennese gemutlichkeit, Grillparzer, who dealt...