Biography Essay

Theodor Storm is a prominent representative of the group of European writers known as "poetic" or "bourgeois" realists. The majority of his tales are set in his native region of Schleswig-Holstein, some of them in his hometown of Husum. His lyrical poetry also treats regional themes and motifs. This regionalism, however, is merely Storm's vehicle for treating themes of national and human significance. In his 1930 essay on Storm, Thomas Mann said that Storm's thematic innovations and craftsmanship were equal to those of such European contemporaries as Ivan Turgenev, Charles Dickens, and Gottfried Keller. Storm's novellas Immensee (Bee's Lake, 1851; translated as Immensee, or The Old Man's Reverie, 1863) and Der Schimmelreiter (1888; translated as "The Rider of the Pale Horse," 1914) are still widely known, and the line "die graue Stadt am Meer" (The gray town by the sea) from his poem "Die Stadt" (The Town, 1851) has entered the German...