Johanna Spyri was a Swiss author of children's stories, best known for Heidi. Born Johanna Louise Heusser in the rural area of Hirzel, Switzerland, as a child she spent several summers in the area aro…
Erich Maria Remarque was a German novelist best known for All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), a landmark anti-war novel based on his experiences in World War I. The book became an international bes…
Benjamin Franklin Wedekind, usually known as Frank Wedekind, was a German playwright. His work, which often criticizes bourgeois attitudes (particularly towards sex), is considered to anticipate expre…
Adalbert Stifter was an Austrian writer, poet, painter, and pedagogue. He was especially notable for the vivid natural landscapes depicted in his writing, and has long been popular in the German-speak…
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director. A seminal theatre practitioner of the twentieth century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturg…
Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal established his reputation with lyric poems and a number of plays, including Yesterday (1891) and Death and the Fool (1893).
Freiin Annette Elisabeth von Droste-Hülshoff was a 19th-century German poet, writer, and composer. Freiin translates from German to English as baroness, and von indicates nobility. She was one of the …
The dramatist, writer, lyricist, and publicist Heinrich von Kleist was born in Frankfurt an der Oder in 1777. Upon his father's early death in 1788 when he was ten, he was sent to the house of the pre…
Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann was a German dramatist and novelist. He is counted among the most important promoters of literary naturalism, though he integrated other styles into his work as well. H…
Theodor Fontane, novelist, critic, poet, and travel writer, was one of the most celebrated nineteenth-century German men of letters. He was born into a French Huguenot family in the Prussian town of N…
Karl Georg Büchner was a German dramatist and writer of prose. He was the brother of physician and philosopher Ludwig Büchner. Georg Büchner's talent is generally held in great esteem in Germany. It i…
A master of poetry, drama, and the novel, German writer and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spent 50 years on his two-part dramatic poem Faust, published in 1808 and 1832, also conducted scie…
Johann Ludwig Tieck was a German poet, translator, editor, novelist, and critic, who was part of the Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
People best know long didactic poems and historical plays, such as Don Carlos (1787) and William Tell (1804), of leading romanticist German poet, dramatist, and historian Johann Christoph Frie…
Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann, better known by his pen name E. T. A. Hoffmann (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann), was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, d…
