Maria Magdalena

Author text
Friedrich Hebbel, 18. 3. 1813 Wesselburen (Dithmarschen) - 13. 12. 1863 Vienna. H., the son of a bricklayer, grew up in poor circumstances and did not receive a secondary school education; he trained himself autodidactically as an errand boy and clerk to a parish bailiff and went to Hamburg in 1835 to prepare for university studies. Here he met his later mistress Elise Lensing, with whom he had two children. He broke off his studies of law in Heidelberg in 1836; after a stay in Munich he returned to Hamburg in 1839. After his first successes, a two-year scholarship from the Danish king enabled him to travel to Paris (1843) as well as Rome and Naples (1844). He lived in Vienna from 1845 on, from 1846 he was married with the castle actress Christine Enghaus. Since 1835 he has regularly kept a diary, which contains biographical information as well as reflections on art and philosophy and his own poetry. H. was primarily a playwright; the conflicts in his plays are based on a tragic existential experience and manifest themselves in the clash of the sexes or in the antagonism of historical epochs or cultures. Here, the individual's actions go beyond the personal sphere and, regardless of the extent to which they are linked to suffering or guilt, serve a necessary or inevitable historical process that leads to a higher historical level. With Mary Magdalene, which allows the tragic conflict to arise within a closed petty bourgeois world, he gave the genre of the bourgeois tragedy a new dimension. The thoughtfulness that characterizes his tragedies often also determines H.'s poetry, in which reflection and emotional intensity, the personal and the allegorical are combined. In: Reclam's encyclopedia of German-speaking authors. By Volker Meid. 2nd, updated and extended edition Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006 (UB 17664.) - © 2001, 2006 Philipp Reclam jun. GmbH & Co.

Flap text
With Hebbel's preface, concerning the relationship of dramatic art to time and related points