Christian Dietrich Grabbe
born Dec. 11, 1801, Detmold,
Westphalia
died Sept. 12, 1836, Detmold
German dramatist whose plays anticipated
Expressionism and film technique.
Grabbe studied law in Leipzig
(1820–22) and made unsuccessful attempts
at acting and directing in Berlin. After
quarrelling with the poet Heinrich Heine
and members of Young Germany (a
politically radical literary movement)
and failing in attempts to get help from
the Romantic writer Ludwig Tieck, he
became a solicitor and then a military
justiciary in Detmold. He was unhappily
married in 1833 and was fired from his
job in 1834 for negligence. After
several months of poverty in Frankfurt,
he went to Düsseldorf, where he lived as
a freelance writer with the help of Karl
Leberecht Immermann, with whom he later
quarrelled also. Although he had been
successful in finding publishers for his
plays, his dissipated life led to an
early death from alcoholism and
tuberculosis.
Grabbe’s most important poetic work,
Napoleon; oder, die hundert Tage (1831;
“Napoleon; or, The Hundred Days”),
exemplifies the boldly experimental form
of his plays, in which he avoided
continuous action by the use of a series
of vividly depicted and contrasting
scenes. His tragedy Don Juan und Faust
(1829) is an imaginative and daring
attempt to combine the two great works
of Mozart and Goethe. Like many of his
plays, it exceeded the practical demands
of the theatre. Among his most enduring
is the mordant satire Scherz, Satire,
Ironie, und tiefere Bedeutung (1827;
Comedy, Satire, Irony, and Deeper
Meaning). He is also known for
Abhandlung über die Shakespearo-Manie
(1827; “Essay on Shakespeare Mania”), in
which he attacks Shakespeare and
advocates an independent national drama.
His other major works are the tragedy
Herzog Theodor von Gothland (1827; “Duke
Theodor of Gothland”), noted for its
scenes of violence; and two plays about
Hohenstaufen rulers, Kaiser Friedrich
Barbarossa (1829) and Kaiser Heinrich VI
(1830).
