Born: Anna Elisabeth Franziska Adolfine Wilhelmina Luisa Maria in Schloss HUlshoff near MUnster, Westphalia, Germany, 10 January 1797. Education: Educated by private tutors. Career: Moved with her mother and sister to RUschhaus following the death of her father in 1826; collaborated with the writer Levin SchUcking from 1840 who encouraged her poetic activity; lived in Meersburg from 1846. Suffered from ill health throughout her life. Died: 24 May 1848.
Publications
Collections
Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Levin SchUcking. 3 vols., 1878-79.
Samtliche Werke, edited by Karl Schulte Kemminghausen. 4 vols., 1925-30.
Poems, edited by Margaret Atkinson. 1968.
Historisch-kritische Ausgabe: Werke, Briefwechsel, edited by Winfried Woesler. 14 vols., 1978-85.
Werke, edited by Clemens Heselhaus. 1984.
Verse
Walther. 1818. Gedichte. 1838.
Das malerische und romantische Westfalen. 1839.
Gedichte. 1844.
Das geistliche Jahr. Nebst einem Anhang Religioser Gedichte, edited by C.B. SchUlter and Wilhelm Junkmann. 1851.
Letzte Gaben, edited by Levin SchUcking. 1860.
Lebensgang, edited by Marie Silling. 1917.
Balladen. 1922.
Fiction
Die Judenbuche. 1851; as The Jew’s Beech, translated by Lionel and Doris Thomas, 1958; as The Jew’s Beech Tree, translated by Michael Bullock, in Three Eerie Tales from 19th Century German, 1975.
Ledwina (fragment). 1923.
Plays
Perdu; oder, Dichter, Verleger und BlaustrUmpfe. 1840.
Other
Bilder aus Westfalen. 1845.
Briefe, edited by C. Schlueter. 1877.
Die Briefe von Annette von Droste-HUlshoff und Levin SchUcking,edited by Theo SchUcking. 1893.
Die Briefe der Dichterin Annette von Droste-HUlshoff, edited by Hermann Cardauns. 1909.
Dreiundzwanzig neue Droste-Briefe, edited by Manfred Schneider. 1923.
Briefe, edited by Karl Schulte Kemminghausen. 2 vols., 1944.
Lieder und Gesange, edited by Karl Gustav Fellerer. 1954.
Critical Studies:
Annette von Droste-HUlshoff by Margaret Mare, 1965; Annette von Droste-HUlshoff in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten by Peter Berglar, 1967; Annette von Droste-HUlshoff. Werk und Leben by Clemens Heselhaus, 1971; Sinnbildsprache. Zur Bildstruktur des Geistlichen Jahres der Annette von Droste-HUlshoff by Stephan Berning, 1975; Annette von Droste-HUlshoff by Ronald Schneider, 1977; Annette von Droste-HUlshoff: A Woman of Letters in a Period of Transition, 1981, and Annette von Droste-HUlshoff: A Biography, 1984, both by Mary Morgan; Annette von Droste-HUlshoff: Die Judenbuche by Klaus Moritz, 1981; Annette von Droste-HUlshoff: A German Poet Between Romanticism and Realism by John Guthrie, 1989; Annette von Droste-HUlshoff: Die Judenbuche by Heinz Rolleke, 1989; Ambivalence Transcended: A Study of the Writings of Annette von Droste-HUlshoff by Gertrude Bauer Pickar, 1997.
Annette von Droste-HUlshoff belonged to the group Junges Deutschland and is considered a writer of classical stature, certainly as one of Germany’s greatest women poets.
Her interest in poetry was early stimulated by a one-time friend of August BUrger, a certain A. Spickmann. In 1814 she began a two-act romantic verse tragedy entitled Berta, a drama fragment of 2,000 lines which foreshadows her later mastery of writing. Berta deals with intrigue and with criticism of the ambitious nobility, and it contains a conspiracy against the prince, an evil Italian servant, diplomatic wedding negotiations, and a pair of true lovers separated by the exigencies of rank as well as by intrigue. Its author was wise to realize early on that the work was not a success and that drama was not her strength.
Another early work, the epic poem Walther, was completed in 1818, and is considered a most ambitious finished product. The poem mingles medieval cruelty and knightly idealism with modern sensibility. It contains lines of exceptional promise, as well as some narrative skill and the ability to sustain and round off her theme. The problem of man’s deliberate waywardness and estrangement from God through a cherished ”idol” is raised but not thoroughly worked out. In this poem, Droste-Hulshoff imitates Walther von der Vogelweide’s Kreuzlied in an attempt to draw on genuine medieval sources as well as on nature. Walther, however, remained unsuccessful.
In 1824 Droste-Hulshoff began a novel Ledwina, which remained unfinished although some 50 pages were published posthumously. It is a fragment of her early prose work, having been begun about the year 1819. It was to remain a fragment, although she worked on it over the next five years of her life. There are elements in the prose passages which seem to belong expressly to a highly ”romantic” phase of Droste-Hulshoff’s life. Some critics believe that these ”romantic” elements in her early work reveal, as well as Droste-Hulshoff’s acquaintance with the literature of the time or at least with its mood, her own lifelong tendency to dwell on decay and death and the transience of all things. One reason for her decision not to finish Ledwina is to be found in her half-humorous remarks in a letter to her friend Spickmann on 8 February 1819 (Die Briefe von Annette von Droste-HUlshoff, vol. 1) that consumptive heroines were becoming rather too common, featuring in all the second-rate, sentimental literature.
Towards the end of 1820 Droste-Hulshoff began to write a cycle of devotional poems for her grandmother, reflecting the ecclesiastical calendar: Das geistliche Jahr [The Spiritual Year], published posthumously in 1851. It is a cycle of 72 poems which are of a confessional character and reflect not only piety but also a conscientious struggle with doubt. There is a song devoted to each Sunday of the year, and one for every church holiday. Although Droste-Hulshoff was a devout Catholic, there are few specific references to the Catholic church in her poems. Das geistliche Jahr gives the impression that Droste-Hulshoff was seeking a God who could not be found and that she had to go on seeking until death (in fact, she continued to revise the manuscript until a few months before her death).
In Das geistliche Jahr Droste-Hulshoff drew from such varied sources as books of scientific knowledge, like those her father had been interested in collecting for his library, containing facts about phenomena such as the ”Phosphorpflanze,” and from accounts of oriental travel, as well as the Bible, mystical literature and baroque verse, books of popular hymns, and classical and romantic verses. Her other poems, too, were indebted to such books. However, direct experience also plays a major role in shaping the poems.
Three epic poems, ”Das Hospiz auf dem grossen St. Bernhard” [The Hospice on the St. Bernhard], ”Des Arztes Vermachtnis” [The Doctor's Legacy], and ”Die Schlacht am Loener Bruch” [The Battle at Loener Bog], were all published in her first collection of poems. ”Das Hospiz” is apparently modelled on Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake since Droste-Hulshoff was an enthusiastic devotee of Scott’s work. These verses rarely express lyric sweetness or romantic sentiment; indeed, they are often repellent in their acerbic realism. But her love for the red soil of her native Westphalia, its forests, and its moors, is perhaps deeper than that of any other German poet for the homeland; and for nature’s most hidden secrets she has an almost preternatural clearness of vision. Her technical mastery and self-abnegating restraint are classical in the pre-Romantic sense of the word, but her language is full of colour. In the above-mentioned epic poems, Droste-Hulshoff shows herself to be a woman of great earnestness, realistic observation, and deep psychological insight.
Her friend and literary adviser, the critic Levin Schucking, inspired her to work on her most famous works: the novella, Die Judenbuche (The Jew’s Beech Tree), and the poems ”Der Knabe im Moor” [The Young Boy in the Bog] and ”Mondesaufgang” [The Rising Moon]. These three works are realistic and detailed descriptions contributing to an atmosphere of horror and gloom previously absent in her works.
The Jew’s Beech Tree is a tragic tale of ignorance, crime, and social prejudice in which the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons. The story was inspired by an actual murder in Westphalia. An old town drunk, Mergel, neglected and debauched, is found dead one day near an old beech tree. His son, Friedrich, disreputable and unsocial, murders a Jewish merchant to whom he owes money and places him beside the same beech tree where his own father died of drunkenness, then flees. All the Jews in the area come with a mysterious inscription in Hebrew and place it on the tree. After many years Friedrich returns; no one recognizes him, but the remembrance of his own act of murder leaves him no peace and he is found hanged on the beech tree. In this work, Droste-Hulshoff introduces new and modern elements: social injustice, environmental influence, the role of the conscience, and the psychology of crime.
After the publication of The Jew’s Beech Tree, on which her reputation as a writer for a long time depended, Droste-Hulshoff began on the ”Spiritus Familiaris des Rosstauschers” [The Familiar Spirit of the Horse-Dealer]. In this work, her last ballad, Droste-Hulshoff shows a deep and genuine faith; in the old folklorist tradition, it tells of a man who accepts help from the devil and imperils his soul. It is a cross between a ballad and an epic poem and is considered one of her most mature works.
Bilder aus Westfalen [Pictures of Westphalia] appeared at first anonymously. These sketches of Westphalia describe the differing mental and physical types found in the districts of Sauerland, Paderborn, and Munsterland. They are shrewd and bold, so much so that they could not appear under her own name, but they were written with the same empathy as The Jew’s Beech Tree, which was written as a result of Droste-Hulshoff’s studies for Bilder aus Westfalen. These later writings show the remarkable nuances of wit and irony which balance, but never obscure, the humanity of her mature style. Until comparatively recently the aspect of Droste-Hulshoff’s work most stressed by the literary historian was the amazing exactness and the visual and auditory quality of her descriptions. Other elements in her poems which contribute even more to her greatness were thus overlooked. What lends fascination to her thoughts are the symbols and images in which they are often clothed.
