Richard Dehmel

Vocation

Notable

German poet who exerted a major influence on young writers through his innovations in form and content. After completing his studies at Berlin and Leipzig Dehmel worked as an insurance official and then, in 1895, became a freelance writer. He chose naturalistic social themes for his early works and was one of the first major poets to write about the misery of the working classes. Influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, he extolled individualism and a life of uninhibited instincts and passion, but at the same time he felt drawn to self-sacrifice and the search for harmonious ethical ideas. In 1889, he married Paula Oppenheimer, sister of Franz Oppenheimer. He became active as a writer, and was co-founder of the PAN magazine in 1894. Dehmel divorced Paula in 1899 and traveled around Europe with Ida Auerbach who was formerly engaged to Dehmel's rival Stefan George. Dehmel married Ida in 1901. Dehmel's poetic volume Weib und Welt (Woman and World) triggered a scandal in the late 1890s, Dehmel was tried for obscenity and blasphemy. Despite his own acquittal for on technical grounds, the court condemned the work as obscene and blasphemous and ordered that it be burned. Dehmel would again be prosecuted for obscenity and blasphemy, but again acquitted as earlier. Despite his earlier record of fighting against the conservatives, Dehmel joined the resounding chorus of the patriotic and pro-war German intellectuals who appealed to the masses to support the Reich upon the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Dehmel volunteered in 1914 and served until 1916, when he was wounded. He called on the Germans to keep fighting right until 1918. Dehmel died 8 February 1920, Blankenese, near Hamburg, of the injury he suffered during the war. Dehmel is considered one of the foremost German poets of the pre-World War I era. His poems were set to music by composers like Richard Strauss, Max Reger, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Kurt Weill, Link to Wikipedia biography