HEBBEL, FRIEDRICH. - German dramatist, b. at Wesselburen, in Holstein, on 18 March 1813, d. at Vienna on 13 Dec. 1863. He lived in straitened circumstances, which created in him a spirit of violent rebellion against everything; he studied intermittently at Heidelberg and enjoyed a little serenity only after his marriage to the actress Christine Enghaus. He wrote lyrics and comedies, but his name is linked to his tragedies, which reflect the tormented life of the poet.
Already his first tragedy Judith (1841) immediately brought him great renown through the portrayal of certain characters that bear the mark of the author's extraordinary personality. Maria Magdalene, a bourgeois drama, and the historical drama Agnes Bernauer, in which the tragic passion of Albert of Wittelsbach for a woman of the people is depicted with his customary power, are likewise full of tragic quality. There followed Genoveva and Herodes und Mariamne, Gyges und sein Ring and the trilogy Die Nibelungen. H. regards drama as the highest and most faithful representation of human life, inasmuch as the tragic is immanent in life itself; to live means nothing other than to sin and to suffer, because original sin weighs and will always weigh upon humanity. The goal to be attained consists for H. not in mastering the world, but in transcending it. His titanism is man's rebellion against his own lower nature and the effort to overcome it; in this rebellion and in this effort at overcoming, his heroes, in irreconcilable conflict with the norms that govern human life, seem hurled beyond their own existence. The poet's pessimism thus rests on the awareness of an irreconcilable dualism that issues in the desperate acceptance of the dominion of fate. So that, apart from certain mystical lyrical flights of his, which might suggest an orientation toward a moral theism that postulates the transcendence of God, in none of his dramas does the concept of Redemption appear sufficiently delineated.
Bibliography8 works
Rodolfo Bottacchiari