HEBBEL, FRIEDRICH. — German dramatist, born at Wesselburen, in Holstein, on 18 March 1813, died in Vienna on 13 December 1863. He lived in difficult circumstances, which created in him a spirit of violent rebellion against everything; he studied intermittently at Heidelberg and enjoyed some serenity only after his marriage to the actress Christine Enghaus. He wrote lyrics and comedies, but his name is associated with the tragedies, which reflect the poet’s tormented life.
Already his first tragedy, Judith (1841), immediately brought him great renown through its portrayal of certain characters bearing the mark of the author’s extraordinary personality. Also full of tragic power are Maria Magdalene, a bourgeois drama, and the historical drama Agnes Bernauer, in which the tragic passion of Alberto di Wittelsbach for a commoner is represented with customary force. These were followed by Genoveva and Herodes und Mariamne, Gyges und sein Ring, and the trilogy Die Nibelungen. H. considers drama the highest and most faithful representation of human life, insofar as the tragic is immanent in life itself; living means nothing other than sinning and suffering, because original sin weighs and will always weigh upon humanity. For H., the goal to be attained does not consist in mastering the world, but in transcending II. His titanism is man’s rebellion against his own lower nature and his effort to overcome it; in this rebellion and this effort at transcendence, his heroes, in irreconcilable conflict with the norms governing human life, seem hurled beyond their very existence. The poet’s pessimism thus rests on the awareness of an irreconcilable dualism that culminates in the desperate acceptance of the dominion of fate. Thus, apart from certain mystical lyrical outbursts of his, which might suggest an orientation toward a moral theism postulating the transcendence of God, none of his dramas presents a sufficiently delineated concept of Redemption.