UHLAND, LUDWIG. — German writer, born on 26 April 1787 in Tubinga, where he died on 13 November 1862. Together with Justinus Kerner and others, he represents the so-called Swabian School of poetry.
As a young man he went to Paris to study the Napoleonic Code there (U. obtained a degree in law and also practised as a lawyer in Stoccarda), and there discovered medieval French literature, which was destined to leave a lasting impression on his spirit both as poet and as historian. In fact, devoting himself to the study of ancient and medieval German literature, he published in 1822 a volume on Walther von der Vogelweide, a vivid and evocative work, perhaps more the work of a poet than of a historian, which in 1830 earned him the chair of German Language and Literature at the University of Tubinga. This was followed, in addition to various studies on the history of medieval German poetry and on Nordic sagas, by the volumes Der Mythos von Thor (1836) and Alte hoch- und niederdeutsche Volkslieder (1844–45), which reflect, with a new and rich command of the sources, the doctrines and taste-related attitudes of the Romantics, from Herder to Schlegel, down to his contemporaries Arnim and Brentano. Having taken an active part from 1816 in political life, and especially in the struggle for the Württemberg Constitution (he had been elected a deputy to the Chamber of Estates), U. was compelled, because of disagreements with his government, to leave the University in 1832; but in 1848 he was a member of the National Assembly of Francoforte, in which he participated until its dissolution.
As a poetic personality, U. possesses, in comparison with Kerner and even with the Heidelberg Romantics, less originality, but this is compensated not only by a broader culture and greater literary expertise, but also by the discovery of a new tone that characterizes his lyric poetry: a tone indeed drawn from the example of medieval German poetry, but reaccepted in a key of singular objectivity, that is, of deliberate and achieved impersonality. Hence the realistic and narrative character of U.’s poetry, expressed especially in the famous ballads and romances. In them scarcely any movement of the earlier practitioners of the genre, who nevertheless include Bürger, Schiller, and Goethe (the latter, certainly, more present to his spirit than the others), comes back to life: U.’s ballads, populated by kings and queens, knights, monks, and shepherds, represent the new result of an unconstrained contact with the medieval German and European world (alongside the French troubadours, Spanish romances especially attracted him), as well as with contemporary life. The first edition of his Gedichte appeared in 1815. He also attempted the theatrical genre, writing, in addition to various fragments, two dramas: Ernst Herzog von Schwaben (1818) and Ludwig von Bayern (1819).