Gottfried Keller (1819 - 1890)
Gottfried Keller was a novelist, poet, and statesman. He was born in 1819 in Zurich. His father died when Gottfried was only five years old. For performing a small prank, Keller was expelled from school at the age of 15.
Starting in 1834, Keller apprenticed with various landscape painters for eight years before switching to writing in 1942. He was still without a paying job.He associated with German political refugees and participated in demonstrations against Catholic leaders. These activities were reflected in his first published poems in 1846. These early works were very politically liberal.
From 1848 - 1850, the Zurich government sponsored Keller to go study at Heidelberg. Lectures of Ludwig Feuerbach, philosopher and atheist, seemed to influence some of Keller's later work. For example, Sieben Legenden (1872) was a work full of temptations during the early Christian era, particularly sexual ones. Impressed with his anti-romanticism, Nietzsche became a fan of Keller.
Even though the government funding stopped, Keller remained in Germany. Although his financial situation was tight, he studied at the University of Berlin 1850 - 1855. It was during this time period that Keller completed his first major work, Der Grüne Heinrich. Much of this piece was autobiographical, as the story depicts an artist who, after studying at Munich, discovers that there is no way he can make a good living as an artist. Keller ended up writing two versions of this story with very different endings. In the first ending, which Keller despised so much that he burned it, the artist dies of shame for having not taken care of his mother, who had done so much for him. In the second version, published in 1880, Keller changed the ending so that the artist lived. Another interesting difference between these two versions is that the first was written in third-person and the second in first-person.
In 1855, Keller returned to Zurich. He served as secretary for the canton from 1861 - 1876. In 1876, another of his famous books, Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe was published. This work adapted Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet's basic plot to make it more meaningful for the Swiss by altering the setting to a Swiss village.
Gottfried Keller died in 1890, having made a great contribution not just to Zurich or Switzerland, but to German Literature as a whole. He himself was an advocate for the concept that writers should remain within their language-speaking community and not divide into sections of nationality1.
Citations
(1) http://www.biblion.com/litweb/biogs/keller_gottfried.html
Other References
http://home.snafu.de/mcthree/literatur/biografien/keller.html
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/gkeller.htm
http://www.gottfriedkeller.ch/FRAMES.htm
