He was born at Schadat near Temeschwar in Hungary, now Lenauheim, Romania. His father, a Habsburg government official, died at Budapest in 1807, leaving his children in the care of their mother, who in 1811 married again. In 1819 Nikolaus went to the University of Vienna; he subsequently studied Hungarian law at Pozsony (Bratislava) and then spent the best part of four years in qualifying himself in medicine. Unable to settle down to any profession, he had already begun to write verse; and the disposition to sentimental melancholy inherited from his mother, stimulated by disappointments in love and by the prevailing fashion of the romantic school of poetry, descended into gloom after his mother's death in 1829.
Soon afterwards, a legacy from his grandmother enabled him to devote himself wholly to poetry. His first published poems appeared in 1827, in Johann Gabriel Seidl's
Aurora. In 1831 he went to Stuttgart, where he published a volume of
Gedichte (1832) dedicated to the Swabian poet, Gustav Schwab. Here he also made the acquaintance of Ludwig Uhland, Justinus Kerner, Karl Mayerl and others; but his restless spirit longed for change, and he determined to seek for peace and freedom in America.
In October 1832 he landed at Baltimore and settled on a homestead in Ohio. He also lived six months in New Harmony, Indiana, with a group called the Harmony Society. But the reality of life in the primeval forest fell lamentably short of the ideal he had pictured; he disliked the Americans with their eternal English lisping of dollars (
englisches Talergelispel); and in 1833 he returned to Germany, where the appreciation of his first volume of poems revived his spirits. From then on he lived partly in Stuttgart and partly in Vienna. In 1836 appeared his
Faust, in which he laid bare his own soul to the world; in 1837,
Savonarola, an epic in which freedom from political and intellectual tyranny is insisted upon as essential to Christianity. In 1838 his
Neuere Gedichte proved that
Savonarola had been the result of a passing exaltation. Of these new poems, some of the finest were inspired by his hopeless passion for Sophie von Löwenthal, the wife of a friend. In 1842 appeared
Die Albigenser, and in 1844 he began writing his
Don Juan, a fragment of which was published after his death. Soon afterwards his never well-balanced mind began to show signs of aberration, and in October 1844 he was placed under restraint (after jumping out of a window one morning and running down a street, while shouting "Revolt! Freedom! Help! Fire!" ) for the rest of his life. He died in the asylum at Oberdöbling near Vienna and was buried in the cemetery of Weidling, near Klosterneuburg. On his grave is the replica of an open book with an extract from one of his poems (
An Frau Kleyle) inscribed on the lefthand page, while on the righthand page there is the final stanza from his poem
Vergangenheit. The city of Stockerau in Lower Austria has proclaimed itself the "Lenau City", because Nikolaus Lenau went on extensive walks in the alluvial forests next to Stockerau and the Danube and was inspired to write one of his most famous lyric poems, "Schilflieder", during this time. He has various streets and squares named after him in Vienna and the surrounding area.
Lenau's fame rests mainly upon his shorter poems; even his epic are essentially lyric in quality. His excellent poem, "Herbst", expresses the sadness and melancholy he felt after his sojourn in the United States and his strenuous travels across the Atlantic to return to Europe. In it, he mourns the loss of youth, the passing of time and his own sense of futility. The poem is archetypal of Lenau's style and culminates with the speaker dreaming of death as a final escape from emptiness. He is the greatest modern lyric poet of Austria, and the typical representative in German literature of that pessimistic
Weltschmerz which, beginning with Lord Byron, reached its culmination in the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi.
Lenau's
Sämtliche Werke were first published in 4 vols. by Anastasius Grün (1855).
Other Sources
- E. Castle (2 vols., 1900).
- E. Castle, Lenau und die Familie Löwenthal (1906).
- L. A. Frankl, Ein Lenaus Biographie (1854, 2nd ed,, 1885).
- L. A. Frankl, Lenaus Tagebuch und Briefe an Sophie Löwenthal (1891).
- M. Koch, Krschner's Deutsche Nationalliteratur, vols. 154-155 (1888).
- A. Marchand, Les Počtes lyriques de l'Autriche (1881).
- L. Roustan, Lenau et son temps (1898).
- A. Schlossar, Lenaus Briefe an die Familie Reinbeck (1896).
- A. X. Schurz, Lenaus Leben, grosstenteils aus des Dichters eigenen Briefen (1855).
