Joseph von Eichendorff

Born into an aristocratic family that fell into financial hardship, Baron Joseph von Eichendorff was born in the late 18th century in a Silesian castle and died in 1857 in Nysa. In his youth, he became acquainted with contemporary Romantic poets and writers such as Müller, Brentano, Arnim, and Kleist. Although he was compelled to work throughout his life as an employee of the Austrian state services, his literary work is rich and includes novels ("Foreboding and Present," "The Poets and Their Companions"), short stories ("The Castle of Dürande"), novellas ("The Marble Statue"), essays on the history of literature, autobiographical texts, and especially poems and collections of romances and lieder, a genre in which he particularly excelled, inspiring composers like Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, and others. However, in the history of German literature, he is remembered as the author of the novella "From the Life of a Good-for-Nothing," a work characterized as the quintessence of German Romanticism.