ABSTRACT

Looking at this era from the standpoint of writers and their works, one is struck by how many authors rapidly fell into obscurity between the 1848 revolution and World War I, despite having been among the most widely-read in their own day. The Nobel prizewinner Paul Heyse and the ‘national’ writers Gustav Freytag and Ernst von Wildenbruch would all fall into this category. The question this poses in terms of arriving at a comprehensive assessment of the literature of that time revolves around the texts that may be deemed representative of an era: those acclaimed from the perspective of the era itself (and possibly written against it), or those that really captured the attention, and with which a broad reading public was able to identify.