Christian Dietrich Grabbe (December 11, 1801 – September 12, 1836) was a German dramatist.

Born in Detmold

Detmold

Detmold is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, with a population of about 74,000. It was the capital of the small Principality of Lippe from 1468 until 1918 and then of the Free State of Lippe until 1947...

, Lippe

Principality of Lippe

Lippe was a historical state in Germany. It was located between the Weser River and the southeast part of the Teutoburg forest.-History:...

, he wrote many historical plays and is also known for his use of satire and irony

Irony

Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...

. He suffered from an unhappy marriage. Heinrich Heine

Heinrich Heine

Christian Johann Heinrich Heine was one of the most significant German poets of the 19th century. He was also a journalist, essayist, and literary critic. He is best known outside Germany for his early lyric poetry, which was set to music in the form of Lieder by composers such as Robert Schumann...

 saw him as one of Germany's foremost dramatists, calling him "a drunken Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

".

With Georg Büchner

Georg Büchner

Karl Georg Büchner was a German dramatist and writer of poetry and prose. He was the brother of physician and philosopher Ludwig Büchner. Büchner's talent is generally held in great esteem in Germany...

, Grabbe was one of the principal German dramatists of his time. He was influenced by Shakespeare and the Sturm und Drang

Sturm und Drang

Sturm und Drang is a proto-Romantic movement in German literature and music taking place from the late 1760s through the early 1780s, in which individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in reaction to the perceived constraints of rationalism...

 dramatists. His plays were very ambitious, with crowd scenes and rapid scene changes that challenged the technical capacity of the theaters of the time. He loosened the strict forms of the classicl drama in a loose series of scenes that were a precursor of the realist drama. His plays reveal a disillusioned and pessimistic world view, with some shrill scenes.

After his death, he was at first forgotten, but his work was rediscovered by the Naturalist

Naturalism (theatre)

Naturalism is a movement in European drama and theatre that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It refers to theatre that attempts to create a perfect illusion of reality through a range of dramatic and theatrical strategies: detailed, three-dimensional settings Naturalism is a...

 and Expressionist

Expressionism

Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...

 dramatists. He was honored by the Nazis as a great national author, partly based on a few anti-semitic statements, (particularly in Aschenbrödel) and partly based on his nationalistic portrayal of German history, (Die Hermannsschlacht). In the 1930s, numerous streets were named after him.

Detmold

Detmold

Detmold is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, with a population of about 74,000. It was the capital of the small Principality of Lippe from 1468 until 1918 and then of the Free State of Lippe until 1947...

 awards the Christian-Dietrich-Grabbe Prize for new dramatic literature since 1994 in association with the Grabbe-Gesellschaft and the Landesverband Lippe.

Works

Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefere Bedeutung (1827)

Herzog Theodor von Gotland (1827)

Don Juan und Faust (1829)

Die Hohenstauffen (1829/30)

Napoleon oder Die Hundert Tage (1831)

Hannibal (1835)

Die Hermannsschlacht (1838)