Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825–1898)

Meyer wrote his first poems while in secondary school. By 1860, his oeuvre numbered 100 poems and he was determined to become a poet. Twenty Ballads of a Swiss Man (Zwanzig Balladen von einem Schweizer) was published – anonymously – in Stuttgart in 1864.

As characteristics of his early poems, Meyer cited his ‘resignation, which grew out of his inner struggles as a youth and loved loneliness’ and his ‘sense of justice’, which he inherited from his father, ‘strengthened through long and solid studies of history’.

He expanded his collection from 192 poems (1882) to 231 (1892). He drew on ‘The Huguenot’ (‘Der Hugenot’) to develop his famous Reformation ballad ‘Feet in the fire’ (‘Die Füsse im Feuer’). Here, Meyer chews and spits his words and uses language to conjure up a threatening sense of tension, fear and a crisis of conscience:

«Fest riegelt er die Tür.
Er prüft Pistol und Schwert.
Gell pfeift der Sturm.
Die Diele bebt.
Die Decke stöhnt. 
Die Treppe kracht … 
Dröhnt hier ein Tritt? ...
Schleicht dort ein Schritt? …»

Browse through Meyer’s pictorial and thought-provoking early poetry in Twenty Ballads.

The publishing house Brockhaus in Leipzig rejected a work that subsequently became a success thanks to Hermann Haessel: Hutten’s Last Days (Huttens letzte Tage). Although Meyer had already published two volumes of poetry before 1871, he believed his first work to be his poem about the German humanist Ulrich von Hutten, who finds his last place of rest on the island of Ufenau on Lake Zurich and sees his whole life pass by in a ghostly manner.

The work was influenced by Meyer’s impression of his own melancholy mood, the ‘landscape that reminded him of his homeland and spoke to his soul’ that he experienced as a hiker, rower and swimmer, and the major events of the time, namely the founding of the German Empire. Eleven editions of Hutten’s Last Days were published during Meyer’s lifetime, earning him the name ‘Huttenmeyer’.

 The first version of his second verse epic, Engelberg, was published in 1872.

The Leipzig-based family newspaper Daheim opted not to serialise the short story The Amulet (Das Amulet). Meyer’s first novel, ultimately published by Haessel, revolves around the Bartholomew’s Night of 24 August 1572 and is not short on entanglements and bloody details. According to Karl Fehr, it anticipates the style of condensed cinematic sequences.

The nameless, fictional editor translates the notes of the Protestant soldier Hans Schadau, who served under the admiral and Huguenot leader Gaspard de Coligny. It focuses on a Catholic fetish that ironically saves the unbeliever. The blue-eyed, blonde Gasparde serves as a love interest.

The adventurous twist of fate also puts its readers to the test. Literary scholars have identified people, places and constellations from Meyer’s stay in Welschland in the 1850s and referred to the ‘Kulturkampf’ cultural clash in Switzerland.

In the summer of 1875, Meyer sent the love poem ‘A double life, two sails’ (‘Ein doppeltes Leben, zwei Segel’) to his fiancée, Louise Ziegler. He had composed it five years earlier under the title ‘Evening image’ (‘Abendbild’). A revised version appeared in his 1882 collection of poems: once again, he allowed his literary creation to mature with his experience.

Zwei Segel erhellend
Die tiefblaue Bucht!
Zwei Segel sich schwellend
Zu ruhiger Flucht!  

Wie eins in den Winden
Sich wölbt und bewegt,
Wird auch das Empfinden
Des andern erregt.

Begehrt eins zu hasten,
Das andre geht schnell,
Verlangt eins zu rasten,
Ruht auch sein Gesell.

Take Anna von Doss’ advice to heart and read Meyer’s poems aloud to hear ‘the music of the words alongside the loftiness of thought, the depth of feeling’.

The Swiss composer Paul Burkhard, who became famous with ‘O mein Papa’ (1939), set Meyer’s poems ‘Two sails’ and the ‘Song of the reapers’ (‘Schnitterlied’) to music for mezzo-soprano.

In the 1860s, Meyer decided to create a literary work about Colonel Jenatsch, the saviour of Graubünden, that straddled the boundary between drama and novella. In 1874, he presented his ‘Tale from the Thirty Years’ War’, as the subtitle put it, in the weekly magazine Die Literatur. The eponymous hero of the novel was called Georg Jenatsch until its third edition (1882).

Meyer diligently studied historical sources, chronicles and localities, but then took completely free rein with the material. In an unprinted preface, he exhorted his audience not to take historical fiction at face value.

A Rhaeto-Romanic translation in the magazine Il progress failed to meet with success in 1880/81 and was abandoned after 59 instalments – ‘too boring’, according to readers. In 1929, an expressionist setting by Heinrich Kaminski was published. Martin Suter wrote the screenplay for the film Jenatsch (1987).

Meyer wrote the humorous novella The Shot from the Pulpit (Der Schuss von der Kanzel) for the 1878 Zürcher Taschenbuch. This was his first work after his marriage – which is perhaps why it was so light-footed. The story of the entanglement surrounding the Zurich general Hans Rudolf Werdmüller, who wreaked havoc on the Au peninsula ‘like a kind of mountain spirit’, as Meyer puts it in a letter, is about passion and social barriers, progress and superstition.

Of course, Meyer’s Shot was compared to Gottfried Keller’s novella The Governor of Greifensee (‘Der Landvogt von Greifensee) from 1879. In a letter to Julius Rodenberg, Meyer stated that his daring Werdmüller seemed unfavourably baroque when compared to Keller’s splendid, capable Salomon Landolt.

The audience liked the humoresque and, six decades later, the dialect film adaptation by Leopold Lindtberg (1942) also received a positive reception. There is even a Bernese comedy in three acts by Adolf Schaer-Ris (1958).

What’s Plautus looking for in the nunnery? That’s not the right question to ask. In fact, the Florentine cardinal Poggio Bracciolini (1380−1459), a participant in the Council of Constance, was searching for a manuscript by the Roman classical author Plautus in Münsterlingen convent. The props also include two near-identical wooden crosses, which are worshipped as relics.

From this, Meyer conjures up an amusing satire about an unhappily-in-love mule driver, a crafty and vulgar abbess, a novice plagued by pangs of conscience, and the aforementioned devious Bracciolini, who is also the first-person narrator. Since the focus is on a woman, he originally called the Renaissance novella Bridget of Trogen (Das Brigittchen von Trogen).

Renunciation of the world and the hypocrisy hidden behind monastery walls were sources of provocation for the Reformed poet, who often thought about his works in parallel. In 1880, he published The Saint (Der Heilige) about Thomas Becket, and in 1884 The Monk’s Wedding (Die Hochzeit des Mönchs). The Gentle Abolition of the Monastery (Die sanfte Klosteraufhebung) (1882–1891) remained unfinished.

The Leubelfing Page (Pagen Leubelfing) from the preprint of 1882 became Gustav Adolf’s Page (Gustav Adolfs Page) in 1883. We can see that it is only possible to understand the fate of the protagonist Leubelfing if you consider his dependence on his master, the Swedish king – and vice versa.

The life of the two is fatefully linked to Gustav Adolf’s enemies Wallenstein and von Lauenburg. The plot leads us to the inevitable showdown on the battlefield near Lützen, which we can also read about in a history book from Meyer’s library. But he imbued the historical event with his own interpretation and a surprising twist – which caused him trouble with the descendants of the real page Leubelfing.

In 1924, Meyer’s work inspired Theodor Walther to create a tragedy in five acts. In 1960, the novella was adapted for the big screen with Liselotte Pulver and Curt Jürgens.

‘I hope that this will be my best work,’ Meyer told Anna von Doss in 1885 when he summarised the plot of his tragic novella The Judge (Die Richterin).

The tale revolves around two Rhaetian women: 15-year-old Palma, who is wooed by Graciosus and adores her half-brother Wulfrin, and her mother Stemma, the proud judge and doctor of Malmort, who is said to have murdered her husband.

The vividly and poetically narrated novella revolves around this suspicion, with no shortage of intrigue: forced marriage, poisoning, family estrangement, infatuation, captivity, ominous dream images, dark secrets… Passion and guilt bubble beneath the surface of discipline and virtue – like the underground stream that gnaws at Malmort Castle Hill.

The motive of brotherly love did not please everyone. Sigmund Freud also explored the work in greater detail.

After a four-year hiatus, Meyer – supported by his sister Betsy Meyer – published Angela Borgia, a novella set in Ferrara and in the Renaissance, in 1891. The eponymous character is a virtuous woman with her head in the clouds, who is at the centre of a political and personal intrigue. Her counterpart is the demonic, manipulative Lucrezia, a woman with a scandalous past and no conscience.

The Austrian writer Rudolf Greinz praised Meyer’s virtuosity in 1895, saying that he was not only a poet, but also a psychologist and able to bring us much closer to human nature than the cool-headed historian with his sober records. According to the publisher Haessel, the pious women in Meyer’s social circle were horrified by the story of femme fatale Lucrezia.

Angela Borgia would be Meyer’s last publication, although he was simultaneously working on the drama Petrus Vinea about Frederick II and on the novella The Toggenburg Dynasty (Der Dynast von Toggenburg).

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s father, the historian and cantonal councillor Ferdinand Meyer, died when he was 15 years old. His mother, Elisabeth Meyer née Ulrich (1802–1856), is described by biographers as strictly religious, witty, ‘as if she were a throwback to the times of Schiller and Goethe’, according to Adolf Frey, but overwhelmed as a widow bringing up her children alone.

Her letters to her two children reveal her melancholy and domineering traits. In 1856, she decided to commit suicide. ‘I shudder at myself – oh, All-Merciful, have mercy on me in the dark place to which I now descend,’ she wrote in her suicide note.

While most 20th-century biographers declared Meyer a hero fated to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders, they squarely blamed his mother for his life-threatening crises. In 1998, a social pedagogue and a political scientist painted a picture of a highly gifted, charitable and sensitive woman and mother amidst a patriarchal society.

Six years younger and never married, Betsy Meyer (1831–1912) was for many years her brother’s closest confidant, housekeeper, secretary and assistant. As Bruno Weber put it, she ‘admired, inspired, stimulated, cared for, criticised, listened to, tried to understand’ him for her whole life.

She studied painting and also had a gift for languages. People in need were particularly close to her heart. In 1858, she travelled with Meyer to Rome and Florence, and in 1863, she brokered a publication contract for his early ballads in Stuttgart. Letters and her handwriting on countless drafts and copies prove that she wrote with him and for him.

Her brother’s marriage ended this deep-seated unity, but not Betsy Meyer’s interest in his work, her publishing correspondence and her commitment to his fame. At the age of 72, she published her idiosyncratic Recollections (Erinnerungen) of her brother.

Cécile Borrel (1815–1894) from Neuchâtel was one of five women known by name with whom Meyer fell – unhappily – in love. He met her in 1852 when he was being treated for depressive moods at the Préfargier Mental Hospital.

Meyer had dropped out of law school, was feuding with his mother, unemployed, introverted. Borrel proved to be an understanding, successful therapist, as her reports after Zurich show. The patient not only stabilised and discovered what to do with his career (studying and teaching French), but also fell in love with the ‘angel’.

The love letters he sent her from Lausanne were edited in 1913. The conversation of July 1853, in which his mother successfully suggested to the ‘inexperienced’ Cécile Borrel that the relationship be broken off, was not recorded.

Lena F. Dahme, who studied Meyer’s real and fictitious women in detail, compared the novice Angela in the narrative poem Engelberg to Borrel.

According to a letter to his concerned mother, 27-year-old Meyer’s question to Mr van der Mülen in Lausanne – ‘Give me the little patrician girl!’ – was only asked half-heartedly. He was referring to the 14-year-old Bern native Constance von Rodt (1839–1858) and was responding, on the one hand, to the man’s fulsome praise of his granddaughter, and, on the other hand, to friends from western Switzerland who wanted to matchmake.

In September 1853, he met ‘the little one’, who probably had no idea that she had been chosen, for the first time. Her humble, good-natured manner seems to have pleased him, but in letters to his family and to Cécile Borrel, he reverted to his bachelor tendencies after their meeting.

Constance von Rodt fell ill and died at the young age of 19. She is, as Meyer himself revealed, the dead woman, who died young and chaste, whom he addressed in 1870 in the Romances and Images (Romanzen und Bildern) and later in ‘Votive gift’ (‘Weihgeschenk’). Irritated by the public’s suspicions, he asked his publisher, according to a letter to Julius Rodenberg, to omit these two poems from the new edition.

Meyer, like Gottfried Keller, had a childhood sweetheart who died young: Clelia Weydmann (1837–1866). The daughter of a St. Gallen merchant, she was, according to her relatives, intelligent, amiable and profound, but not at all – as Adolf Frey reported – melancholy.

Meyer fell in love with Clelia Weydmann when he met her in Zurich in 1858. He was not an ideal candidate for marriage, as he had no profession and no clear future, which he finally understood after ‘hellish torments’, as he wrote to his sister. It was a turning point: he decided to finally lean into his artistic side.

None of Clelia Weydmann’s original responses to Meyer’s overtures have survived. She died at the tender age of 30 as a result of an operation. Literary critics have identified several poems as being related to her, including ‘The forest path’ (‘Der Waldweg’), ‘Trudging’ (‘Stapfen’), ‘Sheet lightning’ (‘Wetterleuchten’), ‘Lethe’ (‘Lethe’), ‘To a dead woman’ (‘Einer Toten’).

In 1871, Meyer met the charismatic, Munich-born Anna von Doss née Wepfer (1834–1913) at an illustrious Pentecost gathering hosted by François and Eliza Wille on the Mariafeld estate in Meilen. The meeting was no coincidence: Wille had read to her from the as-yet-unpublished Hutten, whereupon she requested to be seated next to Meyer. On a walk, the two revelled in their enthusiasm for ‘German thought’ and ‘German feeling’, for poetry and Paul Heyse.

During her subsequent visits to Kilchberg, von Doss, now widowed, remembered every little thing, every snippet of dialogue. Everything Meyer wrote delighted her. He praised her liveliness of feeling and felt ‘close to her and a true affinity with her’ – not least because she was no longer a young woman. There is not a single cross word in their letters.

The lively memoirs of Meyer by Anna von Doss were published in part in 1963. Her summary of Angela Borgia is particularly delectable. According to Lena F. Dahme, she is similar to Viktoria Colonna in The Temptation of Pescara (Die Versuchung des Pescara).

In 1875, the 50-year-old poet married Louise Ziegler (1837–1915), who was 12 years younger than him. The daughter of a federal colonel, she was passionate about landscape painting – and came with hefty financial resources.

Opinions about her influence on Meyer differ. ‘My wife, with her simple military habits and her very natural manner, is quite soothing for me,’ Meyer said in 1884, according to Alfred Zäch. Anna von Doss was disappointed when the poet’s muse, in her eyes, turned out to be a ‘dumpy, old-fashioned, girlish wench.’ Adolf Frey, whose biography, if Louise Meyer had had her way, would not have been published, stated that ‘his engagement with art would have ceased sooner without her diligent care’.

The relationship between the ‘mistrustful’ wife and Betsy Meyer was often portrayed as a ‘cat fight’, the melancholy Meyer as the victim of three manipulative women. Is it not time to call the gossip of their contemporaries into question and look at the situation impartially?

Meyer was 54 years old when his daughter Camilla Elisabeth (1879–1936) was born. Ominously, he wrote in a letter to Friedrich von Wyss: ‘The child looks remarkably like me externally. If she looks much like me internally, her life won’t be easy.’ ‘Little Milly’, about whom he often wrote in his letters, also makes an appearance in his poems, such as ‘After the first mountain ascent’ (‘Nach der ersten Bergfahrt’).

Camilla Meyer’s sad, questioning eyes are unmistakable in photos. When the poet had his major breakdown in 1892, she was just transitioning from schoolgirl to house-daughter. She was described by contemporaries as well educated, amiable and sickly, and she too was gifted in drawing.

After the death of her mother and her aunt, Camilla Meyer took over the publishing correspondence and the management of the poet’s estate. In 1916, she married the farmer and ‘bon viveur’ Willem van Vloten, but divorced him a year later. On 16 October 1936, like her grandmother, she committed suicide by drowning.

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer knew the popular children’s author Johanna Spyri (1829–1901) back when she was called Hanni Heusser, because their mothers were friends. After her marriage, Spyri was a member of Meyer’s mother’s pietist social circle. Despite all their differences, the memories of their youth lent a familiar tone to their later interactions – even though they used the formal German ‘Sie’ when communicating.

Meyer sought Spyri’s literary advice from 1882 onwards, even though he knew that she was a believer in the power of the first draft. According to a letter to Louise von François, he appreciated her clarity, cleverness and devotion to Goethe. ‘I rate Heidi II very highly,’ he told Spyri, ‘creating something so naive, so radiant, so happy with so little material is not something just anyone could do.’ She, in turn, wrote to him that his books always elevate her ‘to another world, above all the adversities of everyday life, for a long while.’ Their correspondence from 1877 to 1897 was edited in 1977.

Between 1881 and 1891, Meyer corresponded with the German novelist Louise von François (1817–1893) in Weissenfels. The impoverished, unmarried noblewoman from a Huguenot family made a living from her writing and in 1871 gained renown in Switzerland, too, with her family novel The Last Reckenburger (Die letzte Reckenburgerin).

‘My brother loved women full of character; he sought that incorruptible judgement that emerged from a pure, sound mind,’ Betsy Meyer recalled in a letter. Her brother talked to Louise von François about his plots and characters, new books and his ‘Christianity against his will’. Like his interactions with Johanna Spyri, he was interested in a witty literary exchange, in sharpening his own pen and his thoughts.

Their correspondence was first published in 1905, although Meyer had spoken out against this in 1894.