Carl Spitteler

Carl Spitteler (Liestal, 1845 - Lucerne, 1924) was a Swiss writer working in German, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1919. His output moves between epic poetry, prose and the essay, and it runs against the dominant currents of his day, which is why he stands apart in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German-language letters.

He was born into a family of civil servants; his father served as Federal Secretary of the Treasury from 1849 to 1856. He was schooled in Basel, where his teachers included the philologist Wilhelm Wackernagel and the historian Jacob Burckhardt. He began with law at Zurich and then turned to theology, but he turned down a pastorate because he had come to see his real calling as an epic poet. Between 1871 and 1879 he worked as a tutor in Russia, with some spells in Finland, and later taught in elementary schools in Bern and La Neuveville while writing for the press. In 1885 he left teaching to devote himself to journalism in Basel.

His first major work was Prometheus and Epimetheus, an allegorical prose poem published in 1881 under the pseudonym Carl Felix Tandem. Verse collections, ballads and stories followed, among them Friedli, der Kalderi (1891), and the long epic he wrote between 1900 and 1905, Olympian Spring, in iambic hexameters. His style blends the fantastic, the mythological and the naturalistic, and his themes circle around the relation between human beings and the universe. In prose, the autobiographical novel Imago (1906) uses interior monologue to probe the unconscious in the clash between a creative mind and middle-class constraints.

During the First World War he criticised the pro-German sympathies of much of the German-speaking Swiss public, setting out his position in the essay "Unser Schweizer Standpunkt". He died in Lucerne in 1924, the same year his reworked Prometheus appeared under his real name. His papers are held in archives in Bern, Zurich and Liestal. Today he is read mainly as a bridge between epic poetry and the psychology of the twentieth century, not least through Jung's engagement with his work and the choice of his novel's title for a psychoanalytic journal.