Conrad Ferdinand Meyer

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (Zurich, 1825 - Kilchberg, 1898) was a Swiss poet and novelist who wrote in German, although his childhood unfolded between two languages and his years abroad took him through France and Italy. Working in the second half of the nineteenth century, he is remembered above all for his historical novels and his narrative ballads, in which the drama of the past is told with great concentration.

He came from an old patrician family in Zurich. His father, a historian, died when Conrad was still young, and his mother was a woman of considerable learning. As a child he showed an almost scrupulous attention to neatness and cleanliness, and a tendency to live more in memory than in the present. He suffered episodes of mental illness that sometimes required hospital care; his mother, who had a similar but more severe condition, took her own life. He spent time in Geneva and Lausanne, where he absorbed French literature. He began to study law, but depression interrupted his studies, and he turned to history, which he came to know thoroughly. He worked as a translator and travelled to Paris in 1857 and to Rome in 1858, where Michelangelo's art struck him deeply. The historians Louis Vulliemin and Jacob Burckhardt shaped his view of the past.

For years he hesitated between French and German. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 settled the matter in favour of German culture, and in 1871 he published Hutten's Last Days, a short epic that made his sympathies plain. His first volume of poems had appeared in 1867, but his novel-writing came later, and in 1875 he settled at Kilchberg. His novels, mostly set in the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation, pair careful research with close psychological portraits, and he avoids projecting the present onto the past. A great crisis often unleashes hidden forces, and the hero, faced with overwhelming temptation, loses his moral freedom. His lyric poetry is far more personal.

His collected works appeared in eight volumes in 1912. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich in 1880 and died at his home in Kilchberg in 1898, aged 73. Today he is remembered chiefly for his ballads and for historical fiction that revisits the religious and political conflicts of early modern Europe.