Gottfried Keller

Born in Zürich on 19 July 1819, Gottfried Keller was the son of Rudolf Keller, a master turner from the village of Glattfelden who died of tuberculosis in 1824, leaving his widow Elisabeth to raise the boy and his sister Regula in poverty. In 1834, not yet fifteen, he was expelled from the cantonal Industrieschule after being named ringleader of a pupils' demonstration against an unpopular teacher, and his formal schooling ended there. He resolved to become a landscape painter and in 1840 went to Munich on a small inheritance; two years later, ill, in debt and having sold much of his work to a junk dealer, he came home penniless. Back in Zürich he turned to verse, publishing his first Gedichte in 1846, and in 1848 a travel stipend from the cantonal government took him to Heidelberg, where evenings in the company of the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach led him away from his inherited faith. He moved on to Berlin in 1850 for what was meant to be a year and stayed more than five, sinking deeper into debt while he wrote Green Henry, the autobiographical novel of a failed painter that appeared in four volumes in 1854 and 1855, and the first volume of The People of Seldwyla (1856), novellas set in an imaginary Swiss small town that include A Village Romeo and Juliet. In 1861 he was elected chief state secretary of the canton of Zürich and held the post until 1876, writing little while in office. Success came late: Seven Legends (1872), the Zurich Novellas, The Epigram (1881), his Collected Poems (1883) and the political novel Martin Salander (1886), while in 1879 and 1880 he rewrote Green Henry from beginning to end. He never married; his fiancée, the pianist Luise Scheidegger, took her own life in 1866. He died in Zürich on 15 July 1890, four days before his seventy-first birthday.

In September 1861 Zürich elected Keller its chief state secretary. On the eve of his first day he joined a gathering at the Schwan inn, where Ferdinand Lassalle was staging a séance with the poet Georg Herwegh as medium, went for both men with a chair and was thrown out. Next morning a government councillor fetched him from his bed.