Nikolaus Lenau

Nikolaus Lenau was the nom de plume of Nikolaus Franz Niembsch Edler von Strehlenau (25 August 1802 – 22 August 1850), a German-language Austrian poet.

He was born at Schadat, now Lenauheim, Banat, then in Hungary, now Romania. His father, a Habsburg government official, died in 1807 in Budapest, leaving his children in the care of their mother, who remarried in 1811. In 1819 Nikolaus went to the University of Vienna; he subsequently studied Hungarian law at Pozsony (Bratislava) and then spent the next four years qualifying himself in medicine. Unable to settle down to any profession, he began writing verse. The disposition to sentimental melancholy inherited from his mother, stimulated by disappointments in love and by the prevailing fashion of the romantic school of poetry, descended into gloom after his mother's death in 1829.

Soon afterwards, however, a legacy from his grandmother enabled him to devote himself wholly to poetry. His first published poems appeared in 1827, in Johann Gabriel Seidl's Aurora. In 1831 he moved to Stuttgart, where he published a volume of Gedichte (1832) dedicated to the Swabian poet, Gustav Schwab. He also made the acquaintance of Ludwig Uhland, Justinus Kerner, Karl Mayer and others. His restless spirit longed for change, and he determined to seek peace and freedom in America.

In October 1832 he landed at Baltimore and settled on a homestead in Ohio. He also lived six months in New Harmony, Indiana, with a group called the Harmony Society. Life in the primeval forest fell lamentably short of the ideal he had pictured. He disliked Americans with their eternal English lisping of dollars (englisches Talergelispel), and in 1833 returned to Germany. The appreciation of his first volume of poems revived his spirits.

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