Grün, Anastasius, pseudonym of Anton Alexander, Graf von Auersperg (Laibach, Austria, now Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1806-76, Graz). It is the name by which he is generally known. He was at school in Vienna, and studied law at Graz and Vienna universities. In 1830 he published a volume of love poetry, Blätter der Liebe, which bore his true name. The first work to appear under his pseudonym was Der letzte Ritter (1830), a cycle of poems written in the Nibelungenstrophe, making up a kind of epic on the career of the Emperor Maximilian I, the ‘last knight’ of the title.

The political and satirical collection, Spaziergänge eines Wiener Poeten (1831), written in the same metre, is aimed at the repressiveness of the Metternich regime. Auersperg, whose father had died in 1818, took over his estates in 1831. For the rest of his life he lived primarily at his castle of Thurn in Carniola (Krain), developing and cultivating his vineyards and forests, and embellishing his park. He married a lady of his own rank in 1839. His pseudonym, which was necessary as a protection against the secret police, was used again for Schutt (1835), a cycle of long romances in four-line stanzas rhyming in couplets, which looked forward to a new Austria rising from the rubble of the early 19th c. The identity of Auersperg and Grün being eventually discovered, he had some trouble with the censorship and abandoned political poetry. His lyrical poems (Gedichte) were published in 1837. He travelled abroad, visiting England in winter (November 1837) and hastily retiring from the fogs.

After some years of silence Grün published a comic epic in the Nibelungenstrophe, Nibelungen im Frack (1842), which has an eccentric Duke of Merseburg of the early 18th c. as its central figure. In 1848 he was a member of the National Assembly (see Frankfurter Nationalversammlung), from which, however, he resigned. Another comic epic, Der Pfaff von Kahlenberg, retells the amusing exploits of the 14th-c. Pfaffe von Kalenberg (see Frankfurter, P.). It is in Knittelverse. The death of N. Lenau in 1850 ended a friendship which had lasted more than twenty years.

In his later years Auersperg (Grün still retained this name) was prominent in Austrian politics, being a member of the Reichsrat in 1860, a member of the House of Lords (Herrenhaus) in 1861, and president of the Reichsrat delegation in 1868. He published only one more poetic work, the poems In der Veranda (1876). He translated Slovenian folk-poetry of his home region (Volkslieder aus Krain, 1850) and English ballads (Robin Hood, 1864).

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