Saar, Ferdinand von (Vienna, 1833-1906, Döbling), descended from a line of civil servants, lost his father in infancy, and was brought up by his mother in his grandfather's house. At 16 he entered the Austrian Cadet School and was commissioned in the infantry in 1854. He saw active service in the campaign in North Italy in 1859, though his regiment was not engaged in the fighting. After the war he resigned in order to devote himself to literature, living in straitened circumstances for several years.

Saar's gifts are chiefly demonstrated in his numerous Novellen, some of which were published individually before being included in the two editions of Novellen aus Österreich (1877 and 1897), which also contain the collections Drei neue Novellen (1883, see Vae Victis!), Schicksale (1889), and Frauenbilder (1892). Later volumes are Herbstreigen (1896), containing Herr Fridolin und sein Glück, Ninon, and Requiem der Liebe; Nachklänge (1899) includes poems as well as the stories Doktor Trojan, Conte Gasparo, and Sündenfall; Camera obscura (1901) contains eight stories, Die Brüder, Die Parzen, Der Burggraf, Der Brauer von Habrovan, Außer Dienst, Die Heirat des Herrn Stäubl, Der Hellene, and Dissonanzen; the last collection, Tragik des Lebens (1906), consists of the four stories Die Familie Worel, Sappho, Hymen, and Die Pfründner. Eine Wiener Geschichte. Saar's fiction embraces a wide-ranging social conspectus, reflecting the tensions of the post-revolutionary monarchy as it approaches the fin de siècle and justifying his claim that each story represents a piece of Austrian contemporary history (Zeitgeschichte).

Like many writers of the 19th c., Saar nourished a persistent ambition to write successfully for the stage, but his plays were repeatedly turned down by Viennese management, Thassilo (1885) being withdrawn by the Burgtheater after the first rehearsal. This and the earlier Kaiser Heinrich IV (1867), a play in two parts (Hildebrand and Heinrichs Tod, both consisting of five acts), are wholly, and Die beiden de Witt (1874) partly, in verse; Tempesta (1880), a five-act tragedy, is set in North Italy in the 17th c.; Eine Wohltat (1887), a four-act Volksdrama which has as its background the Austrian mountains was produced in the Burgtheater on 14 December 1903 to celebrate Saar's seventieth birthday, but it was not able to maintain a place in the repertoire. His lyric poetry was collected in 1881 as Gedichte (expanded 1888), and his elegies, Wiener Elegien, appeared in 1893. Saar wrote two verse epics, Die Pincelliade (1897), a comic erotic poem in ottava rima set in Vienna in the time of Maria Theresia, and Hermann und Dorothea (1902), a sequel to Goethe's poem of the same title. Although it employs the same classical metre, it is only a pale shadow of its model (see Hermann und Dorothea).

In his later life Saar enjoyed happier conditions, being given a permanent invitation to stay at the mansion of the princely family of Salm-Reifferscheidt in Blansko. Princess Marie zu Hohenlohe and the Princess von Sayn Wittgenstein were among his patrons. Saar married in 1881, but his ailing wife committed suicide in 1884. He spent his last years in and near Vienna; he put an end to his life with his revolver while suffering from cancer.

Sämtliche Werke (12 vols.), ed. J. Minor, appeared in 1909, Gesamtausgabe des erzählerischen Werkes (4 vols.), ed. J. F. Fuchs, in 1959-62.

(fĕr'dēnänt fən zär) , 1833–1906, Austrian writer. His best works are his short stories, among them the two collections (1876, 1897) of Novellen aus Österreich [tales from Austria]. Saar was of the decadent school, and the people he portrayed were generally weak failures. Some of his later writings place him with the more sympathetic naturalists.

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