Däubler, Theodor (Trieste, 1876-1934, St Blasien), spent part of his youth in Venice and was bilingual in German and Italian. He served as a one-year officer cadet in the Austrian army (1898), and thereafter led a restless life in the great art centres of Europe (Paris, Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, Vienna, Dresden, and Berlin) and was an early protagonist of Expressionist painting and sculpture (F. Marc and E. Barlach). His far-ranging journeys took him not only to Switzerland, Sicily, and Greece, but to North Africa and the Levant. In middle and later life he visited the countries of western Europe, including Great Britain, and was noted as a lecturer on art. He contracted tuberculosis, but died of a stroke at a sanatorium in the Black Forest. Däubler published nothing before 1910. Nevertheless he wrote much poetry, ranging from an epic, through lofty odes and visionary hymns, to simple, dreamlike nature poems. His often obscure but metrically disciplined verse in classical forms aims at communicating his cosmogony, the envisaged reunion of man (the earth) with God (Geist, the sun); he explains it in the preamble to his revised edition of Nordlicht (1910), Selbstdeutung (Genfer Ausgabe, 1921-2). Other collections include the epic Das Nordlicht (1910), Oden und Gesänge (1913), Hesperien (1915), Der sternhelle Weg (1915), Hymne an Italien (1916), Die Treppe zum Nordlicht (1920), Päan und Dithyrambos (1924), and Attische Sonette (1924). He also wrote autobiographical fragments (Wir wollen nicht verweilen, 1914), two novels (L'Africana, 1928; Die Göttin mit der Fackel, 1931), and a large number of essays, including art criticism. Barlach, a perceptive friend of the stockily built Däubler, made of him in 1929 a monumental wood-carving entitled ‘Ruhender Däubler’.
The Oxford Companion to German Literature. Copyright © 1976, 1986, 1997, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
