Conrad Ferdinand Meyer

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825-1898), Swiss poet and writer of historical tales, generally considered Switzerland’s greatest literary artist next to Gottfried Keller. Meyer was born in Zürich, Switzerland, to a Protestant family. Both his parents were afflicted with neurasthenia, and Meyer himself showed early signs of a nervous disorder that later impeded both his personal growth and his development as an artist. For years he wavered in his choice of a career, considering law, painting, teaching, but in 1860 he finally settled on writing.

Meyer's career is unusual in that his artistic development came relatively late in life—his creative period began when he was 45 years old and ended twenty years later, when his nervous condition forced him to stop writing. The art of Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo and the theology of French Protestant theologian John Calvin were of great importance in his development, and for the material of his stories he drew almost exclusively from the Renaissance and Reformation periods. Against this rich and violent background he presented his interpretations of great historical characters and of moral problems posed by the apparent injustice of events. Infused with symbolism and psychological insight, Meyer’s work is distinguished by a remarkable economy of language and a religious sensibility that is unmistakably Protestant in nature.

Perhaps the best known of Meyer’s stories is Der Heilige (The Holy One, 1879), which concerns the English martyr Saint Thomas à Becket. Das Leiden eines Knaben (The Suffering of a Boy, 1883), the story of a noble but mentally retarded boy, is Meyer’s most thematically modern work and also the most personal of his writings. The long poem Huttens letzte Tage (Hutten’s Last Days, 1871) reflects Meyer's sympathy with the rising German nationalism of his day.