Gottfried August Bürger

Gottfried August Bürger was born in 1747 in a village of the Harz, the son of a pastor. He studied theology, then law at Göttingen, took a post as a country magistrate that he held for ten years without ever being good at it, and wrote at night.

In 1773 he published Lenore, a ballad of two hundred and fifty lines in which a bride sees the soldier she has been waiting for return at midnight. Its success crossed Europe: the ballad was translated, imitated, set to music, and the first text Walter Scott published was a version of it. Bürger had given the new Romantic movement its most effective form, the folk song raised to the rank of poetry.

His private life and his reputation came apart afterwards. A savage review by Schiller in 1791 finished what three unhappy marriages and his debts had begun. He taught at Göttingen without a salary, translated, gave Germany its version of the adventures of Baron Munchausen, and died of tuberculosis in 1794, at forty-six.