Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse was a German writer, poet and playwright. He was born in Berlin, son of Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Heyse and Julie Salomon, a distant relative of Felix Mendelssohn's mother. He trained in Berlin and Bonn, where he studied classical languages. After graduating in Romance Philology he spent several months in Italy, particularly in Naples, Rome and Venice. Later, he translated several Italian poems, bringing the works of Foscolo, Leopardi and Manzoni to the vast German-speaking public. Polyglot, he translated many works also from Spanish and from English, in particular Shakespeare. A very prolific author, he wrote dramas and other theatrical works and several novels, of which the most famous is Kinder der Welt (1873). His novels also met with great success and they met the favor of the international public.
In Berlin he was a member of the poetic circle Tunnel über der Spree, while in Munich he was part, with Emanuel Geibel del Krokodil (Crocodile). Protagonist of cultural life at the court of Maximilian II of Bavaria, he began to separate himself in the '60s of the' 800, by virtue of his Filoprussian feelings. He was in fact a supporter of Bismarck and of its national reunification policy.
I publish novels, stories, poems and about sixty dramas. The variety of his works made him one of the leading figures of German literature at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so much that he obtained the Nobel Prize for literature in 1910.