Christian Morgenstern Correspondence Collection

Christian Otto Josef Wolfgang Morgenstern was born in Munich on May 6, 1871, as the son of the painter Carl Ernst Morgenstern and his wife Charlotte, née Schertel. He went to schools in Hamburg and in Breslau (today Wrocław, Poland), where he started to write his first verses and texts. In 1892 he enrolled at the University of Breslau, and he spent the summer semester 1893 in Munich, where he caught tuberculosis. In the fall he returned to Breslau, but his bad health forced him to end his university studies.

Up until this time he had been engaged in literature studies of his own, and when he moved to Berlin in 1894, he started working as a freelance writer, editor and journalist for newspapers, publishing his first volume of poems in 1895. In 1903, he returned to Berlin, where he worked among others at the Bruno Cassirer Verlag and published more of his poetry. He married Margareta Gosebruch and went through many treatments at various health resorts, attended numerous lectures of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, and studied Buddhism. In 1914 his condition took a turn for the worst, and on March 31st Morgenstern died in Merano in South Tyrol (today Italy).