Literature in Dresden

The special atmosphere in Dresden has attracted and inspired countless poets and friends of literature over the centuries. This atmosphere is characterised by the apparent contradictions of the dreamy, almost conventional lifestyle of a royal residence on the one hand and a creative, cosmopolitan cultural centre on the other.

At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, Dresden became one of the centres of German literature, especially for the Romantic movement.
The salons held by Christian Gottfried Körner, and later the house of Ludwig Tieck, were popular meeting places for great poets such as Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Kleist and Novalis and important philosophers such as Humboldt and the Schlegel brothers.

A further highlight for literature in Dresden came a hundred years later. From 1919, the newspaper »Menschen« was a focal point for such well-known expressionists as Ivan Goll, Friedrich Wolf, Paul Adler and Oskar Kokoschka. Erich Kästner spent his childhood and youth years in Dresden and published his first poems here.

Martin Anderson-Nexö, Gerhart Hauptmann and Friedrich Gerstecker produced some of their most important works in Dresden. It was in Radebeul near Dresden that Karl May created the shining characters for a series of novels which have captivated generations of readers young and old.