Editing Theodor Storm (section)

== Analysis ==
Like [[Friedrich Hebbel]], Theodor Storm was a child of the [[Wadden Sea]] plain, but, whilst in Hebbel's verse there is hardly any direct reference to his native landscape, Storm again and again revisits the chaste beauty of its expansive mudflats, menacing sea and barren pastures &mdash; and whilst Hebbel could find a home away from his native heath Storm clung to it with what may be called a jealous love. In ''Der Schimmelreiter'', the last of his 50 novellas and widely considered Storm's culminating masterpiece, the setting of the rural North German coast is central to evoking its unnerving, superstitious atmosphere, and sets the stage for the battleground of man versus nature: the dykes and the sea.

His favourite poets were [[Joseph von Eichendorff]] and [[Eduard Mörike]], and the influence of the former is plainly discernible even in Storm's later verse. During a summer visit to [[Baden-Baden]] in 1864, where he had been invited by his friend, the author and painter [[Ludwig Pietsch]], he made the acquaintance of the great Russian writer [[Ivan Turgenev]]. They exchanged letters and sent each other copies of their works over a number of years.

Hungarian literary critic [[György Lukács|Georg Lukács]], in ''[[Soul and Form]]'' (1911), appraised Storm as "the last representative of the great German bourgeois literary tradition," poised between [[Jeremias Gotthelf]] and [[Thomas Mann]].