Life

Born in Ottrau

Ottrau

-Constituent communities:The community of Ottrau is made up of six constituent communities:* Ottrau: 730 inhabitants* Immichenhain: 605 inhabitants* Weißenborn: 377 inhabitants* Görzhain: 374 inhabitants...

 (Hesse

Hesse

Hesse or Hessia is both a cultural region of Germany and the name of an individual German state.* The cultural region of Hesse includes both the State of Hesse and the area known as Rhenish Hesse in the neighbouring Rhineland-Palatinate state...

), until 1896 Schäfer was a school teacher. He gained a scholarship to study in Switzerland and France through the Cotta-Verlag publishing house, and in 1898 became a freelance writer in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

. He lived in Vallendar

Vallendar

Vallendar is a municipality in the district Mayen-Koblenz, in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It is situated on the right bank of the Rhine, approx. 4 km north-east of Koblenz. Vallendar is the seat of the Verbandsgemeinde Vallendar. A city named "Vallendar" is included in the PC game Call of...

 from 1900 to 1915, and from 1918 until his death in 1952, he lived in Bodman

Bodman-Ludwigshafen

Bodman-Ludwigshafen is a village in the district of Konstanz in Baden-Württemberg in Germany. The mayor is Matthias Weckbach.The village is located near the Lake Constance ....

 on the Bodensee.

His work (drama, novels, and short prose pieces) were naturalist in style and marked with "völkisch" and national elements. In 1930 he published a novel about the shoe-maker Wilhelm Voigt

Wilhelm Voigt

Friedrich Wilhelm Voigt was a German impostor who masqueraded as a Prussian military officer in 1906 and became famous as The Captain of Köpenick ....

 with the title "Der Hauptmann von Köpenick".

From 1900 to 1920, he published the magazine Die Rheinlande. His early work was especially influenced by naturalism

Naturalism (literature)

Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character...

. Important novellas were "Die unterbrochene Rheinfahrt" (1913) und "Hölderlins Einkehr" (1925). Schäfer's folksy language and mystification of the "German soul" made his work popular with the Nazis.

Awards

• 1941 Goethepreis der Stadt Frankfurt
• 1948 Honorary citizen of Bodman
  Bodman-Ludwigshafen
  Bodman-Ludwigshafen is a village in the district of Konstanz in Baden-Württemberg in Germany. The mayor is Matthias Weckbach.The village is located near the Lake Constance ....
  
  

Selected works

• Die zehn Gebote. Erzählungen des Kanzelfriedrich, 1897
• Rheinsagen, 1908
• Karl Stauffers Lebensgang. Eine Chronik der Leidenschaft, 1912
• Das fremde Fräulein (Novelle über den Tod der Idilia Dubb
  Idilia Dubb
  Idilia Dubb was a seventeen-year-old young woman from Scotland whose tragic demise in the abandoned Lahneck Castle while vacationing in Germany became celebrated through a diary she allegedly kept as she slowly starved to death....
  
   auf Burg Lahneck)
• Die dreizehn Bücher der deutschen Seele, 1922
• Winckelmanns Ende, 1925
• Der Hauptmann von Köpenick, 1930
• Mein Leben, 1934
• Theoderich, König des Abendlandes, 1939
• Lebenstag eines Menschenfreundes (Ein Pestalozzi Roman), 1915