I · Life
A wandering life
Lenau never stayed long anywhere. His years trace a line from a village in the Banat through the universities of Vienna and Pozsony, the poets' circles of Stuttgart and the forests of Ohio, before ending in an asylum on the edge of Vienna.
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Born in the Banat
Born at Csatád in the Kingdom of Hungary, then part of the Habsburg monarchy. The village is now called Lenauheim, in Romania's Timiș County.
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Death of his father
His father, a Habsburg civil servant, dies in Budapest. The children are raised by their mother, who remarries in 1811.
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University years
Enrols at the University of Vienna, then studies Hungarian law in Pozsony (Bratislava) and spends four years training in medicine — yet never settles on a profession, and turns to verse instead.
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First poems in print
His first poems appear in Aurora, the almanac edited by Johann Gabriel Seidl.
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His mother dies
Her death deepens a melancholy he had long carried. Soon after, an inheritance from his grandmother lets him live for poetry alone.
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Stuttgart and the Swabian poets
Moves to Stuttgart and befriends Ludwig Uhland, Justinus Kerner, Karl Mayer and Gustav Schwab, to whom his Gedichte (1832) are dedicated.
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Voyage to America
Seeking peace and freedom, he lands at Baltimore in October, takes up a homestead in Ohio and lives for months with the Harmony Society in New Harmony, Indiana.
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Return, disillusioned
The New World falls far short of his ideal and he sails home. The warm reception of his first poems lifts his spirits; he divides his time between Stuttgart and Vienna.
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Faust
Publishes his Faust, a deeply personal reworking of the legend.
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Savonarola
An epic arguing that freedom from political and intellectual tyranny is essential to Christianity.
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Neuere Gedichte
New poems, many of the finest inspired by his hopeless love for Sophie von Löwenthal, the wife of a friend.
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Die Albigenser
An epic on the Albigensian heresy and its suppression.
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Don Juan — and collapse
Begins Don Juan, left unfinished. In October he suffers a severe mental breakdown and is committed to an asylum, where he remains for the rest of his life.
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Death at Oberdöbling
Dies on 22 August, possibly of neurosyphilis, and is buried at Weidling. Schumann's Lenau songs, Op. 90, are premiered in Dresden the same day.
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School named after him
"Liceul german de stat", which at the time served as German girl's highscool is remaned after him.
The American disappointment
Lenau sailed for America in 1832 hoping to find freedom in untouched wilderness. He bought land in Ohio and stayed with the Harmony Society at New Harmony, Indiana — but frontier life was harder and plainer than his dream, and he found the young republic obsessed with money. Within a year he was back in Europe. The voyage left its mark on poems such as Herbst, full of lost youth and longing for rest.