author
Wilhelm Jensen
1837–1911
Best remembered for the haunting novella Gradiva, this prolific German writer produced novels, poems, and historical fiction across the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His work later drew unusual afterlives in psychology and literary history, especially through Sigmund Freud’s famous reading of Gradiva.
2 Audiobooks
Delusion and Dream : an Interpretation in the Light of Psychoanalysis of Gradiva
by Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Jensen
Gradiva: Ein pompejanisches Phantasiestück
by Wilhelm Jensen
About the author
Born on February 15, 1837, in Heiligenhafen in Holstein, Wilhelm Jensen studied medicine at the universities of Kiel, Würzburg, and Breslau before leaving that path to devote himself to literature. He worked in journalism for a time and went on to build an exceptionally large body of work.
Jensen wrote poetry, novellas, and novels, including historical fiction, and remained productive for decades. Although he was widely read in his own day, he is now remembered most of all for Gradiva (published in book form in 1903), a strange and elegant story that later attracted the attention of Sigmund Freud.
He died in Munich on November 24, 1911. For modern readers, Jensen is an especially interesting figure because his writing stands at a crossroads of literary imagination, archaeology, dream life, and the early history of psychoanalysis.