Körner, Theodor

▪ German poet

in full  Karl Theodor Körner 

born Sept. 23, 1791, Dresden, Saxony

died Aug. 26, 1813, Gadebusch, Mecklenburg

      German patriotic poet of the war of liberation against Napoleon in 1813 whose death in Lützow's volunteer corps made him a popular hero.

      His father, Christian Gottfried Körner, was a friend of Friedrich Schiller (Schiller, Friedrich von). Körner grew up in a house frequented by writers and scientists. He studied philosophy in Berlin, where he attended the lectures of the famous philosophers Johann Gottlieb Fichte (Fichte, Johann Gottlieb) and Friedrich Schleiermacher (Schleiermacher, Friedrich). By 1812 the Vienna Burgtheater had produced three of his dramatic works, the most ambitious of which, Zriny (1812), with its glorification of love for the fatherland, made him famous throughout Germany. His dramas, however, are now largely forgotten. After his death at age 22, his father collected the best of his militantly passionate patriotic poetry in Leyer und Schwert (1814; “Lyre and Sword”), which was received enthusiastically and filled his contemporaries with feelings of patriotism.

▪ president of Austria

born April 24, 1873, Komárno, Hung.

died Jan. 4, 1957, Vienna

      Austrian military officer during World War I and later a statesman who served as president of the second Austrian republic (1951–57).

      A colonel in the Austro-Hungarian Army at the outbreak of World War I, Körner was subsequently appointed chief of staff (May 1915) and successfully helped to stem Italian offensives along the Italian-Slovenian border. Appointed inspector general of the new Austrian Army after the fall of the empire in November 1918, he retired two years later, joined the Social Democratic Party, and, between 1925 and 1934, sat as a delegate for Vienna in the Austrian Bundesrat (upper chamber in the federal parliament). During the early 1930s, as military adviser for the Schutzbund—a Socialist paramilitary organization—Körner steadily counseled against violent action despite the increasingly rightward drift of Austrian politics. He was nonetheless imprisoned after the Socialist rising of February 1934 for his Schutzbund activities.

      Having resisted participation in Nazi politics after the Anschluss (incorporation of Austria into the German Reich, March 1938), he was, at the end of World War II, appointed mayor of Vienna by the Soviet occupation authorities. In May 1951 he was elected president of the second Austrian republic; he died in office.

* * *