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Christian Otto Josef Wolfgang Morgenstern (May 6, 1871 in Munich– March 31, 1914 in Meran) was a German author and poet from Munich. Morgenstern married Margareta Gosebruch von Liechtenstern on March 7, 1910. He worked for a while as a journalist in Berlin, but spent much of his life traveling through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, primarily in a vain attempt to recover his health. His travels, though they failed to restore him to health, allowed him to meet many of the foremost literary and philosophical figures of his time in central Europe.

Morgenstern's poetry, much of which was inspired by English literary nonsense, is immensely popular, even though he enjoyed very little success during his lifetime. He made fun of scholasticism, e.g. literary criticism in "Drei Hasen", grammar in "Der Werwolf", narrow-mindedness in "Der Gaul", and symbolism in "Der Wasseresel". In "Scholastikerprobleme" he discussed how many angels could sit on a needle. Still many Germans know some of his poems and quotations by heart, e.g. the following line from "The Impossible Fact" ("Die unmögliche Tatsache", 1910):

Weil, so schließt er messerscharf / Nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf.

"For, he reasons pointedly / That which must not, can not be."

Embedded in his humorous poetry is a subtle metaphysical streak, as e.g. in "Vice Versa", (1905):

Ein Hase sitzt auf einer Wiesedes Glaubens, niemand sähe diese.Doch im Besitze eines Zeißesbetrachtet voll gehaltnen Fleißesvom vis-à-vis gelegnen Bergein Mensch den kleinen Löffelzwerg.Ihn aber blickt hinwiederumein Gott von fern an, mild und stumm.

"A rabbit in his meadow lairImagines none to see him there.But aided by a looking lensA man with eager diligenceInspects the tiny long-eared gnomeFrom a convenient near-by dome.Yet him surveys, or so we learnA god from far off, mild and stern."

Gerolf Steiner's mock-scientific book about the fictitious animal order Rhinogradentia (1961), inspired by Morgenstern's nonsense poem Das Nasob?m, is testament to his enduring popularity.

Morgenstern died in 1914 of tuberculosis, which he had contracted from his mother, who died in 1881.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Christian Morgenstern", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0