At first glance, Richard Dehmel (1863–1920) would not appear to be a person likely to cause scandal and outrage: He wrote his thesis for a doctorate in economics on the insurance industry and then went on to work for several years in that industry.

He became disillusioned with the hypocritical morality of late Victorian society, though, and by the 1890s had become a writer and poet — one of the best-known in Europe. His collection Weib und Welt (Woman and World) was published in 1896; its focus the connection of love and sex caused an immediate furor that culminated in his facing obscenity and blasphemy charges. Though he was acquitted, the judge ordered the book burned anyway.

The most famous poem in the collection — thanks in part to Schoenberg’s music — is “Transfigured Night,” in which a woman reveals to her new lover that she is pregnant with another man’s child. The lover tells her that their love will transform the child into their own. While being an unwed mother would have been dishonor enough, the real scandal was that the woman had sought her pregnancy and regarded sex as her means to an end, completely disregarding the moral constraints of the day.

While few know his name now, Dehmel was among the leading German poets before World War I, and, besides Schoenberg, his work provided either the inspiration or words for music by composers as disparate as Carl Orff, Max Reger, Richard Strauss, Anton Webern, Kurt Weill, and Alexander von Zemlinsky. ■

— Thomas Consolo