Heinrich, Karl Borromaeus
(7/22/1884 Hangenham/Upper Bavaria - 10/25/1938 Einsiedeln/ Switzerland)
Studied in several towns under many areas of specialization before ending with a Doctorate on Nietzsche. Already in his youth, he emerged as a novelist, editor of the magazine Simplicissimus (1909 – 1912), a Publishing Lecturer (Langen publishing, Munich); and is one of the chief collaborators of Ficker's magazine Der Brenner. Here he published his cultural and philosophical views and functioned as a friend and editor of Trakl.
Heinrich's narrative, lyric and essayist work is religious in nature, while his attempted suicides and therapies for depression point to a pathological melancholy. After foreign stays and activity as the Attaché of the German Embassy in Switzerland during WWI, he married in 1921, and settled together with his wife as a secular monk to the abbey of Benedictine in Einsiedeln, where he died in 1938 in an asylum before the Nazis.
The kinship and intimacy between the two friends is stressed by Trakl's dedication of two poems to Heinrich in which a “brother” is mentioned (Decline and Song of the Departed). In 1926, Heinrich published his remembrances of Trakl in Der Brenner under the title “The Apparition of Georg Trakl.”