Heinrich Heine saw him as one of Germany's foremost dramatists, calling him "a drunken Shakespeare" and Sigmund Freud described Grabbe as "an original and rather peculiar poet.

"[1] Born in Detmold,[2] the son of a prison officer, he began to write plays in the age of sixteen, while attending the Gymnasium.

A scholarship awarded by Princess Pauline enabled him to study law at the universities of Leipzig and Berlin, where he became acquainted with Heinrich Heine.

His plays Napoleon oder Die hundert Tage or Hannibal reveal a realistic, heterogeneous concept of history.

He was honored by the Nazis as a great national poet, based on occasional antisemitic statements (particularly in Aschenbrödel), and on his nationalistic portrayal of German history, like Die Hermannsschlacht on the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.