There seems to be a contradiction in the title of this chapter: after all, Hebbel lived and worked in Vienna from 1845 onward and Austria, over the centuries, has displayed an almost legendary skill in importing and assimilating talent from without. But Hebbel was not one to be assimilated; he once described himself as a “Nicht-Oesterreicher” and the label of “North German” adheres to him wherever he goes in the South; Bavaria (as we shall see in the case of Agnes Bernauer) or Austria. One has only to juxtapose him with Grillparzer to justify their separation as historical dramatists. The one abhorred Hegel; the other was influenced by, or at the very least, had a strong affinity for, him. Insofar as his work is “national” at all (that is above all in his “Nibelung” trilogy), Hebbel's “Deutschtum” is closer to the Prussian than to the Austrian model, and it gained him precedence over Grillparzer in the affections of the Prussian Reich. Grillparzer did not like Die Nibelungen; Treitschke, who was to become “the ideologist of a pro-Prussian power-state with a national-imperialist mission,” praised it. This discussion will be resumed in detail in due course: for the moment, we are concerned to justify the distinction between the “German-ness” of the environment out of which Grillparzer's dramas arose, and that of the Germany which Paul Joachimsen has called “extra-Austrian,” and in which Bismarck could call Austria a “worm-eaten galleon” and Vienna “no longer a German city.”