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WIELAND, CHRISTOPH MARTIN (1733–1813)

WIELAND, CHRISTOPH MARTIN (1733–1813), German writer, publisher, and classicist and one of the most influential literary figures of the German Enlightenment. The son of a Lutheran minister, Christoph Martin Wieland was born in Oberholzheim, Upper Swabia, near the imperial city of Biberach on 5 September 1733. At the age of thirteen, after attending the local public school of Biberach, Wieland was sent to Klosterbergen in the vicinity of Magdeburg, one of the most prestigious boarding schools of the time. Already an avid reader, Wieland acquired the reputation of a freethinker and, not surprisingly, his literary interests proved stronger than his dedication to his law studies at Tübingen (1750–1751). From 1752 to 1759, he was a student of the literary polemicist Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698–1783) in Zurich. After working as a private tutor in Bern (1759–1760) and as a professor of philosophy at the University of Erfurt (1769–1772), Wieland became the tutor of Karl August, the future duke of Weimar, in 1772.

Many of Wieland's works reflect his love of the classics and his profound knowledge of European literature, both of which become evident through his numerous commentaries and his often-criticized Shakespeare translations. Influenced by Bodmer (the teacher of the German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock [1724–1803]), Wieland's early works such as Die Natur der Dinge (1751; The nature of things) are profoundly religious in character, whereas his later works become more frivolous and suggestive in tone. Autobiographical elements appear with striking frequency in most of Wieland's writings. From 1760 to 1769, for example, Wieland served as municipal administrator in Biberach. Some of his experiences as a public administrator reappear in comic form in his later work Die Geschichte der Abderiten (1781; translated as The republic of fools, 1861), which belongs to the category of fools' literature and pointedly ridicules bourgeois pettiness and the fruitlessness of religious quarrels. Probably the first socially critical novel, Die Geschichte der Abderiten systematically portrays life in the Republic of Abdera, the ancient Greek symbol of folly, where things happen in reversal of what one would consider normal. His earlier works Der Sieg der Natur über die Schwärmerey, oder die Abenteuer des Don Sylvio von Rosalva (1764; translated as Reason triumphant over fancy, exemplified in the singular adventures of Don Sylvio de Rosalva, 1773) and Der goldene Spiegel (1772; The golden mirror) reveal Wieland's potential as a future novelist. Scholars view his most famous work, Die Geschichte des Agathon (1766/1767; The history of Agathon), which appeared in several revised editions between 1773 and 1793, as the first and one of the finest examples of the genre of the Bildungs-roman (novel concerned with the intellectual or spiritual development of the main character). Influenced by Euripides's play Ion, Die Geschichte des Agathon uses a classical setting and focuses on the discrepancy between youthful idealism and the harsh realities of life. Kidnapped by pirates from his sheltered home at Delphi, its hero Agathon, who arguably could be seen as a reflection of Wieland's own youthful self, endures a long odyssey of fruitless searching for wisdom and happiness. As a disillusioned old man, Agathon eventually realizes that human beings rarely act the way they should and that the purpose of life must be to find a compromise between head and heart, which means between rational thought and human passions.

Many of Wieland's works, such as his Die Geschichte der Abderiten, first appeared as sequels in his own literary journal Der teutsche Merkur (The German Mercury). Wieland had cultivated the idea of creating a literary journal for a considerable time and was able to realize this goal with the help of the Jacobi brothers in 1772, during his time in Weimar. Wieland's presence at Weimar contributed to the duchy's rise to prominence as Germany's cultural capital because it attracted figures such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) as well. Wieland's relationship to Goethe and Schiller became strained over the years and eventually culminated in a polemic campaign against the aging poet. Proponents of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement initiated the campaign against Wieland and were joined at a later stage by adherents of the rising Romantic movement. Nonetheless, during his final years, Wieland's residence at Weimar became a place of pilgrimage for Germany's most noted and promising writers.

Wieland's reputation as one of the most prominent writers of his age is probably best illustrated by the poet's decoration with the Cross of the Legion of Merit in 1808 by Napoleon Bonaparte. Celebrated as the "German Voltaire" during his lifetime, Wieland's literary contribution fell into near oblivion in the nineteenth century, and scholars have only recently come to view him as one of the most important literary figures of the German Enlightenment as well as a precursor of German classicism and Romanticism.

See also Enlightenment; German Literature and Language.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Wieland, Christoph Martin. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften. Hildesheim, 1986–1987.

——. The History of Agathon. Translated from the German. London, 1773.

——. History of the Abderites. Translated and with an introduction by Max Dufner. Bethlehem, Pa., 1993.

——. Musarion and Other Rococo Tales. Translated and with an introduction by Thomas C. Starnes. Columbia, S.C., 1991.

——. Oberon: A Poem from the German by Wieland. Translated by William Sotheby. New York, 1978. Originally published London, 1798.

——. Sämtliche Werke. Edited by Heinrich Düntzer. 40 vols. Berlin, 1879.

Secondary Sources

Baldwin, Claire. The Emergence of the Modern German Novel: Christoph Martin Wieland, Sophie von La Roche, and Maria Anna Sagar. Rochester, N.Y., 2002.

Budde, Bernhard. Aufklärung als Dialog: Wieland's antithetische Prosa. Tübingen, 2000.

Erhart, Walter. Entzweiung und Selbstaufklärung. Christoph Martin Wieland's "Agathon" Projekt. Tübingen, 1991.

Günther, Gottfried, and Heidi Zeilinger. Wieland-Bibliographie. Berlin, 1983.

Jørgensen, Sven-Aage et al. Christoph Martin Wieland: Epoche-Werk-Wirkung. Munich, 1994.

Kurth-Voigt, Lieselotte E. Perspectives and Points of View: The Early Works of Wieland and their Background. Baltimore, 1974.

Mayer, Gerhart. Der deutsche Bildungsroman: Von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart. Stuttgart, 1992.

McCarthy, John A. Christoph Martin Wieland. Boston, 1979.

Schelle, Hansjörg, ed. Christoph Martin Wieland: Nordamerikanische Forschungsbeiträge zur 250. Wiederkehr seines Geburtstages 1983. Tübingen, 1984.

Shookman, Ellis. Noble Lies, Slant Truths, Necessary Angels: Aspects of Fictionality in the Novels of Christoph Martin Wieland. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997.

ULRICH GROETSCH