Christoph Martin Wieland Biography

Dromo's Den

WIELAND, Christoph Martin (1773-1813). A German epic poet, one of the most important authors of the classic period of German literature, barn at Oberholzheim, near Biberach, in Württemberg. He went to Tübingen (1750) to study law, but was more interested in literature and the classics, and returned to his family much affected by the mystical piety of Klopstock, as he tells us in his Empfindungen eines Christen, but also under the spell of the skeptical French philosophy of the time. At Zurich he was welcomed (1752) by Bodmer (q.v.), who called his attention to biblical themes and enlisted his aid in a controversy with the Anacreontic school of Gleim (q.v.). In the course of this occupation Wieland was attracted to Greek literature and in poetic contributions to the psychology of modern love broke irretrievably with the Puritans of Zurich. In 1759 be went to Bern to accept a position as private tutor. Here his light heart betrayed him into love adventures; but in 1760 he obtained an office in Biberach. In intimate association with the fascinating Sophie von La Roche, who played an important part in Goethe's life. Wieland hovered for a time on the brink of thoughtless hedonism, but presently outgrew this, married a homekeeping wife (1765) , and later became a model paterfamilias amid his 14 children. During these years Wieland was writing fiction that made him a favorite with the German nobility and an Ichabod to his former associates. The versified Nadine (1769) is Greek in its joy of life, the prose Don Silvio von Rosalva (1.764) is a satire on idealism, and the Comic Tales (Komische Erzählungen, 1766) pass the border line of frivolity. The study of Fielding and other English novelists appears in Agathon (1767) and the versified tale Musarion (1768); and the influence of Shakespeare is also unmistakable. After obtaining a professor's chair in the University of Erfurt (1769), Wieland now attempted in Der goldene Spiegel a description of an ideal state (1772), which so pleased the Duchess Anna Amalia, that she invited him in 1772 to Weimar to become tutor to the young Prince Karl August and his brother. At Weimar he remained honored and respected till death. The added dignity naturally produced greater literary seriousness. His critical quarterlies, Der Deutsche Merkur (1773-95), Attisches Museum (1796-1804), and Neues Attisches Museum. (1808-09), spread and confirmed his influence now toward a serene optimism, purer taste, and the diffusion of culture. Thus he moderated with discriminating sympathy the excesses of the writers of the period of Storm and Stress (q.v.). The first important work of the Weimar period was Die Abderiten (1774), a satirical novel in the interest of political cosmopolitanism. Then Goethe, and soon afterward Herder, came to Weimar and gave new wings to Wieland's genius, leading him back to verse and to the unworked mine of medieval Germany, whence he drew the inspiration of Geron, der Adelige and of his best-known epic, the romantic Oberon (1780). His later romances, Peregrinus Proteus (1791) and Aristipp (1800 ), are of inferior interest, and his most valuable contributions to literary culture in the last 30 years of his life were his translations of the Satires and Epistles of Horace (1782-86), the Letters of Cicero (1808-12), the Dialogues of Lucian (1788), and parts of Xenophon, Aristophanes, and Euripides. He took an active part in critical journalism up to 1809, and from 1794 to 1802 superintended an edition of his Works (45 vols.). His death was that of a calm Epicurean. Of all the Weimar galaxy he is the most recreative, delightful, and genial, though others be more philosophieal, serious, versatile, or profound. Wieland first called German attention generally to Shakespeare, 22 of whose dramas he translated (1762-66), and to the Middle Ages; he first made stylistic elegance and refinement natural to German verse and prose.

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XXIII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 548-549.