Christoph Martin Wieland

(b Oberholzheim, 5 Sept 1733; d Weimar, 20 Jan 1813). German poet. Active at Weimar from 1772, he became one of the most prominent German writers. His most important libretto was for Schweitzer's Alkeste (1773, Weimar); stories from his collection Dschinnistan (1786-9) were used in operas, including Die Zauberflöte. Also influential in music was his Oberon (1780), on which Weber's opera was based.

The German poet and author Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813), sometimes called the German Voltaire, was a typical stylist of the German rococo period.

Christoph Martin Wieland was born on Sept. 5, 1733, in Oberholzheim zu Biberach in Württemberg. His father a pastor, had been influenced by the Pietistic movement of A. H. Francke. As a student, Wieland attended the University of Erfurt and then the University of Tübingen, where he studied law. His real interest, however, was literature.

While still at the University of Tübingen, Wieland wrote the epic Hermann; Zwölf moralische Briefe in Versen; and Anti-Ovid (1752). J. J. Bodmar's attention was attracted by this Pietistic literature, and he invited Wieland to Zurich in the summer of 1752. However, he was soon disillusioned by Wieland's "frivolity." Wieland remained in Switzerland as a tutor until 1760. An inner change had come over him by the time he returned to Biberach as town clerk. Instead of austere Pietism he now held a lighthearted philosophy of life. Thus in his prose translation of William Shakespeare's works (1762-1766), Wieland - who now responded to the elegant and playful tastes of the rococo - failed to grasp the depth of Shakespeare's genius. However, he excelled as a translator of Horace's epistles and satires, of Cicero's letters, and of the complete works of Lucian. Don Sylvio von Ros-alva, an imitation of Don Quixote, appeared in 1764, and his Comische Erzählungen was issued in 1765.

Wieland's novel Agathon (1766-1767) remains a psychological masterpiece. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing praised and recommended it as "a novel of classic taste." Its background is ancient Greece, but symbolically Wieland described his own artistic and spiritual development. Platonic philosophy is set against hedonistic irony, sex against Eros. In the end the hero gains only a Pyrrhic victory over sophism. His Musarion oder die Philosophie der Grazien (1768) can be considered a continuation of Agathon, but the conflict between sensuous delight and purity of character is here softened by a spirit of renuciation and a determination to seek pleasure.

In 1769 Wieland was appointed to a chair of philosophy at the University of Erfurt. In 1772 he published a political novel, Der goldne Spiegel oder die Könige von Scheschian. This volume, an enthusiastic defense of an absolute but enlightened monarch whose one aim is the happiness of his people, so impressed the Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar that she invited Wieland to become, with the title of Herzoglicher Hofrat, tutor to the princes Karl August and Konstantin in Weimar. Wieland remained in Weimar until his death.

In 1773 Wieland founded the journal Der Teutsche Merkur, later continued as Der neue Teutsche Merkur until 1810. In 1774 Die Geschichte der Abderiten, his best-known political satire, appeared. In it he blended mythology and philosophy and personal and social allusions to the contemporary scene in a vivid satire aimed at intellectual snobs and spineless sycophants.

Wieland's greatest literary achievement was Oberon: Ein romantisches Heldengedicht in zwölf Gesängen (1780). This verse narrative, in a romantic-heroic vein, was greatly admired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This epic of great rococo virtuosity was based on a 16th-century prose version of the Old French Huon de Bordeaux, into which Wieland wove Shakespeare's story of Oberon and Titania.

In 1797 Wieland purchased a small estate at Ossmannstädt near Weimar, but financial troubles forced him to give it up after six years. In 1800 he composed an epistolary novel entitled Aristipp und einige seiner Zeitgenossen about life and thought in 4th-century Greece. On Oct. 6, 1808, he was presented to Napoleon Bonaparte in Weimar. Wieland died on Jan. 20, 1813.

The formal elegance of Wieland's works has misled many critics and literary historians. They have misinterpreted his sensitive personality, his inner change from a pious protégé of Bodmer's to an Epicurean, and his change from a Platonist to a skeptic and satirist. Wieland's artistic and human vision strove toward ultimate reconcilation of pleasure-seeking materialism and spiritual integrity. His enlightened vision was rooted in a passionate belief in human progress and perfectibility.

Further Reading

An extensive treatment of Wieland in English is Derek M. van Abbe, Christopher Martin Wieland: A Literary Biography (1961). An older study of Wieland is Charles Elson, Wieland and Shaftesbury (1913). Extensive material on Wieland and his times is in W. H. Bruford, Culture and Society in Classical Weimar, 1775-1806 (1962). Useful background studies are J. G. Robertson, A History of German Literature, revised by Edna Purdie (1902; 5th ed. 1966); Ernst Rose, A History of German Literature (1960); and Ernest L. Stahl and W. E. Yuill, Introductions to German Literature, vol. 3: German Literature of the 18th and 19th Centuries (1970).

Additional Sources

McCarthy, John A. (John Aloysius), Christoph Martin Wieland, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979.

Wieland, Christoph Martin (1733–1813), German writer and poet, closely associated with the rise of Weimar culture. He studied theology in a monastery near Magdeburg, but his interest in writing drew him to work with the renowned Swiss critic Johann Jakob Bodmer in Zurich between 1752 and 1754. Thereafter he gained recognition for his poetry, novels, and tales, and by 1772, when he settled in Weimar, he was considered the foremost writer in Germany. Strongly influenced by the French fairy‐tale vogue of the 18th century, Wieland published an important collection of tales entitled Dschinnistan (1786–9), which included adaptations from the French Cabinet des fées (see Mayer, Charles‐Joseph de) as well as three original tales, ‘Der Stein der Weisen’ (‘The Philosopher's Stone’), ‘Timander und Melissa’, and ‘Der Druide oder die Salamanderin und die Bildsäule’ (‘The Druid or the Salamander and the Painted Pillar’). Typical of all these tales is the triumph of rationalism over mysticism. Among his other works that incorporated fairy‐tale motifs are Der Sieg der Natur über die Schwärmerei oder die Abenteuer des Don Sylvio von Rosalva (The Victory of Nature over Fanaticism or the Adventures of Don Sylvio von Rosalva, 1764), Der goldene Spiegel (The Golden Mirror, 1772), and Oberon (1780). In addition, he wrote ‘Pervonte’ (1778–9), a remarkable verse rendition of Basile's ‘Peruonto’, which concerns a poor simpleton, whose heart is so good that he is blessed by the fairies and thus rises in society.

Bibliography

• Bauer, Roger, “‘“The Fairy Way of Writing”: Von Shakespeare zu Wieland und Tieck’”, in Roger Bauer, Michael de Graat, and Jürgen Werheimer (eds.), Das Shakespeare‐Bild in Europa zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik (1988).
• Lim, Jeong‐Taeg, Don Sylvio und Anselmus: Untersuchungen zur Gestaltung des Wunderbaren bei C. M. Wieland und E. T. A. Hoffmann (1988).
• Nobis, Helmut, Phantasie und Moralität: Das Wunderbare in Wielands, ‘Dschinnistan’ und der ‘Geschichte des Prinzen Biribinker’ (1976).
• Stickney‐Bailey, Susan, ‘Tieck's Märchen and the Enlightenment: The Influence of Wieland and Musäus’ (Diss., University of Massachusetts‐Amherst, 1986).

— Jack Zipes

Wieland, Christoph Martin (Oberholzheim nr. Bi-berach, 1733-1813, Weimar), spent his boyhood in Bi-berach until he was sent in 1747 to the school of Kloster Bergen near Magdeburg, which was conducted according to pietistic principles. After a short period of study at Erfurt he returned home and soon fell in love with his cousin Sophie von Gutermann (see La Roche, Sophie von), to whom he became engaged. His first published works were Die Natur der Dinge (1752), a didactic poem in six books of alexandrine verse based on Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, and Lobgesang auf die Liebe (1751, the year of its composition, just after the first title), in Klopstockian hexameters.

A MS., Hermann (see Arminius), attracted the attention of J. J. Bodmer, whose interest was further engaged by Wieland's flattering essay on the Swiss scholar's epic Noah, published under the title Abhandlung von den Schönheiten des epischen Gedichtes ‘Der Noah’ (1753). Bodmer thereupon invited Wieland to Switzerland, where he remained, first as Bodmer's guest (1752-4) in Zurich and then (until 1760) as a private tutor in Zurich and Berne. During this time, usually called Wieland's ‘seraphic period’, he wrote the sentimental Briefe von Verstorbenen an hinterlassene Freunde and a Bodmerian epic in hexameters, Der geprüfte Abraham (both 1753). The pietistic vein of these works was continued in the two prose works Sympathien (1756) and Empfindungen eines Christen (1757). In these ‘seraphic’ years Wieland also wrote the very unseraphic satire against J. C. Gottsched, Ankündigung einer Dunciade für die Deutschen (1755), and Lady Johanna Gray (1758), a tragedy in blank verse, which was performed in Winterthur. While he was in Switzerland his engagement with Sophie von Gutermann was broken off. Towards the end of his years in Switzerland he was temporarily attracted to Julie von Bondeli of Berne, to whom he was betrothed. In 1760 he returned to Biberach, was elected a senator and appointed acting town clerk, being confirmed in this office in 1764. His second betrothal was revoked soon after because of a love-affair with Christine Hagel in Biberach in 1763.

In the 1760s Wieland came under the influence of Graf Stadion (1691-1768), a wealthy man of the world and an admirer of French literary style, who lived at Warthausen. Wieland, easily susceptible to the influence of mature personalities, swung rapidly over to a rationalistic philosophy and to light erotic poetry, which some resented as frivolous. Der Sieg der Natur über die Schwärmerey oder Die Abentheuer des Don Sylvio von Rosalva (2 vols., 1764, reissued 1963), an ironical review of fantastic enthusiasms, was his first novel; it was soon followed by Geschichte des Agathon (2 vols., 1766-7, reissued 1961), in which a young man, after errors and temptations, eventually adopts a balanced rationalism. The work is one of the most perfect expressions of enlightenment (see Aufklärung). During these years Wieland also made his translation of 22 plays of Shakespeare into German prose (except for A Midsummer Night's Dream, which he turned into verse). Wieland's erotic playfulness appeared in his Komische Erzählungen (1765) in verse. A more serious view of love appears in the poem Musarion oder Die Philosophie der Grazien (1768, reissued 1970).

In 1769 Wieland, who had married Dorothea von Hillenbrand in 1765, was elected to a professorship at Erfurt University. Here he wrote Sokrates mainomenos oder Die Dialogen des Diogenes von Sinope (1770) and a political novel, Der goldene Spiegel (4 vols., 1772), which changed the course of his life, for it influenced the dowager Duchess Anna Amalia of Sachsen-Weimar to appoint him tutor to her sons (1772). Though Wieland was not a success as a pedagogue, he was well regarded as a man of letters and an ornament to the court circle, and he spent the rest of his life in or near Weimar. His Singspiel Alceste (1773) soon involved him in a brush with Goethe, in which his quiet tolerance showed up better than the young man's brash satire. In 1773 he launched Der teutsche Merkur, which was a leading periodical in German intellectual life for 37 years. A satirical novel, Die Abderiten. Eine sehr wahrscheinliche Geschichte, appeared in 1774 (reissued 1961), a verse romance, Oberon, regarded by some as his best work, in 1780. Though Wieland continued to write original works in his later years (Neue Götter-Gespräche, 1791, Aristipp, 1800-1), much of his interest was given to translations, lovingly fashioned, of Horace and Lucian.

Versatile and protean, Wieland has often been berated by the more moralistic critics for lack of character. His early religious sentimentality was foreign to his real nature, and for the rest of his life he reflected in diverse original works and translations a via media of rational, sensual life. Without fully intending it, he was an exponent of classicism as well as, by his fantasy and orientalism, a forerunner of Romanticism (see Romantik). Above all he wrote as a civilized man, having at his finger-tips a medium of sensitive, flexible, expressive prose, which brought to the German language qualities hitherto regarded as primarily French.

Wieland's Sämtliche Werke, Ausgabe letzter Hand (45 vols.) appeared 1794-1811 and was reissued (14 vols. with suppl. vol.), ed. H. Radspieler, in 1984; the Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. B. Seuffert and W. Kurrelmeyer, from 1909 (incomplete, 15 vols. reissued 1986-7), Werke (40 vols.), ed. H. Düntzer, 1867-79, and a selection by F. Martini and H. W. Seiffert (5 vols.) 1964-8. Briefwechsel, ed. H. W. Seiffert, appeared 1963 ff. (c. 10-15 vols.).

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.

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.

Mc Carthy, 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

Christoph Martin Wieland (September 5, 1733 – January 20, 1813) was a German poet and writer.

1805 portrait of Christoph Martin Wieland by Ferdinand Carl Christian Jagemann

Contents 1 Biography 2 Editions 3 Literature 4 External links 5 References

Biography

He was born at Oberholzheim (now part of the village of Achstetten), which then belonged to the Free Imperial City of Biberach an der Riss in the south-east of the modern-day state of Baden-Württemberg. His father, who was pastor in Oberholzheim and subsequently in Biberach, took great pains with his son's education. From the town school of Biberach he passed on at the age of twelve to the gymnasium at Klosterberge, near Magdeburg. He was a precocious child, and when he left school in 1749 was widely read in the Latin classics and the leading contemporary French writers; amongst German poets his favourites were Brockes and Klopstock.

During the summer of 1750, he fell in love with a cousin, Sophie Gutermann, and this love affair inspired him to plan his first ambitious work, Die Natur der Dinge (1752), a didactic poem in six books. In 1750 he went to the University of Tübingen as a student of law, but his time was mainly taken up with literary studies. The poems he wrote at the university--Hermann, an epic (published by F Muncker, 1886), Zwölf moralische Briefe in Versen (1752), Anti-Ovid (1752)--are pietistic in tone and dominated by the influence of Klopstock. They attracted the attention of the Swiss literary reformer, JJ Bodmer, who invited Wieland to visit him in Zürich in the summer of 1752. After a few months, however, Bodmer felt himself as little in sympathy with Wieland as, two years earlier, he had felt himself with Klopstock, and the friends parted; but Wieland remained in Switzerland until 1760, spending the last year, at Bern where he obtained a position as private tutor. Here he became intimate with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's friend Julie de Bondeli.

Birthplace of Christoph Martin Wieland in Oberholzheim

Wieland's tastes had changed; the writings of his early Swiss years--Der geprüfte Abraham (1753), Sympathien (1756), Empfindungen eines Christen (1757)--were still in the manner of his earlier writings, but with the tragedies, Lady Johanna Gray (1758), and Clementina von Porretta (1760)--the latter based on Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison--the epic fragment Cyrus (1759), and the "moral story in dialogues," Araspes und Panthea (1760), Wieland, as Gotthold Lessing said, "forsook the ethereal spheres to wander again among the sons of men."

Wieland's conversion was completed at Biberach, having returned in 1760 as director of the chancery. The monotony of his life here was relieved by the friendship of a Count Stadion, whose library in the castle of Warthausen, not far from Biberach, was well stocked with French and English literature. Wieland met again his early love Sophie Gutermann, who had become the wife of Hofrat La Roche, then manager of Count Stadion's estates. Wieland spend many evenings at the well known Wieland Family guest house and tavern "Sonne Post" in Neuhuetten. Here in the quiet guest house gardens the former poet of an austere pietism now became the advocate of a light-hearted philosophy, from which frivolity and sensuality were not excluded. In Don Sylvia von Rosalva (1764), a romance in imitation of Don Quixote, he held up to ridicule his earlier faith and in the Comische Erzählungen (1765) he gave his extravagant imagination only too free a rein.

More important is the novel Geschichte des Agathon (1766-1767), in which, under the guise of a Greek fiction, Wieland described his own spiritual and intellectual growth. This work, which Lessing recommended as "a novel of classic taste," marks an epoch in the development of the modern psychological novel. Of equal importance was Wieland's translation of twenty-two of Shakespeare's plays into prose (8 vols., 1762-1766); it was the first attempt to present the English poet to the German people in something approaching entirety. With the poems Musarion oder die Philosophie der Grazien (1768), Idris (1768), Combabus (1770), Der neue Amadis (1771), Wieland opened the series of light and graceful romances in verse which appealed so irresistibly to his contemporaries and acted as an antidote to the sentimental excesses of the subsequent Sturm und Drang movement. Wieland married in 1765, and between 1769 and 1772 was professor of philosophy at Erfurt.

In 1772 he published Der goldene Spiegel oder die Könige van Scheschian, a pedagogic work in the form of oriental stories; this attracted the attention of Anna Amalia, Duchess of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach and resulted in his appointment as tutor to her two sons, the Duke Karl August and his brother Konstantin, at Weimar. With the exception of some years spent at Ossmannstedt, where in later life he bought an estate, Weimar remained Wieland's home until his death. Here, in 1773, he founded Der teutsche Merkur, which under his editorship (1773-1789) became the most influential literary review in Germany.

Of his later writings the most important are the admirable satire on German provinciality—the most attractive of all his prose writings--Die Abderiten, eine sehr wahrscheinliche Geschichte (1774), and the charming poetic romances, Das Wintermärchen (1776), Das Sommermärchen (1777), Geron der Adelige (1777), Pervonte oder die Wünsche (1778), a series culminating with Wieland's poetic masterpiece, the romantic epic of Oberon (1780). Although now old-fashioned, Oberon still has the power to charm. In Wieland's later novels, such as the Geheime Geschichte des Philosophen Peregrinus Proteus (1791) and Aristipp und einige seiner Zeitgenossen (1800-1802), a didactic and philosophic tendency obscures the small literary interest they possess. He also translated Horace's Satires (1786), Lucian's Works (1788-1789), Cicero's Letters (1808 ff.), and from 1796 to 1803 he edited the Attisches Museum which did valuable service in popularizing Greek studies. Wieland was also strongly influenced by the French fairy-tale vogue of the 18th century, he published a collection of tales entitled Dschinnistan (1786-1789), which included three original tales, 'Der Stein der Weisen' ('The Philosopher's Stone'), 'Timander und Melissa', and 'Der Druide oder die Salamanderin und die Bildsäule' ('The Druid or the Salamander and the Painted Pillar'). Typical of all these tales is the triumph of rationalism over mysticism.

Without creating a school in the strict sense of the term, Wieland had a strong influence on the German literature of his time. The verse-romance and the novel—more especially in Austria--benefited by his example, and even the Romanticism of a later date borrowed from him in its excursions into the literatures of southern Europe. The qualities which distinguish his work, his fluent style and light touch, his careless frivolity rather than poetic depth, show him to have been in literary temperament more akin to Ariosto and Voltaire than to the more spiritual and serious leaders of German poetry; but these very qualities in Wieland's poetry introduced a balancing element into German classical literature and added materially to its fullness and completeness. This is not to say, however, that Wieland is not to be counted among the great German poetic geniuses. Kant himself refers to Wieland in the same sentence as Homer, citing him as an example of Kant's idea of artistic genius. (Critique of Judgment, 5:309). Wieland influenced the American author Charles Brockden Brown whose novel Wieland or The Transformation: an American Tale has relatives of Christoph Martin Wieland as main characters.

Editions

Wieland's Sämtliche Werke appeared in 1794-1802, 45 vols. Collections of Wieland's letters were edited by his son Ludwig (1815) and by H. Gessner (1815-1816); his Letters to Sophie Laroche by F. Horn (1820).

Later Editions of Wieland's Sämtliche Werke: 1818-1828, 53 vols., 1839-1840, 36 vols., and 1853-1858, 36 vols. Then 1879-1882 in 40 vols., edited by H. Düntzer. A new critical edition was started by the Prussian Academy in 1909, of which 22 volumes were published by 1963. There are numerous editions of selected works, notably by Heinrich Pröhle in Kürschner's Deutsche Nationalliteratur (vols. 51-56, 1883-1887); by F. Muncker (6 vols., 1889); by W. Bolsche (4 vols., 1902).

Literature

• J.G. Gruber, C.M. Wielands Leben (4 vols., 1827-1828);
• H. Doring, C.M. Wieland (1853);
• J.W. Loebell, C.M. Wieland (1858);
• Heinrich Pröhle, Lessing, Wieland, Heinse (1877);
• L.F. Ofterdinger, Wielands Leben und Wirken in Schwaben und in der Schweiz (1877);
• R. Keil, Wieland und Reinhold (1885);
• F. Thalmeyr, Über Wielands Klassizität, Sprache und SM (1894);
• M. Doll, Wieland und die Antike (1896);
• C.A. Behmer, Sterne und Wieland (1899);
• W. Lenz, Wielands Verhältnis zu Spenser, Pope und Swift (1903);
• L. Hirzel, Wielands Beziehungen zu den deutschen Romantikern (1904).
• See also M. Koch's article in the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie (1897).

• Jan Philipp Reemtsma: Das Buch vom Ich, Christoph Martin Wielands »Aristipp und einige seiner Zeitgenossen«, 1993.
• Jan Philipp Reemtsma: Der Liebe Maskentanz. Aufsätze zum Werk Christoph Martin Wielands, 1999.

External links

• Works by Christoph Martin Wieland at Project Gutenberg
• http://www.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/diglib/aufkl/teutmerk/ -- Der Teutsche Merkur, vols. 1773-89 are digitized (April 2003)
• John Quincy Adams' translation of Oberon (as edited by A. B. Faust, New York, 1940) is listed on a microfilm at the Massachusetts Historical Society

• Quotations related to Christoph Martin Wieland at Wikiquote

• Media related to Christoph Martin Wieland at Wikimedia Commons

References

• Elizabeth Barnes: “Loving with a Vengeance: Wieland, Familicide and the Crisis of Masculinity in the Early Nation”. In: Milette Shamir und Jennifer Travis: Boys don’t Cry?, Columbia University Press: New York , 2002, S. 44-63.
•  "Wieland, Christoph Martin". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911. 

Persondata
NAME	Wieland, Christoph Martin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	German poet and writer
DATE OF BIRTH	September 5, 1733
PLACE OF BIRTH	Achstetten
DATE OF DEATH	January 20, 1813
PLACE OF DEATH

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