Friedrich Nicolai

Nicolai, Friedrich (Berlin, 1733-1811, Berlin), a bookseller's son who followed his father's trade, educated himself by wide reading. In the 1750s he became a friend and collaborator of G. E. Lessing and M. Mendelssohn, editing the Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freien Künste (1757) and participating in the Literaturbriefe (1759).

Nicolai's first independent publication was a brisk survey of contemporary German literature (Briefe über den itzigen Zustand der schönen Wissenschaften in Deutschland, 1755). From 1765 he edited the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek. A firm adherent of rationalistic Enlightenment (see Aufklärung), Nicolai gradually fell behind the times, as his friend Lessing and the younger generation advanced to new standpoints in the late 1760s. His three-volume novel Das Leben und die Meinungen des Herrn Magister Sebaldus Nothanker (1773-6) is primarily concerned with pillorying the religious intolerance of the excessively orthodox. Fascinated yet repelled by Goethe's novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Nicolai sought to neutralize it by means of a parody, Die Freuden des jungen Werthers. Leiden und Freuden Werthers des Mannes (1775, reissued, ed. C. Grützmacher, 1972). By similar satire he endeavoured to ridicule Herder's cult of folk-song in Eyn feyner kleyner Almanach vol schönerr echterr liblicherr Volckslieder, lustigerr Reyen unndt kleglicher Mordgeschichte (1777-8, the absurd archaic spelling is part of the mockery). His literal and pedagogic mind discovered so much of interest on a German tour in 1781 that he wrote an account of it in twelve volumes (Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1781, 1783-96). His scorn for the idealistic philosophy of Kant found expression in the novel Geschichte eines dicken Mannes (1794) and (with a slant towards Fichte) in Leben und Meinungen Sempronius Gundiberts, eines deutschen Philosophen (1798). And his resentment of the new Romanticism (see Romantik) appears in Vertraute Briefe von Adelheid B. an ihre Freundin Julie S. (1799). Nicolai's resolute opposition to change and the ineffectiveness of his parodies made him a popular butt in the world of letters at the end of the century. Goethe and Schiller mocked him in the Xenien and he appears in a ridiculous light as the Proktophantasmist in the Walpurgisnacht of Faust, Pt. I. Against this, however, Nicolai's opposition is now thought to have been more deeply motivated by his concern for the function of literature in relation to the concrete problems of reality.

Gesammelte Werke, ed. B. Fabian and M.-L. Spieckermann, appeared 1985 ff.; Friedrich Nicolai. Die Verlagswerke eines preußischen Buchhändlers der Aufklärung, ed. P. Raabe, in 1983.