Wilhelm Heinse

Heinse, Johann Jakob Wilhelm (Langewiesen nr. Weimar, 1746-1803, Aschaffenburg), usually known as Wilhelm Heinse, studied law at Jena University (1766), but came under the influence of F. J. Riedel and migrated in his wake to Erfurt University in 1768, where he applied himself to journalism. In 1771 he became secretary to a nobleman, for whom he translated the Satyricon of Petronius. In 1772 he became a private tutor in the house of Herr von Massow in Halberstadt, a position he owed to the recommendation of J. W. L. Gleim. He fell in love with the mother of his pupil, and regarded her in later years as the awakener of his genius. In 1774 he joined J. G. Jacobi at Pempelfort, collaborating on Jacobi's periodical Iris. It was here that he first met Goethe. In 1780 Gleim and Jacobi sponsored a visit of Heinse to Italy, where he remained for three years, meeting Maler Müller (see Müller, F.) and responding especially to Renaissance painting.

Heinse, who had become a Roman Catholic, was appointed reader to the Electoral Archbishop of Mainz in 1786. His best-known work, the sensual Utopian novel Ardinghello, was published in 1789. He was appointed electoral librarian in 1787, and in 1794 removed the contents of the library to Aschaffenburg in order to protect them from destruction or dispersal during the troubles of the French Revolution. His second and partly autobiographical novel, Hildegard von Hohenthal (1795-6), has a central character based on Frau von Massow. A third novel, Anastasia und das Schachspiel, followed in 1803. He translated Tasso's La Gerusalemme liberata (Das befreite Jerusalem, 1781) and Ariosto's Orlando furioso (Roland der Wütende, 1782-3). Both versions are in prose. In 1796. Heinse met F. Hölderlin in Westphalia; he was the dedicatee of Hölderlin's poem ‘Brod und Wein’.

Heinse belonged to the generation of Sturm und Drang, which he resembled in his enthusiasm for genius, his unconventional mental energy, and his dynamic emotional temperament. His passion for Italian art and his pronounced sensual interest led him away from introspection towards a standpoint which had links both with Goethe's classicism and with Romanticism (see Romantik).

Sämmtliche Werke (10 vols.), ed. K. Schüddekopf (last two vols. A. Leitzmann), appeared 1902-25 and correspondence with Gleim, Briefwechsel zwischen Gleim und Heinse (2 vols.), ed. K. Schüddekopf, 1894-5.