
Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (13 July 1773 – 13 February 1798) was a German
jurist
A jurist is a person with expert knowledge of law; someone who analyzes and comments on law. This person is usually a specialist legal scholar, mostly (but not always) with a formal education in law (a law degree) and often a Lawyer, legal prac ...
and
writer
A writer is a person who uses written words in different writing styles, genres and techniques to communicate ideas, to inspire feelings and emotions, or to entertain. Writers may develop different forms of writing such as novels, short sto ...
. With
Ludwig Tieck
Johann Ludwig Tieck (; ; 31 May 177328 April 1853) was a German poet, fiction writer, translator, and critic. He was one of the founding fathers of the Romanticism, Romantic movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Early life
Tieck w ...
and the Schlegel brothers, he co-founded
German Romanticism
German Romanticism () was the dominant intellectual movement of German-speaking countries in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, influencing philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and criticism. Compared to English Romanticism, the German vari ...
.
Life
Wackenroder was born in Berlin. He was a close friend of
Tieck from youth until his early death. They collaborated on virtually everything they wrote in this period. Wackenroder probably made substantial contributions to Tieck's novel ''Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen'' (''Franz Sternbald’s Wanderings,'' 1798), and Tieck to Wackenroder's influential collection of essays, ''Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders'' (''Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar,'' 1797). ''Outpourings'' is a tribute to Renaissance and
medieval literature
Medieval literature is a broad subject, encompassing essentially all written works available in Europe and beyond during the Middle Ages (that is, the one thousand years from the fall of the Western Roman Empire ca. AD 500 to the beginning of t ...
and
art
Art is a diverse range of cultural activity centered around ''works'' utilizing creative or imaginative talents, which are expected to evoke a worthwhile experience, generally through an expression of emotional power, conceptual ideas, tec ...
, attributing to them a sense of emotion Wackenroder and Tieck felt was missing in German
Enlightenment thought. It was also the first work to claim for
Northern Renaissance
The Northern Renaissance was the Renaissance that occurred in Europe north of the Alps, developing later than the Italian Renaissance, and in most respects only beginning in the last years of the 15th century. It took different forms in the vari ...
art a status equivalent to that of the
Italian Renaissance
The Italian Renaissance ( ) was a period in History of Italy, Italian history between the 14th and 16th centuries. The period is known for the initial development of the broader Renaissance culture that spread across Western Europe and marked t ...
, at least in the case of
Albrecht Dürer
Albrecht Dürer ( , ;; 21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528),Müller, Peter O. (1993) ''Substantiv-Derivation in Den Schriften Albrecht Dürers'', Walter de Gruyter. . sometimes spelled in English as Durer or Duerer, was a German painter, Old master prin ...
. The ''Outpourings'' have been accorded a status in Germany akin to that of ''
Lyrical Ballads
''Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems'' is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. ...
'' in England, i.e. as the first work of the
Romantic movement.
[ Koerner, Joseph. ''Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape'', pp. 55-56]
Wackenroder died in Berlin in 1798 at the age of 24 of a case of
typhoid fever
Typhoid fever, also known simply as typhoid, is a disease caused by '' Salmonella enterica'' serotype Typhi bacteria, also called ''Salmonella'' Typhi. Symptoms vary from mild to severe, and usually begin six to 30 days after exposure. Often th ...
.
References
Bibliography
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External links
German Romanticism from the Literary Encyclopedia.
Wackenroders „Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders“ in ihrem Verhältnis zu Vasarivon Dr. Ernst Dessauer at
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks."
It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital li ...
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Wackenroder, Wilhelm H
1773 births
1798 deaths
Writers from Berlin
Jurists from Berlin
People from the Margraviate of Brandenburg
University of Halle alumni
University of Erlangen–Nuremberg alumni
University of Göttingen alumni
18th-century German people
German male writers
Jurists from the Kingdom of Prussia