BAUMGARTNER, ALEXANDER. - Swiss Jesuit, literary critic, and historian, born in St. Gall on 27 June 1841, died in Luxembourg on 5 September 1910. He was the son of the noted historian and statesman Gallus Jakob B., whose Geschichte des schweiz. Freistaates und Kantons St. Gallen (3 vols., St. Gall 1890) he later completed and for whom he wrote a biographical profile: Gallus Jakob B.... und die neue Staatsentwicklung in der Schweiz (1769 bis 1869) (Freiburg im Br. 1892).
A Jesuit from 1860, Baumgartner was assigned after his studies (1873) to the editorial staff of the journal Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, where he attracted attention with incisive literary criticism of Lessing, Longfellow, Vondel, and others (some of his early studies on Goethe and Das Ramayana und die Rama-Literatur der Inder (1892) appeared in the supplementary volumes, or *Ergänzungshefte*, of Stimmen). His vigorous work Goethe, sein Leben und seine Werke (3 vols., Freiburg im Br. 1885–86), though fair in judgment, at times provoked sharp reactions against the prevailing neopagan idolatry of the poet, sparking heated controversy (cf. N. Scheid, Verständigung im Streit um Goethe, in Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, 86 [1941], pp. 420–28; the work was later revised in 2 vols. by A. Stockmann, Freiburg im Br. 1923–25). Baumgartner’s masterpiece, however, remained unfortunately incomplete: Geschichte der Weltliteratur (6 vols., Freiburg im Br. 1897–1911), which treats ancient literatures—both Oriental and Greco-Roman—as well as medieval Latin literature; among modern national literatures, only French is covered in detail, and Italian appears only in the final posthumous volume. Gifted with a refined aesthetic sensibility and himself a poet, Baumgartner as a critic nonetheless adhered strictly to moral and religious principles and rejected the formula of “art for art’s sake,” an approach that earned him no small opposition toward the end of his life (cf. his essay Die Stellung der deutschen Katholiken zur neueren Literatur, Freiburg im Br. 1910). In another vein, his travel accounts of northern regions met with wide favor: Island und die Faröer (3rd ed., Leipzig 1902); Durch Skandinavien nach S. Petersburg (3rd ed., Leipzig 1901); Reisebilder aus Schottland (3rd ed., Leipzig 1906).