WIELAND, CHRISTOPH MARTIN. - German poet, b. at Oberholzheim (Swabia) on 5 Sept. 1733, d. at Weimar on 20 Jan. 1813.
He received a Pietist education and studied law at Tübingen. In Zurich he was a guest of Bodmer, an admirer of his hexameter fragment Hermann (1751); but he fell into controversy with him after his estrangement from the "seraphic" mentality. From 1760 he was secretary of the municipal Chancery of Biberach (Swabia) and from 1769 professor of philosophy at the University of Erfurt. He frequented Frenchified fashionable circles. His political utopia in the form of the novel Der goldene Spiegel (1772) earned him the post of tutor to the hereditary prince Karl August of Sachsen-Weimar. A friend of Goethe, Schiller, Herder, and Kleist, he was opposed by the disciples of Klopstock, by the Stürmer, and by the Romantics.
Supreme representative of German literary rococo, one of the most skilful translators and the first great German publicist, open to all modern spiritual currents, W. attained poetic mastery after detaching himself from the Bodmerian and Klopstockian literary models and from an insincere Puritan fanaticism culminating in the preface to the prose hymns Empfindungen eines Christen (1757). He translated, mostly into prose, 22 Theatralische Werke of Shakespeare (1762-66), with a decisive influence on the Shakespearean cult of the age, and wrote, following the English metre, the first German tragedy in iambics and 5 stresses (Lady Johanna Gray, 1756-58), a metre later that of classical drama in Germany. Making his own the wisdom of life and the irony as they are revealed in the works of Aristophanes, Lucian, Horace, Cicero (of which authors W. translated much), Ariosto, Cervantes, Erasmus, Voltaire, Shaftesbury, and Sterne, he composed 7 great novels, mostly set in Greece or the Orient, 6 tales in verse, partly in ottava rima, and several melodramas: masterpieces of imagination and of style, of a linguistic suppleness never before attained, some of capital importance for the further development of German and European literatures. The autobiographical Bildungsroman Geschichte des Agathon (1766-94), one of the models of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, represents the transformation of a young Schwärmer into a balanced man, while the satire Die Abderiten (1774-81) mocks the narrow and servile mentality of the philistines. The romantic epic Oberon (1780), the basis of Weber's opera and appreciated by Goethe as W.'s masterpiece, interweaves Chaucerian, Shakespearean, and chivalric motifs in a moving tale of adventures and faithful love of two couples. The journals founded and for many years edited by W., Der teutsche Merkur (1773-1810) and Attisches Museum (1796-1803, 1805-1809), are numbered among the most important of the age, especially for the collaboration of Goethe, Schiller, and Herder.
Bibliography8 works
Horst Rüdiger