Christoph Martin Wieland

Christoph Martin Wieland (Oberholzheim, 1733 – Weimar, 1813) was a German poet, writer, translator and editor, and a representative figure of Rococo literature and the German Enlightenment. He lived through the shift from the religious tone of his early verse to the worldly, reasoned prose of his maturity, and he helped prepare the ground for Weimar Classicism.

He was born in Oberholzheim, a village in what is now south-eastern Baden-Württemberg, then split between the Free Imperial City of Biberach an der Riss and a monastery. His father, a pastor, took great care over his schooling. At twelve he was sent to a gymnasium near Magdeburg, where he read the Latin classics and the leading French writers of the day. He began law at Tübingen in 1752 but spent most of his time on literature. His early poems, pietistic in tone and shaped by Klopstock, brought him to the attention of the Swiss critic Bodmer, and he spent much of the next decade in Switzerland.

Around 1760 his style changed noticeably. His tragedies, epic fragments and moral tales of this period shed their earlier religious solemnity, and Lessing remarked that Wieland had left the ethereal spheres to walk again among ordinary people. Back in Biberach, his friendship with Count Stadion gave him access to a library rich in French and English books, and he met again his youthful love, Sophie Gutermann. From then on he championed a lighter philosophy in which sensuality and irony sat comfortably beside moral reflection. His novel Geschichte des Agathon (1766-1767), which recounts his own intellectual growth under the guise of a Greek story, is often regarded as one of the first Bildungsromane. He also rendered twenty-two of Shakespeare's plays into prose, the first time German readers had access to most of the English playwright's work.

In 1772 he became tutor to the sons of Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, and Weimar remained his home until his death. That year he founded Der teutsche Merkur, which became the most influential literary journal in Germany. Goethe mocked him in a satire, and Wieland replied with good humour; the Weimar circle that followed brought together Goethe, Herder and later Schiller. Politically he was a moderate liberal who favoured a constitutional monarchy and a free press. His lasting contribution lies in the fluency of his prose, the blend of lightness and depth in his writing, and his role in bringing classical and foreign literature to German readers.