“Who isn’t delighted by something like this…”: Jan Philipp Reemtsma’s long biography of Christoph Martin Wieland

When Ludwig Tieck once confessed to Fichte in Jena that he wanted to insist on the unity of abstract thinking and poetic perception, he received a resounding verbal slap in the face from the philosopher. Hadn’t German idealism been working on sharply separating the two areas?

Now we learn that Christoph Martin Wieland had to accept a similar humiliation in the reception of his works. At the beginning of his new biography, Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who has studied this 18th-century writer for a long time, refers to the riddle that Wieland was deeply admired in his day, but was quickly forgotten in the years that followed.

As his book progresses, he develops how one might get the impression that this author is just a temporary, wispy phenomenon. In the 19th and even in the 20th century, he writes, critics found it difficult to take seriously the unity of philosophy and poetry that Wieland had presented and, a little later, that Tieck also had in mind. Reemtsma can show that Wieland, for example in his “History of Agathon”, emphasizes the “location-dependence of the view of the world” in a highly reflective manner and at the same time made the novel a generally recognized literary genre in Germany.

Wieland, a pastor’s son, had to break away from his father’s strict Protestant tradition and felt a lifelong aversion to monastic asceticism, which was not least associated with Protestant work ideals. As a 17-year-old, he adores his cousin Sophie and does so to reassure himself of his poetic vocation. Reemtsma observes: “It takes, it seems, a person of allure and beauty to show that he has a sense for it.”

Longing looks

A little later he tries to marry the Catholic Christine Hogel, but after the bi-denominational marriage with her is prevented by the authorities, he can only write to Sophie about bitter disappointment: “The only thing we were able to do was give us a moment to see from afar; I went down into my little garden, she went up to the attic of her house, from where the view leads into my garden. We looked at each other for a few seconds.” That look must still get to you today.

It is revealing which authors the young writer wanted to build on. There is Barthold Heinrich Brockes, whose descriptions of nature he expands to include the presence of scantily clad people, as the biographer notes. Likewise Lucretius, whose turn to nature and rejection of a hereafter promised by the gods he gladly adopts. In this sense he states that the universe “possesses all kinds of beauties, it runs through all kinds of changes; and all this difference finally gets lost in one main purpose, which is the greatest and best that can be imagined. This is the collection of things whose nature is outlined in the following books!”

With the conviction that such a literary world is at the same time “the most perfect work of the deity”, “to the excellence of which all the attributes of God have agreed”, he then remains true to the theological tradition in his own way.

Wieland’s last work is the great epistolary novel “Aristipp and some of his contemporaries”, which was written around the turn of the 19th century. Here he once again calmly explained what he was about in his writing, namely a commemoration of antiquity, a relaxed culture of conversation and an urbanity in which erotic tendencies were also allowed to be freely discussed.

Strange that despite all the recognition of Wieland’s works, Goethe also harbored rancor against him and mockingly admonished him to “moderation” in his interpersonal relationships: no participation in court life in Weimar, which he would have been able to reach from nearby Oßmannstedt. He should prove himself to be a faithful husband who is no longer tempted by other women. But Reemtsma knows Wieland as the leading eroticist of 18th century Germany, likes to quote him and comes to the conclusion: “If something doesn’t delight, there’s no help.”

Yes, Wieland invented modern German literature. Now a rumbling can be heard from his work that had to rest underground, so to speak, in order to concern us today. It is Reemtsma’s great merit that he rediscovered it and described it precisely and intelligently.

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