Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder

Gerhart Hoffmeister (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Ed. by Gerhard P. Knapp, University of Utah
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.4.1: German-language Writing and Culture: Germany, 500-present.
Vol. editors: Gerhard P. Knapp (University of Utah), Jennifer Marston William (Purdue University), Herbert Rowland (Purdue University), Jill E. Twark (East Carolina University)

Dates

Born 13 Jul 1773
Died 13 Feb 1798
Activity 1793-1798

Places

Born in Germany
Active in Germany

Activities

Primary

Essayist
Poet

Resources

Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, the son of a Prussian civil servant, was born 13 July 1773 in Berlin and, after studying at Erlangen in Southern Germany and a close friendship and collaboration with Ludwig Tieck, he died of typhoid on 13 February 1798 in Berlin at the age of twenty-four. This is his life story in a nutshell, but each word above is significant: although this young genius had devoted only the last two years of his life (1796-98) to publications, both his career and writings have become important proof and documentation of the changes taking place within the intellectual and artistic scene of the Age of Goethe.

Berlin was the center of late Enlightenment, where Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn were …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

946 words

Citation: Hoffmeister, Gerhart. "Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 January 2013 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5561, accessed 21 November 2024.]

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here