Johann Karl Wezel

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Wezel, copperplate engraving by Christian Gottlieb Geyser
Wezel memorial stele on the Gottesacker in Sondershausen

Johann Karl Wezel (also: Carl ; also: Wetzel , born October 31, 1747 in Sondershausen ; † January 28, 1819 there ) was a German poet , writer , translator from English and educator of the late Enlightenment .

Life

Johann Karl Wezel was the son of a courtly civil servant cook of rural origin. Wezel showed musical and poetic talents early on and was encouraged by Nikolaus Dietrich Giseke , in whose house he also moved when he began studying theology in Leipzig in 1764 . Soon he added law, philosophy and philology to his subjects.

Christian Fürchtegott Gellert arranged for Wezel, who turned to study Locke , Voltaire and La Mettrie without a degree , a position as court master with the Baron von Schönberg in Bautzen / Trattlau, where he stayed until 1775. After 1776 he worked as a critic at the "New Library of Fine Sciences and Liberal Arts". Wezel received strong support from Christoph Martin Wieland , with whom he later fell out.

Wezel traveled to Saint Petersburg , Paris and London , he was a theater poet in Vienna from 1782 to 1784 and probably returned to his birthplace in Sondershausen in 1793. During the last two decades of his life he found himself in a life crisis, triggered by social isolation, financial difficulties and literary controversies. He was subjected to several psychiatric treatments, in June 1800 with Samuel Hahnemann in Altona. Whether and to what extent he was still writing at this time is unknown; his manuscripts were stolen several times. Books that appeared under his name during this period are mostly hidden; Whether they also contain parts of the stolen manuscripts has not been researched.

The “Wezel House” in Sondershausen, where Wezel spent the last eight years of his life, was demolished in 1986. Today there is a metal stele there, and the street bears his name.

Wezel was one of the first authors who could live from her writing alone. Some of his books were great successes, especially Hermann and Ulrike . Nevertheless, he was almost completely forgotten during his lifetime. In 1837 Hermann Marggraff dedicated a longer essay in his collection of books and people to the “eccentric from Sondershausen”. But it was Arno Schmidt who brought Wezel back to mind in 1959 with the radio essay Belphegor or How I Hate You .

plant

Wezel initially wrote poetry , but also novels , comedies and satires . His work is influenced by Henry Fielding , Tobias G. Smollett and Laurence Sterne , among others . Wezel's satirical novel Belphegor is seen as the counterpart to Voltaire's Candide and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels . The idealist Belphegor travels together with his friends Medardus and Fromal and their former mistress Akante through a world marked by horror and cruelty and withdraws, disaffected, into a small utopia in Virginia, which is isolated from the outside world.

In addition to his literary work, Wezel also wrote an independent contribution to the new science of anthropology , which makes him unique among his contemporaries. He criticizes Ernst Platner's philosophical medicine, which still refers to metaphysical conceptions of the soul. Wezel himself advocates a new, empirical-psychological understanding of the soul. He conducted a public polemic about this with Platner . However, he himself pursues a written description of the affects and passions based on the experimental soul theory (1756) by Johann Gottlob Krüger . For Wezel, the “nerve juice” is the middle link between soul and body. In his pedagogy, Wezel is close to the educational ideas of the Dessau philanthropist , where the upbringing of people was not understood according to the idea of ​​a standardized, perfect ideal, but according to pragmatic points of view for the development of an individual personality.

Fonts

Individual works (selection)

Almost all of Wezel's works appeared anonymously during his lifetime.

  • Filibert and Theodosia . Leipzig 1772.
  • Life story of Tobias Knaut, the wise, otherwise known as the Stammler: collected from family news . Leipzig 1773–1776.
  • The Earl of Wickham . Leipzig 1774.
  • Epistle to the German poets . Leipzig 1775.
  • Belphegor or The most likely story under the sun . Novel. 2 volumes, Leipzig 1776 (volume 2 as digitized version and full text in the German text archive ).
  • Satirical stories . Leipzig 1777–1778.
  • Appellation of the vowels to the audience . Frankfurt / Leipzig 1778.
  • Peter Marcks, a marriage story . Leipzig 1778.
  • Comedies. Leipzig 1778–1787.
  • The wild Betty . Leipzig 1779.
  • Zelmor and Ermide . Leipzig 1779.
  • Diary of a new husband . Frankfurt / Leipzig 1779.
  • Robinson Krusoe Re-edited . Leipzig 1779.
  • Herrmann and Ulrike . Funny novel. 4 volumes, Leipzig 1780.
  • About the language, science and taste of the Germans. Leipzig 1781.
  • My resurrection o. O. 1782.
  • Wilhelmine Arend or the dangers of sensitivity . Dessau 1782.
  • Cockroach, or story of a Rosicrucian from centuries past . Leipzig 1784.
  • Experiment about the knowledge of man. 2 vols. Leipzig 1784/85.
  • Works of madness: by Wezel the God-Man. Erfurt 1804/05.

Work editions

  • Critical writings : Edited by Albert R. Schmitt, Phillip McKnight, 3 vols. Stuttgart 1971–1975.
  • Educational writings . Edited by Phillip McKnight. Frankfurt am Main 1996.
  • Complete edition in eight volumes . Edited by Klaus Manger and Wolfgang Hörner. Mattes Verlag, Heidelberg 1997 ff. (Five volumes published by 2017).

literature

Wezel yearbooks

ISSN  1438-4035

  • Wezel Yearbook 1998. Studies on the European Enlightenment . Edited by Philipp S. McKnight. Wehrhahn, Laatzen 1998, ISBN 3-932324-71-4 .
  • Wezel yearbook 1999 . Edited by Philipp S. McKnight. Laatzen 2000, ISBN 3-932324-72-2 .
  • Wezel Yearbook 2000 . Edited by Philipp S. McKnight. Laatzen 2001, ISBN 3-932324-73-0 .
  • Wezel Yearbook 2001 . Edited by Board of Directors of the Johann Karl Wezel Society. Laatzen 2002, ISBN 3-932324-74-9 .
  • Wezel yearbook 2002 . Edited by Jutta Heinz and Cornelia Ilbrig. Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-932324-88-9 .
  • Wezel yearbook 2003/2004 . Edited by Jutta Heinz and Cornelia Ilbrig. Laatzen 2005, ISBN 3-86525-006-8 .
  • Wezel Yearbook 2005 . Edited by Jutta Heinz and Cornelia Ilbrig. Laatzen 2006, ISBN 3-86525-034-3 .
  • Wezel Yearbook 2006 . Edited by Jutta Heinz and Cornelia Ilbrig. Laatzen 2007, ISBN 3-86525-062-9 .
  • Telling in upheaval. Narration 1770-1810. Texts, forms, contexts. Wezel Yearbook No. 12/13. Ed. Rainer Godel, Matthias Löwe. Wehrhahn, Hannover 2011, ISBN 978-3-86525-228-9 .

Research (selection)

  • Kurt Adel: Johann Karl Wezel. A contribution to the intellectual history of the Goethe era. Vienna 1968.
  • Bernhard Anemüller :  Wezel, Johann Karl . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 42, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1897, p. 292 f.
  • Pascal Bizard: “Which side of the world should one show young people?” The literary reflection of pedagogical concepts in prose texts by Johann Karl Wezel . Diss. Phil. University of Freiburg i. Br. 2007 ( full text ).
  • Irene Boose (Ed.): Why Wezel? For the 250th birthday of a scout . Heidelberg 1997.
  • Karl Joseph Bouginé (Hrsg.): Handbook of the general Litterargeschichte after Heumann's plan. Volume 5. Orell Füssli , Zurich 1792; again Hansebooks, 2017 ISBN 978-3-7434-6613-5 , p. 71 f.
  • Jutta Heinz: Johann Karl Wezel (= Meteors, 4th) ed. Alexander Košenina, Nikola Roßbach, Franziska Schößler. Wehrhahn, Hanover 2010.
  • Cornelia Ilbrig: Enlightenment under the sign of "happy skepticism". Johann Karl Wezel's work as a model case for literary skepticism in the late Enlightenment. Wehrhahn, Hannover 2007, ISBN 3-86525-046-7 .
  • Irene Karpenstein-Eßbach: Johann Karl Wezel as a meeting place for enlightening energies from the perspective of New Historicism . German quarterly journal for literary studies and intellectual history , DVJS, 77, 2003, pp. 564–590.
  • Alexander Košenina (ed.): Johann Karl Wezel (1747-1819). Röhrig, St. Ingbert 1997.
  • Friedrich Carl Ludloff : About Wezel, the writer . Sondershausen 1804.
  • Hermann Marggraff : JK Wezel, the eccentric from Sondershausen. Along with marginalia from the more recent times by Bernhard Langer. Fulda 1997.
  • Arno Schmidt : Belphegor or How I Hate You . Funkessay, 1959. In: The essayist work on German literature, 1 . Haffmans, Bargfeld 1988, pp. 191-222.
  • Martin-Andreas Schulz: Johann Karl Wezel. Literary public and storytelling. Research into his literary program and its implementation in his novels . Wehrhahn, Hannover 2000, ISBN 3-932324-90-0 .
  • André Thiele: About the power of small gifts . In: Konkret , 8, 1998.
  • Hans-Peter Nowitzki: The well-tempered person. Enlightenment anthropologies in conflict . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2003 (interdisciplinary dissertation on the philosophical-anthropological views of Wezel).
  • Christoph Neubert: Wezel: author, work, constructions . Studies on cultural poetics, 11th ed. Torsten Hahn, Erich Kleinschmidt , Nicolas Pethes. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2008, ISBN 3-8260-3695-6 .
  • Constantin von Wurzbach : Wetzel, John Charles I . In: Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich . 55th part. Kaiserlich-Königliche Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, Vienna 1887, pp. 183–186 ( digitized version ).

Web links

Commons : Johann Karl Wezel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Johann Karl Wezel  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In the spelling "Wetzel". Complete bibliography including the translations made by him. First edition available in Google Books . In other volumes of the same anthology, also available there, as well as in this volume elsewhere, he is sporadically mentioned in the spelling “Wezel”.
personal data
SURNAME Wezel, Johann Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wezel, Johann Carl; Wetzel, Johann Karl; Wetzel, JK (different spellings already during lifetime)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German poet, writer, translator and educator from the Sturm und Drang era
DATE OF BIRTH October 31, 1747
PLACE OF BIRTH Sondershausen
DATE OF DEATH January 28, 1819
Place of death Sondershausen