Karl Rechlin

Johann Carl ( Karl ) Rechlin (born October 31, 1769 in Rostock (not Lübeck), † December 17, 1796 in Lübeck ) was a German writer.

Life

Karl Rechlin was a son of the grocer Christian Carl Rechlin (* August 5, 1737 in Mirow ; † March 27, 1795 in Lübeck) and his wife Sophia, née Wreede (* in Bützow ; † March 26, 1781 in Lübeck). His father served in the Imperial Cadet Corps and was transferred to Saint Petersburg , where Karl Rechlin spent his early childhood. In 1781 his father opened a small shop in Lübeck with his savings.

Karl Rechlin received his education at the Katharineum in Lübeck . Here he made close friends with Carl Georg Curtius . Both wrote the drama "Demetrius" as students. They later studied at the University of Jena , where they worked again on the drama. They sent this anonymously to Friedrich Schiller , whom they asked for a judgment. Schiller praised the authors and encouraged them to continue writing. Rechlin and Curtius published their work anonymously in Jena in 1792, with a dedication to Schiller.

From autumn 1789 Rechlin attended lectures in theology with Johann Christoph Döderlein and poetry and rhetoric with Christian Gottfried Schütz . He also studied mathematics and physics. Towards the end of his studies he heard philosophy from Carl Leonhard Reinhold . Schütz and especially Reinhold taught him the philosophy of Immanuel Kant . In the summer of 1792 Rechlin stayed in Weimar for health reasons . Here he made the acquaintance of Christoph Martin Wieland . This took over three poems of Rechlin in the "Neue Teutsche Merkur". They appeared in the years 1793 and 1794.

At Easter 1793 Rechlin settled in Lübeck. At this point he was a theology candidate and worked as a tutor and writer. The writer Friederike Brun invited him to Copenhagen in February 1795 . She planned a trip to Switzerland and Italy, during which Rechlin was to look after her children as an educator. During the crossing to the Danish capital, Rechlin fell ill and broke off the journey in Kiel. He went back to Lübeck and opened a private school with the help of Christian Adolph Overbeck . He also worked here on mathematics, philosophy and wrote poetry.

Rechlin died unmarried at the age of 27 due to several blood attacks.

His family book (friendship album), which has essentially been preserved, with entries from the years 1789 to 1793 from Lübeck and Jena, was acquired by the Lübeck City Library in 1930 .

Importance and works as a poet

Carl Georg Curtius wrote his biography after the death of his friend. It was to be read in the "Hanseatisches Magazin" in 1800, but that did not change the fact that Rechlin was quickly forgotten. It is not known to what extent he was involved in the drama "Demetrius" sent to Schiller. Schiller described the layout and the linguistic design as successful. He described the drawings of the characters and the management of the plot as not yet sufficiently balanced.

Rechlins wrote melodramatic verse narratives in his "Fantasy Painting" in the form of his collection. He dressed her historically and relocated the plot to the past and sometimes to remote places. The seals are characterized by sensitivity. In 1795, while studying philosophy with Reinhold, Rechlin wrote the book on the "Popular representation of the influence of critical philosophy in main ideas of previous theology".

After Rechlin's death his story “The Wonderful” came out. It was based on the fragment of the novel The Spirit Seer . August Wilhelm Schlegel wrote a review on this for the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung . In it he described Rechlin's work as artificial with an unnecessarily complex plot.

Fonts

• Demetrius. Jena 1792 ( digitized version )
• Popular representation of the influence of critical philosophy in the main ideas of previous theology. Lübeck: Bohn 1795 ( digitized version )
• Fantasy painting. Lübeck; Leipzig: Bohn; Chemnitz: Wesselhöft 1795

literature

• Alken Bruns: Rechlin, Karl . In: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Volume 10. Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1994, pp. 302-303.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ms. Lub. 785a, entry in the Repertorium Alborum Amicorum Studbook database , accessed on June 9, 2020