Christoph Martin Wieland was an important German writer that became mostly known by work in the areas of literature, poetry and translation.
Wieland was born on the 5th September 1733, in Oberholzheim. His father was a pastor who professed Pietism, so religion had a great influence in the early works of the author. From an early age, Christoph Wieland revealed an extraordinary ability to learn, as well as a great interest in reading and writing; after finishing high school, he entered Tübingen University, where he intended to study Law. However, young Christoph focused almost entirely on literary studies and writing poetry; he was even able to publish some of his work that caught the attention of Johann Jakob Bodmer, a Swiss academic that invited him to a visit to Zurich, in order to discuss their works and common interests. Wieland would end up staying in Switzerland for several years, getting a job as a tutor in Bern, where he established relationships with several other authors; this entrance in a new society and the constant exchange of ideas between academics and writers would have a great impact in Wieland’s writings, until then strongly influenced by religion.
From 1760 onwards, Wieland’s work displays a more rational side, with the exploration of aspects of a more sensual nature; in fact, the alterations in the genre approached was a constant throughout his career. Despite the fact that Wieland lived during the Rococo period in Germany, his work portrays influences that come from the Enlightenment to Classicism, and even some pre-Romanticism, as well as the afore mentioned Pietistic and Rationalist influences.
In 1760, Wieland returns to Germany, where he accepts a job has a director of the archives of public record in the city of Biberach, but he continues to focus on his writings at the same time; the inspiration in Greek mythology, already present in poems like “Araspes und Panthea”, becomes even clearer with the publication of the romance “Geschichte des Agathon”, a fictional history that occurs in Greece, and where Wieland explores a rational side and of intellectual growth. In the following years, the author continues to write prolifically, and also to work on some translations, with emphasis being placed on the publication, between 1762 and 1766, of several plays from Shakespeare translated to German and transposed to prose, in an attempt to reintroduce the English author in Germany through a new and innovative approach.
During this period, most precisely in 1765, Christoph Wieland marries Anna Dorothea Von Hillenbrand, with whom he would have 14 children.
In 1769, Wieland was invited to be a Philosophy teacher at Erfurt University, which he accepted only to quit a few years later, in 1772. On the following year, he founded a magazine of literary criticism that went by the name “Der Teutsche Merkur”, and would soon be considered the most important publication in the area in Germany. Besides his writings of romances and poetry, Wieland also wrote some librettos, as well as literary critics that were published in his magazine, along with the translations, into which he specially focused on the last years of his life, particularly translations of classic authors from Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. However, he became most known until this day for his poetry, being “Oberon”, an epic poem published in 1780, considered his masterpiece.
Christoph Wieland died in Weimar, on the 20th January 1813.
