Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder
born July 13, 1773, Berlin, Prussia
[Germany]
died Feb. 13, 1798, Berlin
writer and critic who was the
originator, with his friend Ludwig
Tieck, of some of the most important
ideas of German Romanticism.
Wackenroder was the son of a senior
civil servant whose expectations that he
pursue a successful worldly career were
incompatible with the boy’s natural
sympathies and caused him severe
conflict throughout his short lifetime.
At school the shy and melancholy
Wackenroder, happy only when listening
to music, formed a friendship with the
more vital and creative Tieck. This
friendship was to be of great importance
for the work of both men.
After studying with Tieck at the
universities of Erlangen (1793) and
Göttingen (1793–94), Wackenroder
returned to Berlin in 1794. There he was
forced into the Prussian civil service
by his father, but his preoccupations
remained literary. He translated light
English novels and wrote anecdotal
accounts of the lives of Albrecht Dürer,
Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and
Raphael. He also wrote a “biography” of
Joseph Berglinger, an imaginary musician
and a spokesman for Wackenroder’s views
on art. In these stories he developed an
enthusiastic emotional aesthetic,
according to which the perfect work of
art is created by a divine miracle and
is a moral, aesthetic, and religious
unity to be grasped only by the heart,
not by the intellect. In 1797, on
Tieck’s advice, these writings were
published under a title chosen by the
publishers, Herzensergiessungen eines
kunstliebenden Klosterbruders
(“Outpourings of an Art-Loving Monk”).
In 1799 Tieck published the continuation
of Herzensergiessungen (with the
addition of some of his own essays) as
Phantasien über die Kunst (“Fantasies on
Art”). Wackenroder died of typhoid at
the age of 24.
