Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder

Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (born July 13, 1773, Berlin, Prussia [Germany]—died Feb. 13, 1798, Berlin) was a 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.