The German poet, writer and educator of the late Enlightenment developed the genre of the novel explanation for their summit. His disbelief was voiced is also a critical Selbstrefflektion to the Enlightenment. Basis of his philosophical thoughts was the English empiricism and French mechanistic materialism. In his novel works that he made often satirical, Johann Carl Wezel criticized the unwarranted sentimentality or idealizations, or he took against the feudal absolutism. His most vital work is entitled “and Ulrike Herrmann, a comic novel” (1780) …
Johann Carl Wezel on 31 October 1747 in the Thuringian Sondershausen born as the son of a royal servant.
Wezel spent his childhood and youth in poor circumstances. He attended high school in Sondershausen. He then studied in the years 1765 to 1769 in Leipzig theology, later moving to the fields of philosophy, philology, and law. He subsequently worked as a tutor in Bautzen and Berlin. He tried to make a living as a freelance writer. With a trip to Vienna, he joined the hope of a job at the National Theatre, which was not fulfilled, but.
He went back to Leipzig in 1784, he went from there in 1789 in his hometown Sondershausen. Later he suffered from depression, and he was mentally ill. In the last thirty years he lived in a spiritual trance. Wezel shunned public life and the people. In his works he articulated a consistent disbelief about the company and all its manifestations – as he has often articulated during the Enlightenment. But he also took a skeptical attitude headed for the Enlightenment aspirations of his own time.
In his first novel, written down with humor, “Tobias Knaut life report of the wise, otherwise known as the Stammerer” (1773-1776) is Wezel oriented to the English writer Laurence Sterne. This is the life report of an eccentric, as was right even of Wezel, told on the basis of French materialism. In his next novel, “Belphegor, or the most likely report under the sun” (1776), he goes off with biting satire on human society and the best of all possible worlds attacked Leibnitz-Wolff `shear Coleur.
Wezel withdraws its confidence in human perfectibility, as he had to experience it physically in your own life. With his enthusiastic literary beginnings, which were accompanied by their own overestimation of frustration followed, which contributed to the grueling links to book sellers and the market saturated with writers offer their impart. 1780 published the book “Robinson Crusoe” in which he granted the utopian vision of a harmonious society and a refusal to denounce the feudal absolutism. “Ulrike Herrmann, a comic novel” (1780) is considered his masterpiece.
In the play’s author was attempting characteristics of like and education to accommodate novel and a comedy enriched with vision of society, where he served as an additional form of letters and dialogues elements. The literary output was Wezel for this novel in the experiment with the different shapes as design elements. He lined up so that one to the other writers of his time trying to implement a similar diversity of forms in the novel genre. The reconciliation at the end in “Ulrike Herrmann and” is in doubt ironically, so that the author once again takes the disbelief that characterizes all his work.
Another characteristic of his work is not alone in his disbelief of all possible social phenomenon, but also on the education try itself, he turned to the unsuccessful figments of Enlightenment thought and place them in his works on literary expression. For consistently skeptical attitude he was urged by his own contemporaries. Just as, for example by Christoph Martin Wieland, who attested to his fantastic writing talent but also marked him as a German and Fielding.
His other works contain “Epistle to the German poet” (1775), “Satirical narratives” (1777-17778), “comedies” (1778-1787), “The wild, Betty. A history of matrimony” (1779), ” Peter Marks. A marriage report “(1779),” On Language, knowledge and taste of the Germans “(1781),” Wilhelmine Arend, or the danger of sentimentality “(1782),” cockroach, or history of a Rosicrucian, out of the last century ” (1784) and “Essay on the knowledge of man” (1785).
Johann Carl Wezel died on 28 January 1819 in Sondershau
