Jakob Baechtold

Jakob Baechtold, surname sometimes spelled as Bächtold (27 January 1848, Schleitheim – 7 August 1897, Zurich) was a Swiss literary scholar.

He studied German philology under Adolf Holtzmann at Heidelberg University, then continued his education at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and in 1870, he received his doctorate from the University of Tübingen with a thesis on the Lanzelet of Ulrich von Zatzikhoven. From 1872, he worked as a schoolteacher in Solothurn and Zurich, and from 1879 to 1884 he headed the feuilleton of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ).

In 1880, he obtained his habilitation at the University of Zurich, where in 1888 he was named a full professor of German literature. In Zurich, he also gave lectures at the Polytechnic School from 1896. He was the author of numerous biographies in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie.