Johann Christoph Gottsched

Johann Christoph Gottsched (; 2 February 1700 – 12 December 1766) was a German philosopher, author, critic and grammarian of the Enlightenment.

Biography

Early life He was born at Juditten (renamed Mendeleyevo in 1947) near Königsberg (Kaliningrad), Brandenburg-Prussia, the son of a Lutheran pastor, and was baptised in St. Mary's Church. He studied philosophy and history at the University of Königsberg, but immediately on taking the degree of Magister in 1723, he fled to Leipzig to avoid being drafted into the Prussian army. In Leipzig, he enjoyed the protection of Johann Burckhardt Mencke, who, under the name of "Philander von der Linde", was a well-known poet and president of the Deutschübende poetische Gesellschaft in Leipzig. Of this society, Gottsched was elected "Senior" in 1726, and in the next year reorganised it under the title of the Deutsche Gesellschaft. He insisted German literature be subordinated to the laws of French classicism. He enunciated rules by which the playwright must be bound (such as the Ständeklausel), and abolished bombast and buffoonery from the serious stage. In 1740, he came into conflict with the Swiss writers Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger, who, under the influence of Addison and contemporary Italian critics, demanded that the poetic imagination should not be hampered by artificial rules. As examples, they pointed to English poets, especially Milton. Gottsched, although not blind to the beauties of the English writers, clung tenaciously to his principle that poetry must be the product of rules and, in the fierce controversy which for a time raged between Leipzig and Zürich, he was ultimately defeated.

Works

Gottsched's chief work was his Versuch einer kritischen Dichtkunst für die Deutschen (1730), the first systematic treatise in German on the art of poetry from the standpoint of Boileau. His Ausführliche Redekunst (1728) and his Grundlegung einer deutschen Sprachkunst (1748) were of importance for the development of German style and the purification of the language. He wrote several plays, of which Der sterbende Cato (1732), an adaptation of Joseph Addison's tragedy and a French play on the same theme, was long popular on the stage. His Deutsche Schaubühne (6 volumes, 1740–45) contained mainly translations from the French,

Gottsched wrote the texts of two secular cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach: Laß, Fürstin, laß noch einen Strahl (BWV 198) and Willkommen! Ihr herrschenden Götter der Erden (BWV Anh. 13, music lost).

Family

His first wife, Luise Kulmus, was also a prominent author. She died in 1762. After a three-year mourning period, in 1765 in Camburg, Saale, Gottsched married his 19-year-old second wife, Ernestine Susanne Katharina Neunes (1746–1811).