Christoph Martin Wieland

Innovator, Enlightenment philosopher, writer, journalist, political animal, expert judge of human nature: Christoph Martin Wieland, Weimar’s intellectual godfather, was all of these things. He and Lessing were the central figures of the German Enlightenment. It was thanks to Wieland that the novel became a recognised literary genre in Germany; he also wrote the first German opera, and his erotic epic poems introduced a new tone to German poetry. He published ‘Der Teutsche Merkur’, one of the most important literary and political magazines in Europe at the time, and almost as a sideline he shaped the genre of political journalism with his texts about the French Revolution and Napoleon, whose dictatorship he foresaw early on and whom he met in Weimar in 1808. There are many reasons to revisit Wieland. Jan Philipp Reemstma’s major biography, the product of decades of research, gives us the opportunity to do just that.

*Long-awaited: the major Wieland biography by Jan Philipp Reemtsma

*Germany’s first author

*The first Wieland biography for seventy years

*The man who invented ‘Weimar’

*Major Wieland exhibition on the Wieland estate at Oßmannstedt near Weimar, curated by Jan Philipp Reemtsma