Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetHeinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg
German poet
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Tønder, Region of Southern Denmark, Denmark
About Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg
- Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg (3 January 1737 – 1 November 1823) was a German poet and critic. Gerstenberg was born in Tønder, Denmark.
- After attending school in Husum and at the Christianeum Hamburg, and studying law at the University of Jena (1757-1759), he entered 1760 the Danish military service and took later part in the Russian campaign of 1762.
- He spent the next twelve years in Copenhagen, where he was intimate with Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock.
- His military period ends in the year 1771.
- Von Gerstenberg was a Danish deputy in a German Chamber and was an assessor in the Commercial Deputation up to 1775. From 1775 to 1783 he represented Denmark's interests as Danish Resident at Lübeck, and in 1786 received a judicial appointment at Altona, where he died in November 1823. In the course of his long life, Gerstenberg passed through many phases of his nation's literature.
- He began as an imitator of the Anacreontic school (Tändeleyen, 1759); then wrote, in imitation of Gleim, Kriegslieder eines dänischen Grenadiers (1762); with his Gedicht eines Skalden (1766) he joined the group of bards led by Klopstock.
- He translated Beaumont and Fletcher's Maid's Tragedy (1767), and helped to usher in the Sturm und Drang period with a gruesome but powerful tragedy, Ugolino (1768).
- But he did perhaps even better service to the new literary movement with his Briefe über Merkwürdigkeiten der Litteratur (1766-1770), in which the critical principles of the Sturm und Drang, and especially its enthusiasm for Shakespeare, were first definitely formulated.
- In later life Gerstenberg lost touch with literature, and occupied himself mainly with Kant's philosophy. His Vermischte Schriften appeared in 3 vols.
- (1815).
- The Briefe über Merkwürdigkeiten der Litteratur were republished with an introduction by Alexander von Weilen (1888).
Read more at Wikipedia
See Also
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