Background
He was born on February 2, 1700 at Juditten (Mendeleyevo) near Königsberg (Kaliningrad), Brandenburg-Prussia (now Russia), to a Lutheran clergyman.
( Johann Christoph Gottsched: Der sterbende Cato. Ein Tra...)
Johann Christoph Gottsched: Der sterbende Cato. Ein Trauerspiel Edition Holzinger. Taschenbuch Berliner Ausgabe, 2016, 4. Auflage Vollständiger, durchgesehener Neusatz mit einer Biographie des Autors bearbeitet und eingerichtet von Michael Holzinger • Entstanden: 1730. • Erstdruck: Leipzig (Teubners Buchladen), 1732. • Uraufführung Januar 1731 durch die Neubersche Theatergruppe. Textgrundlage ist die Ausgabe: • Johann Christoph Gottsched: Ausgewählte Werke. Herausgegeben von Joachim Birke, Band 1: Gedichte und Gedichtübertragungen, Band 2: Sämtliche Dramen, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1968/1970. Herausgeber der Reihe: Michael Holzinger Reihengestaltung: Viktor Harvion Umschlaggestaltung unter Verwendung des Bildes: Bildnis Johann Christoph Gottsched, um 1750 Gesetzt aus der Minion Pro, 10 pt.
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He was born on February 2, 1700 at Juditten (Mendeleyevo) near Königsberg (Kaliningrad), Brandenburg-Prussia (now Russia), to a Lutheran clergyman.
He was educated at the University of Königsberg. There he took the degree of Magister in 1723.
He fled to Leipzig in 1724 in order to escape impressment into the king's guard. He became a lecturer at the University of Leipzig and in 1734 professor of logic and metaphysics. From 1730 to 1740 Gottsched was the undisputed arbiter of German aesthetic taste. In the following decade, however, his influence waned under the attacks of the Swiss critics Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698 - 1783) and Johann Jakob Breitinger (1707 - 1776), and he became an object of ridicule. The deathblow to his prestige was Lessing's seventeenth Literaturbrief in 1759.
Gottsched's goal was to systematically reform the German theater, literature, and language. His historically important Versuch einer kritischen Dichtkunst (1730) set up dogmatic theories of aesthetics, and championed a literature based on reason and morality. Der sterbende Cato (1731) ("Dying Cato") had an unprecedented success on the stage despite its artistic worthlessness. Allied with the influential Neuber troupe, Gottsched tried to replace the irregular, often bombastic plays of the time with more conventional pieces in the classical French manner. The Deutsche Schaubuhne (1740 - 1745) supplied chiefly translations of French and other foreign plays for the new German stage.
Gottsched also published several literary periodicals, a treatise of rationalistic philosophy, and a Deutsche Sprachkunst (1748). Gottsched bitterly defended his rationalistic, pedantic view of literature against the Swiss, and other critics, by whom imagination was accorded a greater significance in creative writing. Critics are now agreed that Gottsched's reforms, particularly those pertaining to the theater, were of inestimable value to later, greater German writers of the 18th century.
( Johann Christoph Gottsched: Der sterbende Cato. Ein Tra...)
The Societas eruditorum incognitorum
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.