Jean Paul Richter

Biography

Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, was born on 21st March 1763 as the son of a poor village schoolmaster and organist, who later became the pastor at Joditz near Hof, and in 1776 at Schwarzenbach. Jean Paul left his birthplace of Wunsiedel in Bavaria in 1779 in order to attend the grammar school at Hof, where he lived with his grandparents. Between the years of 1781 and 1784 he studied theology and philosophy at Leipzig, but he was forced to give up his studies when his efforts to finance his education privately failed. In 1790 however he founded an elementary school in Schwarzenbach, where he taught until 1794. After this date his writing had brought him enough success to earn a living from it. From 1798 to 1800 he lived in Weimar, where he met Goethe, Schiller and Herder. Herder greatly appreciated Richter’s work, but he was not well received by Goethe and Schiller who found were sickened by his distasteful style of writing. In 1801 he married Caroline Meyer, and they settled in Bayreuth in 1804 where he was able to write full time. In 1821 Richter lost his only son; a youth with huge potential. He never quite recovered from the shock, and died on the 14th November 1825.

He began his career in writing with letters, however because they were satirical in tone, they were not received with great favour, even later on in his life. His book Die unsichtbare Loge published in 1793 comprised of all his most famous qualities, and was well accepted by the critics. After the book’s success he released Hesperus (1795), Biographische Belustigungen unter der Gehirnschale einer Riesin (1796) Leben des Quintus Fixlein (1796), Blumen- Frucht- und Dornenstilcke, oder Ehestand, Ted und Hochzeit des Armenadvokaten Siebenkäs (1796—97), Der Jubelsenior (1797), and Das Kampaner Tal (1797).

Style and Influence

Richter’s Romantic style is evident through both his love of nature and his poetic expression of religion. He was however a humorist writer, and therein lay many of his grotesque qualities. His humour is mingled with all his thoughts, and to some extent determines the form in which he embodies his most serious reflections. This humour originates from the perception of the absurdity between ordinary facts and ideal laws. In his works, Richter depicts the world as both wakefulness and dreamlike, rational and absurd, disjointed and whole, and lyric and grotesque. He had a considerable influence on E.T.A Hoffmann, whose areas of expertise were the fantastic and the grotesque.

In his theoretical work Vorschule der Ästhetik, he writes about a darker and terribly grotesque style of humour, which is painful, and recognises evil. He scathes the earthly, finite world through humour, and calls this technique ‘die vernichtende Idee des Humors':

Einen solchen Fürstenbund zweier seltsamen Seelen gab es nicht oft ... dieselbe Lachlust in der schönen Irrenanstalt der Erde (Siebenkäs p.38)

This style of writing and his satanic sense of black humour place him securely in the tradition of grotesque.

Richter was unable to resist the temptation of including strange notions which occurred to him in his works. His 1796 novel Siebenkas tells the story of a sensitive husband who ends his unhappy marriage by feigning death and burial. In many of his works, this work in particular there exists an intrinsic duality: For this novel Richter developed the concept of the doppelganger, which in his own words is defined as: “so heissen sie Leute die sie selbst sehen”.

Droben guckt nämlich herunter - und wir sehen alle in der Kirche hinauf - Siebenkäsens Geist, wie der Pöbel sagt, d.h. sein Körper, wie er sagen sollte (Siebenkäs p.38)

A doppelganger is a shadow of oneself that accompanies every human, and can be defined as:

• an alter ego

• a living person who has the same name or who closely resembles another living person