225th birthday: Oscar Ludwig Bernhard Wolff: A poetic miracle bird

Wolff? Kurt Wolff was a great publisher who believed that one should not only print books that people wanted to read, but books that they should read. So books that you first have to explore. Another Wolff, Oscar Ludwig Bernhard, only has something to say to those who know Karl Marx: Professor Wolff helped him get his doctorate in Jena.

But it’s worth rediscovering the forgotten one. 225 years ago, on July 26, 1799, Benny Wolff was born in Altona, Denmark, now a district of Hamburg, as the son of the Jewish merchant Eisig Wolff. His maternal grandfather was a banker and ran a cosmopolitan house. The precocious boy was able to read and write at the age of three, learned English, French and Danish from the guests, was taught by tutors and promised a brilliant career. In 1817 he began studying medicine in Berlin, and two years later changed his profession and location: in Kiel he heard history and literature, but had to break off his studies in 1821 and work as a teacher in Hamburg.

In the introduction to his 14-volume edition of 1841, Wolff conceals the reasons for this first turning point in his life, as well as his Jewish ancestry. Apparently his father’s business had failed. This is where his special talent comes to light: the 25-year-old tries his hand at being an improviser, he writes poetry off the cuff. The audience tells him a topic and he immediately puts it into verse. A sensation in stiff Germany, where poets spend days and nights poring over their verses. Because he also delivers poems in English and French in exemplary form. In Berlin he gives two soirées, becomes the talk of the town and even attracts the royal family.

In October 1825, Wolff went on an “art trip” via Bremen, Hanover, Braunschweig to Leipzig and Dresden. His real goal is Weimar: he wants to stand before Goethe as his judge. The poet laureate also received him on January 18, 1826, but he didn’t want to hear about the young man’s art because it would “distract him too much.” It was only a few days later, invited by Goethe’s daughter-in-law, that he met the old man again, who now had a rehearsal performed. His verdict: Wolff suffers from the illness of all young people; he is too “subjective.” The examinee will get back at the examiner and attest to his excessive objectivity in his “Little Book of Goethe” (1832), i.e. his lack of heart. Carl August, Grand Duke of Saxony, liked the impromptu poet and offered him a professorship at the Weimar high school. Goethe now also likes to “fix the poetic miracle bird” and Wolff immediately agrees to the conditions of the new position: he gives up performing as an improviser, gives himself the first name Oscar and converts to Christianity – like his childhood friend Harry Heine.

It remains a foreign body in the classic nest. Through Goethe’s mediation, he received an extraordinary professorship for modern languages ​​and literature on January 1, 1830, which was converted into a full professorship in 1837. Wolff gives a course on “Faust” and gives lectures on the history of German and European literature since the 15th century, making him a co-founder of modern German studies. It wasn’t just the topics that thrilled the students, but even more so the way they were delivered: while others laboriously read from their books, Wolff enchants them with his free speech.

No wonder, since he was also a writer: Wolff wrote novels, short stories, poems, travel guides, encyclopedias and anthologies, translated from numerous languages ​​and contributed to collections. In 1828 he translated Indian dramas from English. A little later he published “Memoirs of a Court Lackey,” the fictional diary of a mocker who serves a prince in Rattenhausen, and in 1831 his novel “Irwische des Tages.” He then edited a “New Conversations Lexicon for Educated People of All Classes” in four volumes. An “Encyclopedia of German National Literature” followed in 1837 in seven volumes (an eighth appeared ten years later). His “General History of the Novel” (1841) from antiquity to the 19th century is still remarkable. And under the pseudonym “Pliny the Youngest” he wrote a satire on university life and published “The Little Sorrows of Human Life” with drawings by Jean-Jacques Grandville, whose grandiose opus “Another World” he translated in 1847, which contained elements of Dada and anticipated surrealism.

He had his greatest successes with the anthologies “Poetic Household Treasure of the German People” (1839) and “Poetic Household Treasure of Foreign Countries” (1848). More original was his “Latin Grammar” (1851), in which, like Johann Gottfried Seume once did, he packaged sharp contemporary commentaries in scholarly Latin. Such jokes were not appropriate at German universities. In 1898, the “General German Biography” of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences declared him to be a prolific writer who had overestimated himself with his “unrefined” sense of humor, was lonely and bitter, and ultimately “fell into the arms of the radicals.”

In fact, Wolff had published over a hundred book titles in 25 years, which, including new editions, filled an impressive 225 volumes by the time of his death on September 13, 1851. While friends attributed the author’s productivity to his low professorial salary, others suggested that the former improviser was driven by mere vanity. And in an obituary from 1853 it even says that “he always had to have something to bargain for in literature.” There he flashes for a moment, that secretly scary anti-Semitism with which he struggled all his life: despite his Christian baptism, despite denying his Jewish origins, despite years of effort to make poetry accessible to Germans – he always remained an outsider, which made him receptive to outsiders like Grandville. For the anarchist and composer Richard Wagner, whom he helped on his escape through Thuringia in 1848, and probably also for this idiosyncratically gifted student Karl Marx, the son of a Jewish lawyer, who was baptized in 1820. It’s high time to rediscover Oscar Ludwig Bernhard Wolff.

A long version of this text can be found in »Palmbaum. Literary Journal from Thuringia”, issue 1/2024.