Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder
Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder was a German jurist and writer. With Ludwig Tieck, he was a co-founder of German Romanticism.
Wackenroder was born in Berlin. He was a close friend of Tieck from youth until his early death. They collaborated on virtually everything they wrote in this period. Wackenroder probably made substantial contributions to Tieck's novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, and Tieck to Wackenroder's influential collection of essays, Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders. Outpourings is a tribute to Renaissance and medieval literature and art, attributing to them a sense of emotion Wackenroder and Tieck felt was missing in German Enlightenment thought. It was also the first work to claim for Northern Renaissance art a status equivalent to that of the Italian Renaissance, at least in the case of Albrecht Dürer. The Outpourings have been accorded a status in Germany akin to that of Lyrical Ballads in England, i.e. as the first work of the Romantic movement.
Wackenroder died in Berlin in 1798 at the age of 24 of a case of typhoid fever.
