Wilhelm Wackernagel

• Born: April 23, 1806
• Birthplace: Berlin, Prussia (now in Germany)
• Died: December 21, 1869
• Place of death: Basel, Switzerland

Biography

With the exception of Jacob Grimm, Karl Heinrich Wilhelm Wackernagel was the most significant German philologist of the nineteenth century. Both his critical scholarship and his own poetic writings were appreciated during his lifetime by his fellow scholars and are respected, although under examined, by contemporary scholars.

Born in Berlin in 1806, Wackernagel was orphaned as a child along with his four older brothers and sisters. His siblings considered him to be the most gifted of the five children and sacrificed greatly to further his education. His older brothers, who were also gifted, dropped out of school to work so he could complete high school.

The defeat of Napoleon I occurred while Wackernagel was a young teen, and he became involved in the political movement surrounding this defeat. His support of democracy aroused opposition and anxiety in some public officials, and this opposition would follow and haunt him for many years to come. In 1819, Wackernagel began writing a series of letters to his brother espousing prodemocracy positions and laying out a plan to democratize Germany. The letters were intercepted and in 1821 Wackernagel spent three days in Berlin’s city prison.

In subsequent years, Wackernagel gave up politics and turned his interest to old German and classical literature, history, and philosophy, studying under Friedrich von der Hagen, Karl Lachmann, and August Böckh, philologists at the University of Berlin. He also attended courses with the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who also taught at Berlin at the time. Wackernagel’s economic situation, never stable, was increasingly precarious. He took as many manuscript copying jobs as he could find, leaving Berlin for a time in 1827 to live in Poland, where at one point he lived in a bowling alley.

His financial difficulties did not deter his scholarship, and in 1827 he published his edition of Das Wessobrunner Gebet und die Wessobrunner Glossen. This book became the definitive word on one of the oldest works of German literature, the Wessobrunner prayers and glosses. Wackernagel’s book refuted the theories of both Jacob Grimm and Hans Ferdinand Massmann, establishing a purely Christian origin for the piece.

Wackernagel lacked the money to earn his college degree. His efforts to find a job, despite his extraordinary qualifications, were thwarted by the continual intervention of Karl von Kamptz, an official in the Ministry of Justice who took it upon himself to contact potential employers with word of Wackernagel’s “political unreliability,” drawing on an 1823 law that prevented anyone who had engaged in demagoguery from holding government posts.

Defeated, Wackernagel moved to Breslau at the invitation of his friend, August Heinrich Hoffmann, and lived with Hoffmann’s friend Freidleib Ferdninand Runge, a chemistry professor with interests in literary patronage. In Breslau, he devoted himself to scholarly pursuits. He attended meetings of the Zwecklose Gesellschaft, a society devoted to writing and studying poetry and literary books, he contributed research on the customs of Silesia to Hoffmann’s Monatsschrift, and he wrote art reviews, all the while continuing his scholarly research on German philology.

Wackernagel returned to Berlin in 1830 amid tensions in his relationship with Hoffman over his inability to secure a paying position but motivated more by his desire to advance his academic career. While in Breslau, Wackernagel had collaborated with Karl Lachmann on several projects, and Lachmann was astounded to learn of Wackernagel’s financial situation. Lachmann helped Wackernagel find paid employment as a copyist, and eventually Lachmann and Jacob Grimm helped Wackernagel secure a position at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Jacob and his brother, Wilhelm Grimm, were influential in persuading Göttingen University to award Wackernagel a degree based on his published writing, and Jacob Grimm raised the money to pay Göttingen’s fees.

Wackernagel joined the faculty at Basel in 1833 and shortly thereafter was awarded the degrees of doctor of philosophy and magister of liberal arts. He became a full professor in 1835, and wrote all three of his most important works there: Deutsches Lesebuch, published in pieces between 1835 and 1843; the four-volume Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur: Ein Handbuch, published between 1848 and 1855; and Poetik, Rhetorik und Stilistik: Academische Vorlesungen, published in 1873.

Although German officials eventually realized their mistake in ostracizing a scholar of Wackernagel’s magnitude and offered him positions at all of the major German universities, Wackernagel spent the remainder of his life in Basel, receiving honorary Swiss citizenship in 1937 and marrying Louise Blunchli that same year. Louise died in 1848, after bearing her husband five children, only three of whom lived to be adults. Wackernagel married Maria Sarasin in 1850, with whom he had three sons and a daughter. He served in the Basel legislature and was active in Basel’s vigorous religious life. His health began to fail in the early 1850’s and winters were difficult for him. He died on December 21, 1869, at his home in Basel.