Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder

Who was 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.

Wackenroder died in Berlin in 1798 at the age of 24 of a case of typhoid fever.