The poet, preacher, and university professor Ludwig Gotthard (Theobul) Kosegarten (1758-1818) lived most of his life in a region on the Baltic Sea known as Swedish Pomerania. This popular writer participated actively in German culture, interacting with Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, as well as other literary figures and intellectuals, including Ernst Moritz Arndt and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Kosegarten helped to shape the aesthetic attitudes of German Romantic art, and his poetry was set to music by three dozen composers, including Franz Schubert. During the French occupation, when German national feelings were running high, Kosegarten shocked his contemporaries by speaking out courageously against patriotic excess. He welcomed the social reforms that were beginning to free serfs and to establish equality under the law. In 1817, German nationalists burned his books and tarred his reputation. This book, which is based on a close reading of his works, is the first detailed biography of Kosegarten to be published in English.
"This lucid and well-organized biography succeeds in providing a fresh perspective on one of the most turbulent and productive eras of German history and culture. I have made good use of its chapter on the last years of Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten's life in a graduate seminar on Napoleon, nationalism, and German literature from 1806 to 1830. Teachers and scholars in German studies will find similar points of contact between Kosegarten and developments in German art and music of his day." (Dennis F. Mahoney, Professor of German and Director of the European Studies Program, University of Vermont)
"Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten is among those German authors who began to write in the last third of the eighteenth-century and had strong ties to their home regions. Even though he has not come into the canon of German national literature, Kosegarten achieved broad recognition among contemporary readers throughout Germany as the poet of Swedish Pomerania. In this capacity, he was perceivedabove all as the bard of Rügen. Indeed, one can say without exaggeration, that it was through Kosegarten's poetry and the Rügen pictures of Caspar David Friedrich that the island acquired significance as a topos. The present first biography in English thus brings a portion of German cultural history into view." (Regina Hartmann, Professor of German Literature and Culture, Stettin University, Poland)
"Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten is among those German authors who began to write in the last third of the eighteenth-century and had strong ties to their home regions. Even though he has not come into the canon of German national literature, Kosegarten achieved broad recognition among contemporary readers throughout Germany as the poet of Swedish Pomerania. In this capacity, he was perceivedabove all as the bard of Rügen. Indeed, one can say without exaggeration, that it was through Kosegarten's poetry and the Rügen pictures of Caspar David Friedrich that the island acquired significance as a topos. The present first biography in English thus brings a portion of German cultural history into view." (Regina Hartmann, Professor of German Literature and Culture, Stettin University, Poland)