Jean Paul

Jean Paul was a German Romantic novelist whose long, digressive works blended sentiment, satire, philosophy, and humor and made him one of the most-read German writers of the early nineteenth century. He was born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter on March 21, 1763, in Wunsiedel, in the Principality of Bayreuth, and died on November 14, 1825, in Bayreuth.

The son of a Lutheran pastor and organist, he grew up in modest circumstances and studied theology at Leipzig from 1781, but financial difficulties cut his studies short and he supported himself for years as a tutor and schoolmaster in small Franconian towns. Reading Laurence Sterne, Jonathan Swift, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he chose the pen name Jean Paul as a tribute to Rousseau.

His breakthrough came with the 1793 novel Die unsichtbare Loge, followed by Hesperus (1795), which made him a literary celebrity across the German-speaking world. Siebenkäs (1796–1797) introduced the device of the dream of the dead Christ, in which a figure of the risen Christ announces that there is no God, an early statement of the modern theme of cosmic loneliness.

His later large novels, Titan (1800–1803) and Flegeljahre (1804–1805), and the aesthetic treatise Vorschule der Ästhetik (1804), confirmed his reputation. He settled in Bayreuth in 1804 with his wife Karoline Mayer and their three children. Admired by readers and by Goethe, Schiller, and later Stefan George and Hermann Hesse, he was nonetheless overshadowed in the standard canon by Weimar Classicism.

The given name Jean Paul is a French double name combining Jean, from the Hebrew Yochanan, meaning God is gracious, with Paul, from the Latin Paulus, meaning small; he chose it as a pen name.