Dictionary of Literary Biography on Johann Georg Jacobi
Johann Georg Jacobi was an important figure of German belles lettres during the 1770s and 1780s. Although his poetry matured and developed beyond the anacreontic style in which he began, he has been unjustly seen as a frenchifying versifier in the style of Jean-Baptist-Louis Gresset and the Abbé de Chaulieu (Guillaume Amfrye). Although he experimented with several genres, Jacobi was most successful as a lyric poet whose self-description as a "little singer of small songs" seems quite accurate. His work falls into three phases: the youthful anacreontic phase; a more mature and serious phase beginning at about his thirty-fifth year, based on influence from Johann Wolfgang Goethe and a love affair with his cousin Caroline Jacobi; and the mature phase in Freiburg. While he wrote of ordinary things, his poems display smoothness and appropriateness of form; his language is polished, unforced, and euphonious. His strength is in putting into verse the gentler emotions and perceptions. Many of his poems have been set to music. He wrote several librettos for singspiels, a dramatic ancestor of the operetta. Acquainted with Enlightenment thought, Jacobi did not reject religion but preached a nondogmatic Christianity. The Sturm und Drang movement and, later, Romantics were alien to him. He knew personally many of the most important eighteenth-century figures of German literature, including Goethe and Christoph Martin Wieland. His literary almanacs Iris (1774-1777), the Überflüssiges Taschenbuch (Superfluous Almanac, 1800), and the second Iris (1803-1813) number among his major contributions to German literature.
Born into a well-to-do merchant family in Düsseldorf on 2 September 1740, Jacobi absorbed the atmosphere of Lutheran piety that filled his parents' home. His mother, Johanna Maria Fahlmer Jacobi, died when he was six years old. His father, Johann Konrad Jacobi, then married the twenty-year-old Maria Katharina Lausberg, a kind and selfless woman who was evidently loved and accepted by the children of the first marriage. Private tutors, usually theology students, were employed in the home, and Jacobi was sent to French schools; the household included a French governess as well. At fifteen Jacobi wrote a play in French. At eighteen he went to the University of Göttingen, where he studied theology before turning to the law. But the law was not to his taste, either. His friend and biographer J. A. von Ittner relates how Jacobi, finally receiving his father's permission to switch from law to humanities, threw his law textbook out the window. (It was caught by its next owner, who, by prearrangement, was waiting below.) Encouraged by the writer Christian Adolph Klotz, to the study of the classics and the modern languages. He wrote a Latin dissertation on Torquato Tasso (1763) and prepared for a career as a professor of literature.
In 1764 he published Poetische Versuche (Poetic Experiments), a small collection that included a translation from Dante. In 1766 he was called to Halle as a professor of philosophy and humanities. There he lectured on foreign literature and produced a translation of Luis de Góngora y Argote's romances (1767) which brought him his first critical attention and praise.
Jacobi was influenced by Laurence Sterne, whose simplicity and sensitivity he admired. Taking a cue from the episode in Sterne's Sentimental Journey (1768) in which Lorenzo and Yorick exchange snuffboxes as a sign of reconciliation and friendship, Jacobi bought a quantity of these boxes and distributed them to his friends. If the friends ever quarreled, one of them needed only to hold forth the snuffbox to remind the other of the duties of friendship. His enthusiasm for Sterne was so great that Jacobi was nicknamed "Toby."
Jacobi formed an important and lasting friendship with Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim. A collection of their letters in mixed verse and prose, which was widely criticized for its expression of tenderness between men, was published in 1768. In that same year Gleim procured a benefice for Jacobi in Halberstadt as a lay canon of a Protestant religious community. Jacobi used the required initiatory nighttime visit in the chapter commons to jot down his Nachtgedanken (Night Thoughts, 1769), which was not a parody of Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1742-1745) but rather a criticism of the German imitators of that work. In Halberstadt his literary acquaintances included Johann David Michaelis, Lorenz Benzler, Klamer Eberhard, Karl Schmidt, and Christoph Friedrich Sangershausen. The benefice gave him sufficient free time to write poetry. The excesses of his early period earned him criticism from Johann Jakob Bodmer, Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, who found his anacreontic love poetry too frivolous. The rationalist writer and critic Friedrich Nicolai thought Jacobi sufficiently ridiculous to skewer him as "Herr von Säugling" (Baron Suckling) in the novel Das Leben und die Meinungen des Herrn Magister Sebaldus Nothanker (The Life and Opinions of the Schoolmaster Sebaldus Nothanker, 1773-1776); Goethe also satirized him in two farces.
The poem Abschied an den Amor (Farewell to Love, 1769) marks a turning away from the decorative, frothy anacreontic poetry. His travelogues written in the manner of Sterne, Die Sommerreise (The Summer Journey, 1770) and Die Winterreise (The Winter Journey, 1769), were widely reviewed by literary magazines. Both books are characterized by sentimentality which at this point replaces the anacreontic mode in his writing.
Jacobi's first dramatic attempt, Elysium (1770), a singspiel in the form of a poetic dialogue of the dead, was performed in Celle. His reputation grew with the publication of his collected works from 1770 to 1774. Through Sophie von La Roche he made the acquaintance of Wieland in 1771 and formed an important friendship: Wieland was one of the most enthusiastic defenders of the young Jacobi, although even he occasionally criticized his writing as trivial.
In 1774 Jacobi returned to Düsseldorf, where he came under the influence of more vital forces, particularly Goethe. With Wilhelm Heinse he edited Iris, a journal of cultural uplift for ladies, imparting lore of the Greek gods, current events, and the basic elements of literary theory. Iris also contained many of Jacobi's poems. The journal, a project designed to earn money, survived for eight volumes; after its demise, Jacobi contributed to Wieland's better-known Der teutsche Merkur. The Düsseldorf period produced his best poetry. His acquaintance with Goethe, whom he genuinely admired, and the love affair with his cousin Caroline Jacobi enabled his poetry to move from convention to confession and to feelings he had actually experienced.
Throughout his early career Jacobi struggled for financial success; he was engaged to Caroline Jacobi but did not marry her because of his precarious circumstances. His lot was enormously improved by a call to the University of Freiburg in 1784. The first Protestant professor at the university, he remained there for thirty years as a celebrated and popular professor of literature and philology. During this phase of Jacobi's life he was widely praised as lovable, kindhearted, and sociable; yet he also enjoyed the solitude of the forest and the garret. He stimulated his students by his explications of the Latin classics, which went beyond mere philological exegeses. He exercised his talents as a speaker by occasionally preaching in the nearby Protestant town of Emmendingen.
His home became an asylum for refugees from the French Revolution. He also found his French training useful during the Napoleonic occupation, when he represented his city to the French authorities. He represented the university at the funeral of the emperor Joseph II in 1790, delivering the funeral oration. Able at last to support a family, in 1791 he married Maria Ursula Müller, a country girl from the Black Forest who appears in his poetry as Naide. At the relatively late age of fifty-four he became the father of a son, whom he named for his younger brother, the philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi.
The Freiburg period, during which Jacobi was deprived of association with the most creative forces in German poetry, marked a less important phase in his literary career. The poetry of this period is one of reflection and taking stock; the role played by reason increases; the poet pays greater attention to the world outside the self.
Between 1795 and 1813 Jacobi edited other almanacs, including a revival of Iris and the Überflüssiges Taschenbuch , which offered contributions by Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (Jean Paul), Johann Heinrich Voß, Matthias Claudius, Gottlieb Konrad Pfeffel, Klopstock, Jens Immanuel Baggesen, and Johann Gottfried Herder. The poetry of his old age deals with friendship, love, nature, and God. During his later years, however, he was not an influential poet on the national scene.
The death of his son at age seventeen in 1811 broke Jacobi's spirit. Jacobi lived to see the victory of the German troops over Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813. His last poem, written on his deathbed, was a patriotic one.
Jacobi died on 4 January 1814. His funeral involved the entire university, with townsfolk participating as well. A girls' chorus led the procession, singing his somber poem "Am Aschermittwoch" (Ash Wednesday). His grave in the university cemetery was marked by a simple black cross.
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