Joseph Schreyvogel

Joseph Schreyvogel (27 March 1768 - 28 July 1832) was a Viennese writer and journalist. He also worked as a dramaturge.

Older sources sometimes change the spelling of his name to Joseph Schreivogel.

In addition to his own name, he sometimes wrote under pseudonyms. These included "Karl August West", "Thomas West" and "Gebrüder West" ("West brothers").

Joseph Schreyvogel was born in Vienna, the youngest of his parents' three recorded children. His father, Gottfried Schreyvogel, is variously described as a carpenter/cabinet maker and a "prosperous timber merchant". His mother, born Maria Anna Bäurin, was the daughter of a wheelwright from Swabia who had moved to Vienna. According to one source his youth was spent in dreamy idleness. He received much of his early "education" from an aunt who noticed how he delighted in the puppet theatre of her own children, and whose home he frequently visited. His interest thus pricked, he learned to read with remarkable rapidity, and quickly steeped himself in the comedic repertoire of the puppet world. Between 1779 and 1783 he attended the Piarist "Maria Treu" academy in Vienna's Josefstadt. By the time he left, it was as a prize winner. His parents were ambitious on his behalf and his father forced him to train for a legal career. He passed the necessary preparatory exams at Vienna University in 1786 but pursued his legal studies no further. His father had died in 1784.

In 1788 he suffered some kind of a mental crisis which led him to turn to the writings of Immanuel Kant, still a radical and polarising figure. Vienna was undergoing its own decade of enlightened radical reform at this time. In this context Schreyvogel turned to political journalism. He became one of the Danube monarchy's earliest advocates for Kantian philosophy. In 1792 he was contributing to "Wiener Zeitschrift", and his contributions were appearing in 1793/94 in "Österreichische Monathsschrift" (monthly news journal). He became involved in a savage literary feud with Franz Felix Hofstätter, the former Jesuit whom Schreyvogel was happy to smear as a Jacobin, traitor and freemason.

Towards the end of 1794 he moved to Jena where a new intellectual awakening was taking place in the growing circle surrounding the philosopher-poet, Friedrich Schiller. During the next couple of years, without at this stage disclosing his authorship, Schreyvogel contributed a two act comedy, "Die Witwe" ("The Widow") (1973) to Schiller's "Neue Thalia" journal, also contributing to Wieland's literary journal "Mercur" the first parts of his novel "Der neue Lovelace" ("The New Lovelace") (1795/96) and numerous less substantial articles to the . Late in 1796 or early in 1797 he returned to Vienna and supported himself by working as a private tutor.

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