Karl Gutzkow
Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow (born 17 March 1811 in Berlin, died 16 December 1878 in Sachsenhausen) was a German writer notable in the Young Germany movement of the mid-19th century.
Gutzkow was born of an extremely poor family, not proletarian, but of the lowest and most menial branch of state employees. His father held a clerkship in the war office in Berlin, and was pietistic and puritanical in his outlook and demands. Jacob Wittmer Hartmann speculates that Gutzkow's later agnosticism was probably a reaction against the excessive religiosity of his early surroundings. After completing his basic studies, beginning in 1829 Gutzkow studied theology and philosophy at the University of Berlin, where his teachers included Hegel and Schleiermacher.
While still a student, he began his literary career by the publication in 1831 of a periodical entitled Forum der Journalliteratur. This brought him to the notice of Wolfgang Menzel, who invited him to Stuttgart to assist in the editorship of the Literaturblatt. At the same time he continued his university studies at Jena, Heidelberg and Munich. In 1832 he published Briefe eines Narren an eine Närrin anonymously in Hamburg; and in 1833 his novel Maha-Guru, Geschichte eines Gottes, a fantastic and satirical romance set in Tibet, was issued in Stuttgart by the well known Cotta publishing house. In 1835 he went to Frankfurt, where he founded the Deutsche Revue. While Gutzkow started out as a collaborator of Wolfgang Menzel, he ended up his adversary.
Also in 1835, his novel Wally die Zweiflerin appeared. News of the 1830 July Revolution at Paris had moved him deeply, and the general atmosphere of radicalism pervading Europe at that time, and perhaps more specifically a reading of the Life of Jesus by David Friedrich Strauss, influenced Gutzkow in the composition of this first novel, which exalts the agnosticism and emancipated views of the heroine, Wally. The work was directed specially against the institution of marriage and the belief in revelation. The book incorporates many ideas that Gutzkow had recently absorbed from French writers, notably Henri de Saint-Simon, particularly the latter's theory of the emancipation of the flesh.
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