A Troll Emerges: The Beginning of August Friedrich Cranz's Career as a Provocateur

Summary

THE FRANKFURTER GELEHRTE ANZEIGEN (Frankfurt Learned Notes) published a special double issue at the end of February 1779, which was hardly unusual. The pressure of a twice-weekly publication schedule and the need to delegate tasks to a vast network of correspondents and reviewers often led the journal's editor, Johann Conrad Deinet, to print such expanded issues in lieu of two separate ones. What was, however, peculiar about this specific installment was the absence of any book reviews, which normally comprised the majority of texts in this particular periodical. Instead, the entire issue was devoted to the publication of a single text, a piece of cultural critique.

As with all contributions to the journal, the text appeared without any indication as to the author's identity. It bears the title “Fragment eines Schreibens über den Ton in den Streitschriften einiger teutschen Gelehrten und Schöngeister” (Fragment of a Text on the Tone in the Polemics by Some German Scholars and Aesthetes). The text's sixteen pages contain a broad indictment of numerous grandees of the German publishing world, including Friedrich Nicolai, Christoph Martin Wieland, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Johann Georg Jacobi.

Nicolai receives the majority of the author's scorn: the publisher of the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek (General German Library) is denounced for printing Leben, Bemerkungen und Meinungen Johann Bunkels: Nebst den Leben verschiedener merkwürdiger Frauenzimmer (Johann Bunkel's Life Story, Observations, and Opinions, alongside the Life Stories of Several Noteworthy Women, 1778), a German translation of the Irish author Thomas Amory's novel The Life of John Buncle, Esq., first published in 1756, a novel that scandalized some members of the German reading public on account of its frank discussion of deism. In the anonymous critic's view, it was a “platter, dummer, langweiliger Roman” (platitudinous, dumb, boring novel) that was as objectionable as the novel's religious ideas. In addition to disparaging comments about Lessing and Jacobi, Wieland's journal Der teutsche Merkur (The German Mercury) is portrayed as “leichtes Puppenwerk” (simple doll play) of the sort presented by all the charlatans peddling their wares at the trade fair in Nuremberg (“Fragment,” 122–23). The author's frequently lurid critique, however, is accompanied by constant proclamations of his own steadfast purity, as he pledges never to denigrate himself by engaging in public controversies like the many German authors who act like “Gassenbuben” (“Fragment,” 132; street urchins).