Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling Biography

Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling

(Johann Heinrich Jung, called Jung-Stilling; Grund, 1740-Karlsruhe, 1817) German writer.His friendship with Goethe facilitated the publication of his first work: The Youth of Enrique Stilling (1777).He also wrote several autobiographical novels with a realistic tone, impregnated with a deep mystical-pietistic feeling.

Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling

His father, teacher and tailor, was little widowed after the birth of Johann Heinrich, and was then seized by a kind of melancholy that led him to educate the child with exceptional rigor, only tempered by deep pious feelings; little Johann Heinrich remained isolated until almost ten years old, and learned to read, especially from the Bible, still very young.

Such dispositions facilitated an unusual formation in a boy of his social condition; And despite arriving at the university very late (he was already thirty years old), he was able to slowly assimilate somewhat confusing and diverse knowledge, but, deep down, of a certain amplitude, and this while he devoted himself, successively, to the professions of teaching , tailor, tutor, administrator and, after graduation in medicine from Strasbourg, doctor, professor of economics and religious propagandist.

Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling wrote many books, several of them of a didactic nature, and he maintained a vast correspondence, even with famous people and residents outside of Europe.His Scenes from the Spirit Realm (1798-1801) enjoyed singular appreciation among romantics tending to a certain mystery, such as Justinus Kerner.Some of his novels, such as the Historia del Señor Morgenthau (1779), contain happy passages, drowned, however, by a continuous sadness and by the monotony of the endings, in which the triumph of the just and the punishment of the wicked.The novels of this pietist have unique affinities with those written by English storytellers of the same period or somewhat earlier, such as Richardson.

Jung-Stilling was also a rather fortunate physician, who spread the story at a still difficult time.cataract operation; on the occasion of one such intervention, he was Goethe's guest in Frankfurt.Despite several defects that have relegated his too vast work to oblivion, in our days the freshness of some moments of his autobiography assures Jung-Stilling a certain fame in posterity and allows predicting a possible revalidation of other pages today forgotten.