Christoph Martin Wieland was born in
Oberholzheim (now part of
Achstetten), half of which then belonged to the
Free Imperial City of
Biberach an der Riss and the other half to
Gutenzell Abbey in the south-east of the modern-day state of
Baden-Württemberg. His father, who was
pastor in Oberholzheim and subsequently in Biberach, took great pains with his son's education. From the town school of Biberach, he passed on at the age of twelve to the
Kloster Berge gymnasium, near
Magdeburg. He was a precocious child, and when he left school in 1749 was widely read in the
Latin classics and the leading contemporary French writers; amongst German poets his favourites were
Brockes and
Klopstock. During the summer of 1750, he fell in love with a cousin,
Sophie Gutermann, and this love affair inspired him to plan his first ambitious work,
Die Natur der Dinge (The Nature of Things, 1752), a
didactic poem in six books. In 1750 he went to the
University of Tübingen as a student of
law, but his time was mainly taken up with literary studies. The poems he wrote at the university—
Hermann, an epic (published by F. Muncker, 1886),
Zwölf moralische Briefe in Versen (Twelve Moral Letters in Verse, 1752),
Anti-Ovid (1752)—are
pietistic in tone and dominated by the influence of Klopstock. and in the
Comische Erzählungen (1765) he gave his extravagant imagination only too free a rein. With the poems
Musarion oder die Philosophie der Grazien (1768),
Idris (1768),
Combabus (1770),
Der neue Amadis (1771), Wieland opened the series of light and graceful romances in verse which appealed so irresistibly to his contemporaries and acted as an antidote to the sentimental excesses of the subsequent
Sturm und Drang movement. Wieland married Anna Dorothea von Hillenbrand (July 8, 1746 – November 9, 1801) on October 21, 1765. They had 14 children. Wieland's daughter Sophia Catharina Susanna Wieland (October 19, 1768 – September 1, 1837) married philosopher
Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757–1823) on May 18, 1785. Between 1769 and 1772, Wieland was a professor of philosophy at the
University of Erfurt. In 1773, he founded
Der teutsche Merkur, which under his editorship (1773–1789) became the most influential literary review in Germany. At least three of his works,
Geschichte des Agathon,
Der goldene Spiegel oder die Könige van Scheschian, and
Beiträge zur geheimen Geschichte des menschlichen Verstandes und Herzens, found themselves on the official
Bavarian Illuminati reading list. Wieland also explored the role of secret societies in Enlightenment thought in
Das Geheimnis des Kosmopoliten-Ordens (1788). This work examines the political and philosophical implications of clandestine organizations, particularly their potential to form a "state within a state". A modern English edition,
The Secret of the Order of Cosmopolitans, was published in 2025, making the text accessible to a wider audience. He was also a librettist for the
Seyler theatrical company of
Abel Seyler. Of his later writings the most important are the admirable satire on German provinciality—the most attractive of all his prose writings—
Die Abderiten, eine sehr wahrscheinliche Geschichte (A very probable history of the Abderites, 1774), (translated into French by
Antoine Gilbert Griffet de Labaume) and the charming poetic romances,
Das Wintermärchen (1776),
Das Sommermärchen (1777),
Geron der Adelige (1777),
Pervonte oder die Wünsche (1778), a series culminating with Wieland's poetic masterpiece, the romantic epic of
Oberon (1780). == Works ==