in an oil portrait by
Elias Gottlob Haussmann c.1750
Early life He was born at
Juditten (renamed Mendeleyevo in 1947) near
Königsberg (Kaliningrad),
Brandenburg-Prussia, the son of a
Lutheran clergyman, and was baptised in
St. Mary's Church. He studied philosophy and history at the
University of Königsberg, but immediately on taking the degree of
Magister in 1723, he fled to
Leipzig to avoid being drafted into the
Prussian army. In Leipzig, he enjoyed the protection of Johann Burckhardt Mencke, who, under the name of "Philander von der Linde", was a well-known poet and president of the
Deutschübende poetische Gesellschaft in Leipzig. Of this society, Gottsched was elected "Senior" in 1726, and in the next year reorganised it under the title of the
Deutsche Gesellschaft. He insisted
German literature be subordinated to the laws of
French classicism. He enunciated rules by which the playwright must be bound (such as the
Ständeklausel), and abolished bombast and buffoonery from the serious stage. In 1740, he came into conflict with the Swiss writers
Johann Jakob Bodmer and
Johann Jakob Breitinger, who, under the influence of Addison and contemporary Italian critics, demanded that the poetic imagination should not be hampered by artificial rules. As examples, they pointed to English poets, especially
Milton. Gottsched, although not blind to the beauties of the English writers, clung tenaciously to his principle that poetry must be the product of rules and, in the fierce controversy which for a time raged between Leipzig and
Zürich, he was ultimately defeated. ==Works==