Gutzkow, Karl

Born Mar. 17. 1811, in Berlin; died Dec. 16, 1878. in Sachsenhausen, near Frankfurt am Main. German author, public figure, head of the Young Germany literary movement. Son of a prince’s servant.

Gutzkow studied theology and philology at the University of Berlin. He was a bourgeois liberal and edited the journal Telegraph für Deutschland (1838–42), in which the young F. Engels participated. Breaking with the school of German romanticism, Gutzkow wrote the novels Malta-Guru, the History of a God (1833) and Doubting Wally (1835), in which he affirmed the idea of the “emancipation of the flesh.” In the multivolume epic The Knights of the Spirit (1850–51; Russian translation, 1871) the task of struggling for social harmony was placed on the shoulders of the intelligentsia. Gutzkow’s plays Werner (1842; Russian translation, 1842) and Pugachev (1847; Russian translation, 1918) introduced the social theme to German literature. However, the tragedy Uriel Acosta (1847; Russian translation, 1872. 1955), dedicated to the 17th-century thinker who fought against religious oppression, is the only one of his works that remains in the repertoire of world theaters.