Jeremias Gotthelf

(pseudonym of Albrecht Bitzius). Born Oct. 4, 1797, in the canton of Bern; died there Oct. 22, 1854. Swiss author who wrote in German.

Gotthelf was the son of a pastor and a pastor himself. He acquired fame through his first novel, The Peasants’ Mirror, or the Life Story of Jeremias Gotthelf (1836). His novel The Joys and Sorrows of a Schoolmaster (vols. 1–2, 1838–39) deals with the pressing problems of mass education. In the novels Uli the Farm Servant (1841) and Uli the Tenant Farmer (1849) and the short stories Swiss Pictures and Legends (1842—46) and The Wanderings of Apprentice Jakob Through Switzerland (1846–47), Gotthelf describes the wretched conditions of the peasantry and artisans. However, the descriptions of the Utopian ideal of a well-to-do peasant community in Cheese-making in Weifreit (1850) and the idealization of the Swiss past in Black Spider (1842) and Elsie, the Strange Maiden (1843) are also characteristic of Gotthelf.