Author: OEHLENSCHLÄGER, Adam
Biography:
OEHENSCHLAGER, Adam (1779-1850: NBG)
As a foreign-language author, Adam Gottlob Ohlenschläger requires only a brief outline of his career. He was born in Vesterbro, Copenhagen, Denmark, on 14 Nov. 1779, the son of Joachim Conrad Oehlenschläger (1748-1827) and his wife Martha Marie Hansen (1745-1800). In 1780 his father was appointed organist of the Frederiksberg Church and steward of the royal palace in Frederiksberg. Adam and his sister Sophie grew up in the palace. He is said to have started writing poems in early childhood and to have played at being an actor or a preacher. He was given a good literary education. After a brief spell on the stage he entered the University of Copenhagen in 1800. It was a turning-point in his life when the Norwegian nature-philosopher Henrik Steffens (1773-1845), an associate of Schelling and admirer of Goethe and Schiller in Germany, arrived to lecture in 1802. Oehlenschläger enthusiastically adopted a Romantic aesthetic which he expressed in a series of collections of poetry and separate works for the stage—a few comedies but mainly tragedies and historical dramas. He followed Steffens to Halle, Germany, in 1805 and went on a literary grand tour with extended visits to Berlin, Weimar, Dresden, Paris, Rome, and Switzerland to meet their resident luminaries, including Humboldt, Fichte, Goethe, Tieck, and Staël. In 1809 he returned to Denmark to take up the chair of professor of aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen and to marry, on 16 May 1810, his fiancée Christiane Georgine Elisabeth Heger (1782-1841), with whom he would have seven children. He died in Copenhagen on 20 Jan. 1850 and was buried in the graveyard of the Frederiksberg Church. The English press reported that his funeral was attended by 20,000 people, a sixth of the population of the city, and that the three theatres were closed for a week of mourning. Given his immense popularity in Denmark and Germany and the appetite for Scandinavian mythology in Britain at the time, it is surprising that George Borrow’s (q.v.) Romantic Ballads seems to have been the first of any of Ohlenschläger’s works to be published in volume form in English. (NBG 38, cols. 512-16; EB 19 Mar. 2024; ancestry.com 19 Mar. 2024; findmypast.com 19 Mar. 2024; SJC 16 Feb. 1850)