“Brain! A Little More Brain”

Christoph Martin Wieland’s Literary Reflections on Stupidity

Abstract

Human stupidity as the inability and unwillingness to use one’s own intellect without the guidance of others forms a central constant in Christoph Martin Wieland’s literary texts as a topos and textual strategy. The heroes of his texts and their behaviors are various characterized by stupidity, which is explicitly called as such in the texts. With this ‘idealization ex negativo’, which contradicts the ideals and writing styles of the emerging Weimar Classicism, Wieland, in his literary texts as an Enlightenment philosopher and pioneer of Weimar Classicism, directs his attention to human deficits of a primarily intellectual and, linked to this, moral nature. On the basis of selected discursive contextualizations that are unfolded in connection with the stupidity topos the article outlines, with a focus on the fairy tale Pervonte (1778) and the play Das Urtheil des Midas (1775), different forms and implications of human stupidity. Wieland stages, reflects and comments on these in a thoroughly ambivalent and flexibly connoted manner.