author
Friedrich Theodor Vischer
1807–1887
Best known today for the comic novel Auch Einer, he explored how everyday objects seem to turn stubborn at exactly the wrong moment. He was also an influential German thinker on art and literary realism whose ideas reached far beyond his own fiction.
1 Audiobook
Deutsche Humoristen, 1. Band (von 8)
by Peter Rosegger, Wilhelm Raabe, Fritz Reuter, Albert Roderich, Friedrich Theodor Vischer
About the author
Born in Ludwigsburg in 1807, Friedrich Theodor Vischer was a German writer, critic, and philosopher of art. He studied at Tübingen and began in theology before building his career in aesthetics and German literature, becoming known for serious thinking shaped in part by Hegelian ideas.
Vischer taught at Tübingen and later at Zürich and Stuttgart, and he became one of the notable German voices in 19th-century literary criticism and aesthetic theory. His major scholarly work was Ästhetik; oder Wissenschaft des Schönen, a large study of beauty and art, and he is often associated with efforts to give literary realism a strong theoretical foundation.
Alongside his criticism and philosophy, he wrote poetry, drama, and fiction. Many readers now remember him most for Auch Einer (1878), a witty and unusual novel that helped popularize the idea sometimes described as the “spite of objects,” the comic feeling that ordinary things develop a will of their own just when life is already difficult enough.