author
Georg Gottfried Gervinus
1805–1871
A sharp-minded historian of literature and politics, he helped shape 19th-century debates about German culture, national identity, and constitutional freedom. His books brought literary history into public life and made him a notable liberal voice of his time.
1 Audiobook
The Art of Drinking: A Historical Sketch
by Georg Gottfried Gervinus
About the author
Born in Darmstadt in 1805, Georg Gottfried Gervinus became a German literary and political historian whose work linked scholarship with public debate. He studied at Giessen and Heidelberg, where the historian Friedrich Christoph Schlosser strongly influenced him, and he later taught at Göttingen and Heidelberg.
Gervinus is especially remembered for his major study Geschichte der poetischen Nationalliteratur der Deutschen and for his writings on history, politics, and Shakespeare. He was also one of the Göttingen Seven, the group of professors who protested the Hanoverian king's breach of the constitution in 1837, a stand that made him an important liberal figure as well as a scholar.
In the revolutionary era of 1848, he took part in political life and continued to write about Germany's constitutional future. He died in Heidelberg in 1871, leaving behind a body of work that shows how closely literature, history, and civic ideals were connected in his thinking.