Gervinus, GEORG GOTTFRIED

Gervinus, GEORG GOTTFRIED, German historian, was born at Darmstadt, 20th May 1805. Though at first engaged in commerce, he contrived to pursue his studies privately, then at the universities of Giessen and Heidelberg. In 1836 he was appointed professor of History at Göttingen. Already he had begun to publish his Geschichte der poetischen Nationalliteratur der Deutschen (5 vols. Leip. 1835-42), which, under the new title of Geschichte der Deutschen Dichtung, reached a fifth edition under the care of K. Bartsch, 1871-74. In 1837 he was one of the seven Göttingen professors who signed the famous protest against the abolition of the Hanoverian constitution, in consequence of which he lost his chair, and was ordered to leave the country within three days. He went first to Darmstadt, then to Heidelberg, thence to Rome, and was in 1844 appointed honorary professor in Heidelberg. From this period his career was that of an active political writer in behalf of constitutional liberty. In July 1847 he helped to establish the Deutsche Zeitung in Heidelberg, and next year was elected a member of the National Assembly by a district of Prussian Saxony. After the failure of the national democratic party in Germany, Gervinus returned disheartened to his literary pursuits, one of the fruits of which was his great work on Shakespeare (4 vols. 1849-52; 4th ed. 1872; Eng. trans. new ed. 1875), which may be regarded as on the whole the most important German contribution to Shakespearian criticism. The analyses of the characters show insight, learning, and much ingenuity; but the critic strains the interpretation in order to bring Shakespeare into harmony with his theory of him as the absolute and perfect dramatist. The book has been called in Germany the 'bulwark of Shakespearomania.' A later work was the Geschichte des 19ten Jahrhunderts (8 vols. 1856-66). Gervinus died at Heidelberg, 18th March 1871. See Briefwechsel zwischen J. und W. Grimm, Dahlmann, und Gervinus (ed. by Ippel, 1885).