AUGUST JACOB LIEBESKIND

August Jacob Liebeskind (1758-1793) was a German vicar and author. He was the tutor of the children of Johann Gottfried von Herder, the great philosopher and was married to one of the daughters of Christoph Martin Wieland. He collaborated with Wieland on his collection of fairy tales Dschinnistan. His story Lulu oder die Zauberflöte served as a source for several theatre plays and operas, most notably Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte.

The fragments:

Following the concern of Enlightenment thinkers for education and didactics, engender especially by Rousseau but continued in France and England by the rising bourgeoisie, Liebeskind collected a number of Oriental tales which he adapted for a young readership. The collection can be compared with similar works in English (Richard Johnson; Aikin; Peacocke) and has a similar aim. In his preface, the philosopher Herder points at the important role of the imagination in education, but he also warns of the dangers of a too lively fantasy. According to him, Oriental stories are especially suitable for educational purposes, because all figures are essentialized and conform to specific stereotypes. However, the stories are cleansed of the ‘falschen Schwulst’ (‘false pompousness’) that Europeans often ascribed to Oriental tales. The collection, titled Palmblätter, was published in 1786 and contain material from the collection Le cabinet des fées, published in France in the 1780s. The stories are mostly exemplary tales about kings, ministers, merchants, etc., set in Asia and the Arab world both in the time of the caliphs and in ‘modern’ times.

Palblätter; erlesene morgenländische Erzählungen für die Jugend gesammelt von August Jacob Liebeskind, Insel, Leipzig 1976, pp. 5-53.