United States or Malta ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Eagerness to learn Fritz showed in pathetic fulness, but the most diligent search has revealed no trace in these years of that creative imagination with which he was so richly dowered. When Fritz was thirteen his father received a long-hoped-for promotion to Schwarzenbach, a market town near Hof, then counting some 1,500 inhabitants.

Katharina Bärin's first kiss was, for him, "a unique pearl of a minute, such as never had been and never was to be." But, as with the Communion, though the memory remained, the feeling soon passed away. The father designed Fritz, evidently the most gifted of his sons, for the church, and after some desultory attempts at instruction in Schwarzenbach, sent him in 1779 to the high school at Hof.

Now, in his maturity, he will, he says, let himself go; and a wild tale he makes of it, exuberant in fancy, rich in comedy, unbridled in humor. The Autobiography extends only to Schwarzenbach and his confirmation, but of all his writings it has perhaps the greatest charm. Richter's last years were clouded by disease, mental and physical, and by the death of his son Max.

The Devil's Papers, published in 1789, when Richter, after a few months at Hof, was about to become tutor to the children of three friendly families in Schwarzenbach, confirm the impression of progress. In his new field Richter had great freedom to develop his ideas of education as distinct from inculcation.

Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, who was born at Wunsiedel, in Bavaria, on March 21, 1763, and died on November 14, 1825, was the son of a poor but highly accomplished schoolmaster, who early in his career became a Lutheran pastor at Schwarzenbach, on the Saale.