Partner Karl Wilhelm Schlutting
Queer Places:
Wilhelm-Waiblinger-Haus, Schützenstraße 16, 74072 Heilbronn, Germany
Fontana del Mascherone, Via Giulia, 00186 Roma RM
Campo Cestio
Rome, Città Metropolitana di Roma Capitale, Lazio, Italy
Friedrich Wilhelm Waiblinger (21 November 1804 – 17 January 1830) was a
German poet and writer, today known for his "homoerotic relationship" with
Eduard Mörike and his friendships
with Friedrich Hölderlin and
the homosexual August von
Platen. In 1822 Waiblinger visited the insane Hölderlin in his tower in
Tübingen and processed these encounters in his two-volume novel "Phaeton"
(1823).
Friedrich Wilhelm Waiblinger was born in Heilbronn in 1804. In the family he was called Fritz and called himself only from 1824 Wilhelm. In 1806 he moved with his family to Stuttgart, and in 1817 to Reutlingen. In November 1819 he became assistant clerk at the Urach High District Court and attended lectures at the neighboring lower theological seminary. In the summer of 1820 he returned to Stuttgart and attended the Oberes Gymnasium. During this time, his first poems were written, which gave the then still minor his first fame. From 1822 he studied theology at the Tübingen Abbey in order to be able to study philology as a minor subject. On 3 July 1822, Waiblinger met the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who had already been considered insane for a decade and a half, for the first time in the Hölderlin Tower in Tübingen, where he was a frequent guest throughout his studies. He first dealt with these encounters in his novel Phaeton (1823), which earned him an enormous amount of admiration among the students; in addition, his cycle of poems "Songs of the Greeks" had also been sold. He later portrayed Hölderlin in his essay Friedrich Hölderlin's Life, Poetry and Madness, which is considered the beginning of Hölderlin research. After a scandalous relationship with Julie Michaelis, sister of the Tübingen lawyer Adolph Michaelis, five years his senior, which became public in 1824 on the occasion of a trial for an arson, the victim of which was Julie's uncle, Salomo Michaelis, who opposed the relationship, Waiblinger renounced the Christian-moral appearance that he had had to give himself because of his theology studies, and indulged in debauchery, which were also reflected in his works. In the following years he wrote his Songs of Aberration and Three Days in the Underworld. After the publication of these works, he was excluded from further studies on 25 September 1826 by the monastery administration, which had tried to protect the highly gifted man after the scandalous relationship.
In the autumn of 1826, at the instigation of the publisher Johann Friedrich Cotta, Waiblinger embarked on a trip to Italy and went to Rome, which seemed attractive to him both from a cultural-historical perspective and with regard to his permissive sexuality. From 1827 he lived in a wild marriage with Nena Carlenza and wrote works that describe everyday scenes from life in Italy. In Rome he also completed the biography of Hölderlin in 1827/28. From a trip to Sicily he returned to Rome weakened in the autumn of 1829, suffered pneumonia and died at the age of 25 on 17 January 1830 in a house in Via Giulia opposite the Fontana del Mascherone.
Wilhelm Waiblinger is regarded as the "young savage" of the Biedermeier period, whom his posterity has obviously largely ignored for moral reasons. He made many friends, among which the homoerotic relationship with Eduard Mörike was certainly one of the most important. Waiblinger's friends, patrons and admirers included Gustav Schwab, August von Platen, Friedrich von Matthisson, Johann Heinrich Dannecker, Matthias Schneckenburger, Eduard Gnauth, Carl Miedke and Christian Friedrich Wurm. On his deathbed, he appointed his friend Karl Wilhelm Schlutting as executor, who also died in 1830 and was buried directly next to Waiblinger in Rome on the Cimitero acattolico near the Pyramid of Cestius.
The Wilhelm-Waiblinger-Haus in Heilbronn at Schützenstraße 16, corner Schießhausstraße (near the main train station) is named after the poet Wilhelm Friedrich Waiblinger and today houses the Stadt- und Kreisjugendring Heilbronn e.V. and various associations and organizations such as Mac IGHeilbronn or the activists of the OpenStreetMap group.
The estate of Wilhelm Waiblinger lies in the German Literature Archive Marbach. Parts of it can be seen in the permanent exhibition "Under Parnassus" of the Schiller National Museum in Marbach.
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