Wolfgang Menzel

Menzel, Wolfgang 

Born June 21, 1798, in Waldenburg, present-day Watbrzych, Silesia, Poland; died Apr. 23, 1873, in Stuttgart. German writer and critic.

Menzel was the son of a physician. He received his education in Jena and Bonn. From 1824 to 1825 he published the Europaische Blatter with F. List, in which he printed his critical essays, described by F. Engels as “clumsy” (see K. Marx and F. Engels, Iz rannikh proizvedenii, 1956, p. 279). After the French Revolution of 1830, Menzel openly allied himself with the reaction. Menzel’s trite argumentation and the philistine narrowmindedness of his aesthetic views were ridiculed by V. G. Belinskii. Menzel is the author of the fairy tales Rubezahl (1829) and Narcissus (1830).

WORKS

In Russian translation:
Nemetskaia slovesnost’ parts 1-2. St. Petersburg, 1837-38.

REFERENCES

Börne, L. Parizhskie pis’ma. Mentsel’-frantsuzoed. Moscow 1938. (Translated from German.)
Heine, H. “O donoschike: Predisl. k 3-i chasti ’Salona,’ “Poln. Sobr Soch. , vol. 8. Moscow-Leningrad, 1949. (Translated from German.)
Belinskii, V. G. “Mentsel’: Kritik Gete,” Poln. Sobr. Soch. , vol. 3. Moscow, 1953.