KARL PHILIPP

MORITZ (1757-1793)  , German author, was born at Hameln on the Weser on the 15th of September 1757, of humble parentage . After receiving a scanty schooling, he was apprenticed to a hat-maker, but was later enabled to study philosophy at Erfurt and Wittenberg and in 1777 became teacher in a school at Dessau . While on a tour through Italy in 1786 he became acquainted with Goethe, who interested himself in him . On his return, he was appointed professor of archaeology and aesthetics, at the academy of art in Berlin, and in this city he died on the 26th of June 1793 . Of Moritz's writings on aesthetic, archaeological and philosophical subjects, the little treatise Uber die bildende Nachahmung des Schonen (1788; re-printed 1888) and Die Gotterlehre (1791; loth ed., 1855, a reprint in Reclam's Universalbibliothek, 1878) are important; interesting, too, are the accounts of his travels, Reisen eines Deutschen in England (1788; repr . 1903; also trans. into Eng.) and Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien (3 vols., 1792-1793) . As an author he is best known by his two novels, Anton Reiser (1785-1790; new ed. by L . Geiger, 1886) and Andreas Hartknopf (1786), which are mainly autobiographical . See K . F . Klischnig, Erinnerungen aus den zehn letzten Lebensjahren meines Freundes Anton Reiser (1794); Varnhagen von Ense, Denkwurdigkeiten, vol. iv . (1838) ; and M.Dessoir, Karl Philipp Moritz als Aesthetiker (1889) .