Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart is important to eighteenth-century German literature less for his own literary output than for his influence on other writers and on the German people as a whole. This influence took both a literary and a political form: for writers of his period Schubart served as a literary critic and the source of dramatic themes; to the German people he gave the impetus for the awakening of national pride. Schubart has been described as a poet, a journalist, a musician, and a rebel. He is most famous as the prisoner in the fortress Hohenasperg, but as the editor of and sole contributor to the Deutsche Chronik (1774-1777), a journal established as a commentary on the current political scene, he gained acclaim and achieved success as a writer.

Schubart was born in Obersontheim in Franconia on 24 March 1739, the eldest of five children. His father, Johann Jacob...