Christian Graf zu Stolberg is remembered less for his own work than for his close relationship to many of the luminaries of a particularly lustrous firmament in German letters. The older brother of the more gifted and productive Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg and the friend of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and many others, Stolberg played a minor role in the revival of German literature that began around 1770.

Born in Hamburg on 15 October 1748 to Christian Günther and Friederike Christiane zu Stolberg, Stolberg grew up in small towns and rural areas in present-day Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark, enjoying the advantages of the physical and intellectual culture of the north German nobility. His outlook and work were shaped both by his pietistically inclined mother and his reformminded father, who participated in the abolition of serfdom in the north. Together with his brother, he studied philosophy and law...