Were it not for the possibility that Friedrich Gottlob Wetzel might be the author of German Romanticism's most pessimistic vision, Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura (1804; translated as The Night Watches of Bonaventura, 1971), his name would no longer occupy even a modest place in the history of German literature. In any case, Wetzel assumed this place only ninety years after his death, when the painstaking detective work of Franz Schultz's Der Verfasser der Nachtwachen des Bonaventura (The Author of the Night Watches of Bonaventura, 1909) arrived at the startling conclusion that the almost totally unknown Wetzel had to be the man behind the not uncommon pseudonym "Bonaventura." For over one hundred years Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura was suspected to be an early work of the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. An intense search for more plausible alternatives during the first two decades of the twentieth century also suggested Schelling's wife...