Moritz August von Thümmel participated in the literary Rococo, a tendency in style and theme that recurred in various forms from the 1730s through the first decade of the nineteenth century. The Rococo offered a playful, worldly alternative to the sober rationalism of the dominant movement, the Enlightenment. The erosion of Thümmel's literary reputation during the twentieth century can be attributed in part to fluctuations in the popularity of the Rococo and to the rise in the esteem accorded Christoph Martin Wieland, a writer who is now seen as eclipsing the movement to which he belonged. That rise was well underway by 1909, when a German encyclopedia. Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, asserted that Thümmel surpassed Wieland as an observer of society but lagged behind him in stylistic elegance. The article goes on to predict that Thümmel's powers of observation and description, combined with...