SOURCE: "Johann Valentin Andreae: A Practising Idealist of the Seventeenth Century," in German Life and Letters, Vol. 41, No. 4, July, 1988, pp. 363–70.

In the following essay, Powell gives a brief overview of Andreae's life and discusses his satiric drama Turbo.

In our universities students are encouraged to see [Johann Gottfried von] Herder as mentor of the 'Sturm and Drang' and inaugurator of the classical age in German literature. What they are generally not told is that, in addition to reviving old folk-songs and ballads, Herder was also active in rescuing from oblivion writers of the century immediately preceding his own—amongst them Johann Valentin Andreae and Jacob Balde. Although Herder's position as exalted official of the Lutheran church tends to be minimized in surveys of literature, it is not irrelevant in the context of the present essay. Andreae was also a Lutheran clergyman and ultimately appointed to high office in...