THE LIFE OF THE SWEDISH COUNTESS*** (hardcover)

The Fables and Tales and the Swedish Countess were ensconced in the German canon of literature well into the nineteenth century. But Gellert’s renown faded in the twentieth, a development that can be traced in part to the profound disillusionment and cynicism that set in after the World Wars and the Holocaust. It is understandable that the continent that produced philosophical optimism in the eighteenth century and Auschwitz in the twentieth would find much of the thinking of Enlightenment figures like Gellert naïve, even passé. Saxony was one of the many states large and small that belonged to the vast and slowly failing Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, the capital of which was Vienna.