Autobiography Of Heinrich Zschokke

The Autobiography of Heinrich Zschokke was originally published in German as Eine Selbstschau in 1842, a few years before Zschokke’s death in 1848. Zschokke, born in Magdeburg in 1771, was a German Swiss writer, journalist, theologian, and political administrator whose long and varied career placed him at the centre of central European intellectual life during the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century.

Zschokke moved from Prussia to Switzerland in his late twenties and became a Swiss citizen, eventually settling at Aarau in the canton of Aargau where he spent most of the rest of his life. His Swiss decades produced an enormous body of writing across many genres. He wrote popular history and political analysis for the educated German speaking middle classes of central Europe. He produced devotional and theological work that became widely read in liberal Protestant circles. He held various administrative positions in the Helvetic Republic and the later Swiss cantonal governments. He wrote fiction including the famous short novel Abällino der grosse Bandit that influenced the later popular bandit literature of European Romanticism.

The autobiography records this varied career from the inside. Zschokke writes with the kind of confident clarity that characterised the best German prose of the period. He traces his early childhood and education in Prussia, his early radical political enthusiasms during the years of the French Revolution, his move to Switzerland, his work as a journalist and administrator across the turbulent Napoleonic period, his developing religious and philosophical views, and the various friendships and intellectual partnerships that shaped his thinking.

The autobiography also contains the famous passage on Zschokke’s experience of what he called the inner sense or seherblick, a kind of psychic perception that he claimed allowed him to see into the past lives of strangers. The passage attracted substantial attention from later writers on psychical research and on the various forms of religious and mystical experience.

The book runs to several hundred pages in the German original and rather less in the various nineteenth century English translations. For readers of German Swiss intellectual history or of late Enlightenment and early Romantic central European culture, it is a valuable primary document.