The New International Encyclopædia/Schmidt, Erich

SCHMIDT, shmit, Erich (1853—). A German historian of literature, born at Jena, son of Oskar Schmidt. He studied Germanic philology and literary history at Graz, Jena, and Strassburg, established himself as privat docent at Würzburg in 1875, became professor at Strassburg in 1877, at Vienna in 1880, and director of the Goethe archive at Weimar in 1885. Thence he was called to Berlin in 1887, to succeed Wilhelm Scherer in the chair of German language and literature. Devoted almost exclusively to the investigation of modern literature, especially of the classical period, he published: Richardson, Rousseau, und Goethe (1875); Lenz und Klinger (1878); Heinrich Leopold Wagner (1879); Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Klopstockschen Jugendlyrik (1880); Charakteristiken (1st series 1880; 2d series 1900); and the excellent biography of Lessing (2d ed. 1899). He edited two volumes of the Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft (Weimar, 1886 and 1893); Faust, for the Weimar edition; and in 1887 he published Goethe's Faust in ursprünglicher Gestalt (3d ed. 1894), discovered by him in Dresden.