1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Jung, Johann Heinrich

JUNG, JOHANN HEINRICH (1740–1817), best known by his assumed name of Heinrich Stilling, German author, was born in the village of Grund near Hilchenbach in Westphalia on the 12th of September 1740. His father, Wilhelm Jung, schoolmaster and tailor, was the son of Eberhard Jung, charcoal-burner, and his mother was Dortchen Moritz, daughter of a poor clergyman. Jung became, by his father’s desire, schoolmaster and tailor, but found both pursuits equally wearisome. After various teaching appointments he went in 1768 with “half a French dollar” to study medicine at the university of Strassburg. There he met Goethe, who introduced him to Herder. The acquaintance with Goethe ripened into friendship; and it was by his influence that Jung’s first and best work, Heinrich Stillings Jugend was written. In 1772 he settled at Elberfeld as physician and oculist, and soon became celebrated for operations in cases of cataract. Surgery, however, was not much more to his taste than tailoring or teaching; and in 1778 he was glad to accept the appointment of lecturer on “agriculture, technology, commerce and the veterinary art” in the newly established Kameralschule at Kaiserslautern, a post which he continued to hold when the school was absorbed in the university of Heidelberg. In 1787 he was appointed professor of economical, financial and statistical science in the university of Marburg. In 1803 he resigned his professorship and returned to Heidelberg, where he remained until 1806, when he received a pension from the grand-duke Charles Frederick of Baden, and removed to Karlsruhe, where he remained until his death on the 2nd of April 1817. He was married three times, and left a numerous family. Of his works his autobiography Heinrich Stillings Leben, from which he came to be known as Stilling, is the only one now of any interest, and is the chief authority for his life. His early novels reflect the piety of his early surroundings.

A complete edition of his numerous works, in 14 vols. 8vo, was published at Stuttgart in 1835–1838. There are English translations by Sam. Jackson of the Leben (1835) and of the Theorie der Geisterkunde (London, 1834, and New York, 1851); and of Theobald, or the Fanatic, a religious romance, by the Rev. Sam. Schaeffer (1846). See biographies by F. W. Bodemann (1868), J. v. Ewald (1817), Peterson (1890).