ABSTRACT
The most prominent adversaries of Gottsched, the Swiss critics Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698–1783) and Johann Jakob Breitinger (1701 — 1776), had begun to play their roles as critics before Gottsched, and until 1740 a friendly exchange of ideas and common concerns marked the correspondence between Leipzig and Zurich. Bodmer and Breitinger were life-long friends and colleagues at Zurich’s Gymnasium, Bodmer as historian and Breitinger as philologist teaching Greek and Hebrew. They co-authored a number of books, and attained an unusually high degree of mutual consultation as all of their publications were being prepared. Bodmer was the more eloquent and more daring in presenting his thoughts, while Breitinger was more cautious. From the beginning their critical work received strong impulses from English models, most notably from Addison’s Spectator and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Bodmer’s various translations of Milton into German — the first, in prose, appeared in 1732 — brought the English poet many admirers in Germany, inspired German poets, and established Bodmer as a critic so solidly that in time his authority became a threat to Gottsched. Although the literary feud often consisted of Gottsched’s attacks on, and Bodmer’s defense of, Paradise Lost, Milton’s epic served only as the battleground on which an important power struggle was taking place.
