The New International Encyclopædia/Kerner, Justinus

KERNER, Justinus (1780-1862). A German poet of the so-called Swabian School. He is best known for his Reiseschatten (1811), poems and dramatic scenes characterized by a dreamy fancy and a peculiar fantastic humor, and for a morbid book on animal magnetism, Die Seherin von Prevorst (1829), which passed through several editions, and aroused much fleeting interest in America. Of his poems the Wanderlied is a universal favorite. He began life as an apprentice in a cloth factory at his native Ludwigsburg, and went in 1804 to study medicine at Tübingen, where he became a friend of Uhland. After two years of travel (1809-11) he practiced medicine at Wildbad (1811), Welzheim (1812), Gaildorf (1815), and Weinsberg (1819). Partial blindness compelled him to give up his profession in 1851. A monument was erected to him at Stuttgart in 1895. Consult Kerner's autobiographical Bilderbuch aus meiner Knabenzeit (Brunswick, 1849; new ed. Frankfort, 1897); Reinhard, Justinus Kerner und das Kernerhaus zu Weinsberg (Tübingen, 1886); Niethammer, Justinus Kerners Jugendliebe (Stuttgart, 1887); Strauss, “Justinus Kerner,” in Kleine Schriften (Berlin, 1866); Watts, Life and Work of Kerner (London, 1884).