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In Anton Reiser, the critic and educator Karl Philipp Moritz (1756-1793) turned his early life into fiction and, according to his translator Ritchie Robertson, created 'one of the most memorable experiences German literature has to offer'.
A masterpiece of emotional extremism and unsparing self-analysis, it tells the story of a gifted outsider driven to near-madness by exclusion from middle-class privilege and academic success. Brought up by members of a mystical protestant sect, apprenticed to a pious but tyrannical tradesman, and humiliated as a charity-pupil at school, Reiser escapes into an obsession with literature and the theatre, discovers a strange underworld of impoverished artisan intellectuals, and undertakes long wanderings in pursuit of a theatrical career.
