Johann Nikolaus Böhl (Hamburg 1770 – Cádiz 1836; ennobled in 1806 and known as von Böhl or Böhl von Faber; in Spanish: Juan Nicolás) was a key mediator between Spain and Germany in the first decades of the 19th century, harbinger of German Romanticism in Spain and, at the same time, an important publicist of older Spanish literature in Germany.
Born into a Protestant family of Hamburg merchants, his father had him and his brother schooled by the prominent pedagogue and philologist Joachim Heinrich Campe; indeed, Johann Nikolaus became one of the main characters of Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere (1779), in which he expounded his Rousseauesque educational principles.
At the age of fourteen, Böhl moved to Cádiz to take care of the family business. In 1796 he married Francisca Larrea (1775–1838), an admirer of Shakespeare, of modern English literature, of Madame de Staël and of Mary Wollstonecraft (whose Vindication of the Rights of Women she translated into Spanish). “Frasquita”, as she was known, was instrumental in Böhl’s reappraisal of Spanish culture and his later conversion to Catholicism.
In 1796 their first daughter, Cecilia Böhl (the future Spanish writer known as Fernán Caballero) was born. In 1805 Böhl bought a manor in Görslow (Mecklenburg) and moved his family to Germany. In these years, he met N.H. Julius, who became one of his closest friends, and was ennobled. For her part, Frasquita was not at ease in the country and went back to Cádiz again, this time alone, where she started her own tertulia (salon) and participated actively as a patriotic publicist during the Napoleonic Wars. The couple remained separated until 1813, but maintained a respectful correspondence.
In the first years of the new century Böhl became an adept of Romanticism and convinced of the necessity of a spiritual and religious revival. In 1803 he wrote an essay introducing Schiller’s reading of Kant’s aesthetics and the Herderian appreciation of national literatures to the Spanish public. Around 1808 he rediscovered both Spanish and German medieval literature, and became part of the trend of recovering popular ballads and poetry. His conversion to Catholicism took place in 1813, just before his return to Spain, where he was reunited with his wife.
In 1814 Böhl began propagating August Wilhelm Schlegel’s appreciation of Spain’s national literature. Following Schlegel, Böhl saw in Calderón’s plays the essence of a chivalrous, monarchical and Catholic national spirit diametrically opposed to the values of the Enlightenment. This defense of Calderón’s theatre was so reactionary that it provoked an irate response from his erstwhile friend José Joaquín de Mora. Thus began the “Calderón polemic”, in which Antonio Alcalá Galiano supported Mora. Unfolding just as the absolutist restoration was taking place in Spain, it had an evident political dimension. Böhl accused his enemies of being anti-Spanish, aligning neo-classicism and the Enlightenment with France. Conversely, and counter-productively, this made his opponents reject German Romanticism as a reactionary movement.
Böhl never abandoned his ultraconservatism and in the 1820s aligned himself with the similarly-minded Vienna Romantics around Friedrich Schlegel. Even so, he moderated his polemical positions in order to win over his Spanish colleagues. His major compilation of ancient Spanish poetry, Floresta de rimas antiguas castellanas (1821-25), gained him recognition and an honorary membership of the Real Academia de la Lengua Española. The Floresta drew on Jacob Grimm’s Silva de romances viejos (1815) as a model. In Böhl’s opinion, the medieval romances were the expression of the popular and national Spanish soul, threatened since the 18th century by French neo-classicism. While this approach drew on discussions of the romances that had been current in Spain since the late 18th century, his methodology (derived from Des Knaben Wunderhorn and the Grimm brothers) introduced some of the principal ideas of the new German philology.
After 1829, Böhl developed a close and mutually profitable friendship with the Spanish philologist Agustín Durán, in whom he recognized a supporter of Schlegel’s ideas. In the last stage of his life, he published his second major work, Teatro anterior a Lope de Vega (1832). Böhl died in 1836. Although he was a pivotal mediatior in the spread of Romantic ideas in Spain and in the diffusion of Spanish literary treasures abroad, his works were less appreciated in Spain than in England or Germany, where he was considered one of the most important authorities on Spanish literature of the time.
