Joachim Heinrich Campe
1746–1818
Biography
Joachim Heinrich Campe was born in 1746 in Deensen, a village in Lower Saxony, and died in Braunschweig in 1818. He was a German writer, educator, linguist and publisher, and a leading representative of philanthropinism, the movement that applied Enlightenment ideas to schooling. He studied Protestant theology but made his living mostly as a tutor, including to the Humboldt family in Berlin, and he later ran a teaching institute of his own in Hamburg before turning fully to writing and publishing.
Campe is counted among the founders of children's literature as a genre. He wrote for children and young people with particular age groups in mind, and his works ranged from alphabet books to travel accounts and conduct books. His best-known book, Robinson der Jüngere (1779–80), reworked Defoe's Robinson Crusoe for young readers, drawing on suggestions Rousseau had made in Émile. It went through more than a hundred editions in the nineteenth century. He followed it with Die Entdeckung von Amerika (1781–82), a trilogy that helped to define youth literature. In his later years he devoted himself to the German language, compiling a German dictionary and seeking native words to replace foreign loanwords.
The book on this site is the first volume of Ang Bagong Robinson, a Tagalog title meaning The New Robinson, which points back to Campe's story. The catalogue credits the translation to Tomás de Iriarte and Joaquín Tuason. Its presence here shows how far Campe's tale travelled from the German original into many other languages.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Ang Bagong Robinson (Tomo 1)
by Joachim Heinrich Campe (translated by Tomás de Iriarte and Joaquín Tuason)
A father in a house near Hamburg tells his children a tale for each evening, the story of a young man cast away on a desert island who must make everything he needs with his own hands. Over thirteen evenings the first volume follows the shipwreck and the first years of toil…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.