German Enlightenment anti-clerical journalism

Wilhelm Ludwig Wekhrlin

1739 – 1792

Wilhelm Ludwig Wekhrlin (1739–1792) was one of the most combative publicists of the German Enlightenment, born in Botnang and dying in Ansbach. He edited and published several influential radical periodicals — including Chronologen (1779–1783) and Das Graue Ungeheuer — championing civil equality, freedom of conscience, religious tolerance, and social justice against church and state authority in the spirit of Enlightenment rationalism and Masonic idealism.