TO SCHOLARS OF GERMAN THEATER in the first half of the eighteenth century—and particularly those with an interest in the Hamburg theater scene before the arrival of Lessing—Franz Ferdinand Heitmüller is a name with serious currency. His studies Hamburgische Dramatiker zur Zeit Gottscheds und ihre Beziehungen zu ihm (Hamburg Dramatists in Gottsched's Lifetime and Their Relation to Him) from 1890, Holländische Komödianten in Hamburg (1740 und 1741) (Dutch Comedians in Hamburg 1740 and 1741), and Adam Gottfried Uhlich, both published in 1894, are, even well over a century later, still indispensable starting points for all research in the field. Heitmüller's studies are rich in details, events, and names long sidelined by the grand narratives of literary history—which inevitably makes them also rich in comments we would not expect to find these days. It would be rare, for example, to find any scholar today describing the decades between 1730 and 1760 as an era hallmarked by the loss of an entire generation of great literary talents who “went to the dogs” one by one in their combined battle to usher in the new literary ideals most prominently expressed and promoted by Johann Christoph Gottsched. Heitmüller here explicitly refers to an observation made by Eduard Devrient in the second volume of his 1848 Geschichte der deutschen Schauspielkunst (History of Acting in Germany):