Abel (family of scholars)
Abel is the name of a well-known German silk merchants , writers and scholars who have been attested since the beginning of the 16th century. Various branches still exist today. She gained widespread recognition primarily through the humanist and poet Michael Abel , through the historian and Low German poet Caspar Abel, as well as the diverse connections to other families of poets.
history
Beginnings in the 16th and 17th centuries
The first family father known by name is Caspar Abel the Elder, a silk merchant in Frankfurt an der Oder and Stendal . However, his son Michael Abel (1542–1609) also describes other ancestors in one of his Latin elegies:
"Ipse pater, lustris decies ac pluribus actis, Alcoraniculus miles in agmen ijt. Grandis erat, nivibusque comas infectus ab aevo, (Aula senescentem Regia novit) avus: Integer et nullis vitiatus membra podagris, Cum sacra Wolffgangi viseret ossa pedes. Ossa iugis adeunda feris et vertice duro, Norica qua salsus terminat arva liquor. Maternis profitetur idem non degener ortus Sanguis, ad extremos si repetatur avos. "
Afterwards, his father, more than 50 years old, took part in a campaign against the Turks as a soldier , while his grandfather, who was well-known at the royal court, with snow-white hair, made a pilgrimage to the bones of St. Wolfgang on foot over the mountains. The maternal blood is also not out of place. Since St. Wolfgang is buried in Pupping, west of Linz, the route across the mountains can only have been started by Bohemia , which would make the family's origins from there conceivable. Since Michael Abel remained unmarried, the family was only continued by his younger brother Jakob (1559-1636), who continued the family's silk shop. His son Joachim the Elder (1608–1686) is attested as an elder of the silk merchants' guild in Stendal, and his grandson Joachim the Younger (1642–1710), pastor in Hindenburg, is married to a descendant of an old family of silk merchants in Brunswick. At the same time, the family boasted of their early attachment to Luther's theology through Nicolaus Abel, another son of Caspar Abel the Elder. Caspar Abel the Younger, for example, writes about his father in a memorial box:
At first you come from now so that I can be your gender
Don't go over it, you pious servant
From a good city
From ungracious people
And a real deal, from which long ago
And shortly after Luther's death, became a preacher
Who still leaves his name in writing.
Unfortunately, an Abelian house chronicle was lost during the Russian billeting in Sondershausen in 1945, so that the earliest genealogies mainly have to be taken from secondary sources.
18th century
As a result of the increasing wealth of the family, more and more sons of the family studied, so that the commercial business lost its importance. The family gained great fame through the historian and poet Caspar Abel the Younger (1676–1763). In order to relieve him of his literary work, Johann Gottfried Bürger, father of the poet Gottfried August Bürger , was assigned to him as an adjunct in his pastoral office in 1748 . In marriage politics there are now diverse connections to well-known poets of the time. Three granddaughters of Caspar Abels married the poets Klamer Schmidt , August Lafontaine and Stephan Kunze , partly through the mediation of Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim . His youngest son Joachim Gottwalt Abel was also active as a historian and theologian and married a niece of the poet Drymantes , while his eldest son gained fame in medicine, belonged to the literary circle around Father Gleim and translated satires of Juvenal into German.
Significant family members
- Michael Abel (1542–1609), humanist and poet
- Caspar Abel (1676–1763), historian and Low German poet
- Friedrich Gottfried Abel (1714–1794), doctor, scholar and poet
- Christian Leberecht Abel (1719–1776), theologian
- Joachim Gottwalt Abel (1723–1806), historian and theologian
- Johann Gotthelf Leberecht Abel (1749–1822), doctor and art collector
- Sophie Elisabeth Charlotte Abel (1750–1822), wife of the poet August Lafontaine
- Louise Magdalena Justina Abel (1754–1832), wife of the poet Klamer Schmidt
- Christina Charlotte Abel (1769–1841), wife of the writer Stephan Kunze
literature
- Carl Theodor Hertel: Genealogical Handbook of Bourgeois Families , Vol. 9, Berlin 1902, Pages 1–41: Abel; v. Abel from Stendal in the Altmark
- Karl Abel: Gender Abel , Görlitz 1937, page 56ff
- Martin Kessler: The ancestors of pastor Hermann Kunze in Prödel (1836–1923) and his wife Anna born. Färber (1842-1919) , Stuttgart 1982
Web links
- Caspar Abel in the German biography