Alexander Moszkowski

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Alexander Moszkowski (born January 15, 1851 in Pilica , Russian Empire , † September 26, 1934 in Berlin ) was a German writer and satirist of Polish origin. He is the brother of the composer and pianist Moritz Moszkowski .

Life

Moszkowski was born in Pilica , which was part of Congress Poland , to a wealthy, Jewish, Polish family, but grew up in Wroclaw . He later moved to Berlin , where Julius Stettenheim hired him from 1877 to 1886 for his satirical newspaper Berliner Wespen .

After differences with Stettenheim, he founded his own magazine, Funny Papers , which had high print runs during the Weimar Republic .

Moszkowski had been a member of the Society of Friends since 1892 . He was a figure in Berlin society and known to celebrities like Albert Einstein . Moszkowski was one of the first to make the theory of relativity accessible to a broad audience in popular science .

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The Jewish Box (1911)

In addition to his satirical works, Moszkowski's work includes numerous popular science books, primarily on language and philosophy: The jump over the shadow (1917), Sokrates the Elder. Idiot (1917), The secret of language (1920), The reverse side of the world (1920), The Venuspark, Fantasies about love and philosophy (1920) and others. a.

He was a joke and aphorism collector and published The Immortal Box with the "333 best jokes in world literature", "advocated and advocated by Alexander Moszkowski"; this was followed by a second part entitled The Jewish Box . Furthermore, The Jewish Joke and its Philosophy appeared with 399 examples. His collection of jokes reached over 100 editions.

The panorama of my life was published in 1924 .

The islands of wisdom

His most interesting work to this day is the utopian novel The Islands of Wisdom from 1922. This work, which is in the tradition of Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift , uses the framework of an expedition to unknown, but in some cases high-tech islands, in order to convey various intellectual currents of his time through societies to portray different islands. These societies each take an idea to the extreme and thus ad absurdum.

Among other things, Moszkowski invented the mobile phone and prophetically describes the acceleration of the modern, high-tech information society . Among other things, a kind of holodeck , ie a virtual space, is described in which a three-dimensional film is shown about the rise of machines and the enslavement of mankind.

Works (selection)

Philipp Scharwenka : Illustration to Moszkowski's "Anton Notenquetscher"
  • Anton music squeezer. A satirical poem in four songs by Alexander Moszkowski. With 23 illustrations by Philipp Scharwenka . Cassel, Troll, 1875. ( digitized version )
  • Schultze and Müller in the Ring of the Nibelung. Humorous sketches . Berlin [1881] a. Berlin, Hofmann & Comp., 1911 and Hildesheim, Olms, 2013.
  • Einstein. Insights into his world of thought . Common considerations about the theory of relativity and a new world system developed from conversations with Einstein. Hamburg, Hoffmann & Campe, 1921, digitized .
  • The Jewish joke and its philosophy. 399 jewels real chamfered . Berlin, Eysler, 1922.

source

Web links

Wikisource: Alexander Moszkowski  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary in the community newspaper of the Jewish community in Berlin (No. 38) of October 13, 1934, p. 6.
personal data
SURNAME Moszkowski, Alexander
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-German writer and satirist
DATE OF BIRTH January 15, 1851
PLACE OF BIRTH Pilica , Silesia
DATE OF DEATH September 26, 1934
Place of death Berlin