August Gottlieb Meißner

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August Gottlieb Meißner
Sketches 1788

August Gottlieb Meißner (born November 3, 1753 in Budissin , Markgraftum Oberlausitz , † February 18, 1807 in Fulda ) was a German university professor and writer of the Enlightenment . He is considered to be one of the founders of the German-language crime stories .

Life

Meißner's father († 1761) was a government quartermaster . From 1764 to 1772 he attended the school in Löbau , completed a law degree at the University of Wittenberg on September 18, 1772, and moved to the University of Leipzig in 1774 , where he completed his studies in 1776. During his student days he discovered his love for theater and poetry. At the insistence of his worried mother, he gave up these artistic ambitions and went to Dresden to work as a lawyer . Here he became a member of the Association of Freemasons ; later he also joined the Order of Illuminati .

After traveling through Austria in 1785 , he received a professorship for aesthetics and classical literature at the University of Prague on November 26, 1785 as the successor to Karl Heinrich Seibt . He campaigned for the promotion of the German language at universities and promoted the need to educate the population to enable further education. In Prague he was editor of the magazine "Apollo" and translated works of French and classical literature into German. The writer Wenzel Mathias Kramerius (1759–1808) was one of his Prague students .

After 20 years he went to Fulda in 1805 , where he became illustrious Nassau consistorial councilor and director of the grammar school, but died after two years.

Family and loved ones

His marriage to the Hofrat's daughter Johanna Becker in 1783 resulted in several children. His daughter Bianca was married to Johann Gottlob von Quandt for the second time . The poet Alfred Meißner is his grandson.

Literary work and meaning

August Gottlieb Meißner made his literary debut in 1776 with the text for the comic opera Das Grab des Mufti or the two miser , which was premiered on January 17, 1779 by Johann Adam Hiller in Leipzig . He also wrote other libretti for operettas and musical plays. In his extensive publications he showed himself to be an opponent of Romanticism and became known as an author of entertaining historical novels. For example: Johann von Schwaben , 1780; Alkibiades , 1781-1788; Bianca Capella , 1785 and Masaniello 1784.

Meißner also wrote numerous fables. One of the best known is The Sun and the Wind (actually called Sun and Wind ) and is often erroneously attributed to Johann Gottfried von Herder .

Crime stories

He achieved particular importance for German literature through his founding of the new genre of crime stories . There had been reports of crimes before him in the form of sensational journalism and collections of legal cases, some of which were very popular. The separation of legal and moral attribution of an act, however, made August Gottlieb Meißner's stories real bestsellers of his time. He shifted the focus of his stories from the act and punishment itself to its psychological and social roots. The reader is made acquainted with the perpetrator even before his criminal act and gets to know the circumstances and motives of the crime and can thus judge the crime for himself. Meißner's portrayals in the stories about crimes were continued in Friedrich Schiller The Criminal of Lost Honor as well as in the works of Heinrich von Kleist . The detective novel became a popular read in the 19th century. Meißner's publications can also be seen as a contribution to the Enlightenment , which brought about a “humanization” of the judiciary by incorporating the social and psychological framework of crime. As early as 1800, the importance of psychological reports increased, and these were also increasingly included in the formation of judgments. Meißner published in his sketches (14 volumes, 1778–1796) over 50 crime stories, which were very successful. Today they also offer a good insight into that time.

Here are some of the titles of these stories:

  • Murder from Schwärmerey
  • Immaculate, murderess, murderer, and yet just an unhappy girl
  • Blood molester, fireman and murderer at the same time, according to the laws, and yet a youth of noble soul
  • Murderer of his betrothed and robbers! then an honest man for a while; strangely discovered, even stranger pretending to be self

Meißner's contribution to “empirical soul science” in the spirit of the Enlightenment can already be deduced from the titles . With the principle “Every human being is a criminal”, the image of man is placed in a social context.

expenditure

  • Criminal stories . Vienna 1796. ( digitized and full text in the German text archive )
  • Complete works , ed. by Christoph Kuffner. 36 volumes. Doll, Vienna 1811–1822.
  • August Gottlieb Meißner: crime stories. Sketches. Thirteenth and Fourteenth Collections , ed. by A. Košenina and Sarah Seidel. Hanover: Wehrhahn 2019.

literature

  • Karl Heinrich Jördens : Lexicon of German poets and prose writers. Weidmannische Buchhandlung, Leipzig 1808, vol. 3, p. 473 ( online ).
  • Arnošt Kraus: August Gottlieb Meissner. In: Athenaeum. Listy per literaturu a kritiku vědeckou . 5, 5 (February 15, 1888), pp. 125-135, 153-163.
  • Franz Schnorr von Carolsfeld :  August Gottlieb Meißner . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1885, p. 242 f.
  • Rudolf Fürst : August Gottlieb Meissner. A representation of his life and his writings, with source research. B. Behr Verlag, Berlin 1894 and 1900.
  • H. Braune: August Gottlieb Meißner , dissertation Leipzig 1935.
  • Uta Egert: Personal bibliographies of professors of the philosophical faculty in Prague in the approximate period from 1800 to 1860 . Dissertation Erlangen 1970, pp. 40-44.
  • Ingrid Bigler: Meißner, August Gottlieb . In: German Literature Lexicon . Biographical-bibliographical manual. 3rd edition, Volume 10, Francke, Bern 1986, Sp. 752-753.
  • Walter Weber:  Meißner, August Gottlieb. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 16, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-428-00197-4 , p. 694 ( digitized version ).
  • Heribert Sturm (Ed.): Biographical lexicon for the history of the Bohemian countries . Published on behalf of the Collegium Carolinum , Volume 2, ISBN 3 486 52551 4 , p. 632.
  • August Gottlieb Meißner: Selected crime stories. With an afterword ed. v. Alexander Košenina, Röhrig University Press, St. Ingbert 2004. ISBN 978-3-86110-346-2 .
  • Sarah Seidel: "Not a single one of these stories was invented by myself." August Gottlieb Meißner's case histories between example and novella. Wehrhahn Verlag, Hannover 2018, ISBN 978-3-86525-613-3 .

Web links

Wikisource: August Gottlieb Meißner  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ C. Lenning (Ed.): General Handbook of Freemasonry, 2nd volume, FA Brockhaus, Leipzig 1865, p. 305
  2. ^ Hermann Schüttler: The members of the Illuminati Order 1776 - 1787/93 , ars una, Munich 1991, p. 102f.
personal data
SURNAME Meißner, August Gottlieb
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German university professor and Enlightenment writer
DATE OF BIRTH November 3, 1753
PLACE OF BIRTH Budissin , Markgraftum Oberlausitz
DATE OF DEATH February 18, 1807
Place of death Fulda