August von Einsiedel

Johann August von Einsiedel (born March 4, 1754 in Lumpzig ; † May 8, 1837 in Scharfenstein ) was a German philosopher , naturalist and traveler to Africa. He and his brother Friedrich Hildebrand belonged to the Weimar Court of Muses .

origin

Johann August von Einsiedel was born in Lumpzig not far from Altenburg in the Duchy of Saxony-Altenburg. He came from a Saxon nobility family. His ancestors were in contact with the protagonists of the Reformation, including a. with Luther. He grew up in the Lumpzig, Wurzen area. His parents were August Hildebrand von Einsiedel (1722–1796) and his wife Caroline Charlotte Pflugk , the lawyer and writer Friedrich Hildebrand von Einsiedel (1750–1828) was his older brother.

Life

Already in his early youth he was given military service according to the usual norms, a military career was determined for him by his parents. He served in a regiment of the Rhine Count Friedrich von Salm, which was under the sovereignty of the Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. This regiment was given into Dutch service for subsidies. Einsiedel did not like this service, even if he was said to have excellent military skills. He felt this state as a condemnation to death. Einsiedel had a personal relationship with Rheingraf von Salm. Salm had always tortured him very much, but Einsiedel also learned a lot from and from him.

In the course of time, however, the young Einsiedel succeeded in asserting his family's desire to be discharged from military service. He was interested in mining from an early age. He now wants to move from a state of destruction to a state of production. After his discharge from the military as a lieutenant in May 1779, he began studying in Göttingen, focusing on the natural sciences and learning a.o. a. with the mathematician Abraham Kästner , the natural scientist Christian Wilhelm Büttner and with Georg Christoph Lichtenberg . The University of Göttingen was one of the most modern of the time in terms of the course content, but according to Einsiedel it was more of a book than a museum.

A year later he moved to the Bergakademie in Freiberg. I.a. Abraham Gottlob Werner was one of his teachers. Einsiedel showed the best prerequisites for studying not only through his primeval nobility, but also because of his intellectual ability, which was highly recognized, combined with a profound interest. After he passed his special examinations on mining with excellent results, he was appointed in June 1782 by Elector Friedrich August of Saxony as a mountain commissioner and assessor with a seat and vote at the Freiberg Oberbergamt. Einsiedel had the very best prerequisites for attaining a leading position at the Oberbergamt in the following years.

August von Einsiedel came into contact with Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach in the years before. His brother Friedrich Hildebrand von Einsiedel (1750-1828) was in the service of the duchess and princess Anna Amalia after serving as a page and studying law . August von Einsiedel visited his brother in 1777 and got to know the royal lords, including Duke Karl August and Prince Konstantin . Above all, he was interested and captivated by the lively bourgeois intellectuals of Weimar, Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Wolfgang Goethe . The younger Einsiedel felt understood by Herder. That didn't always seem easy, as Einsiedel characteristically always had to go through the spiritual questions of interest to him in depth. The lawyer and writer Goethe seems to have attracted Einsiedel because of his radicalism in the representations and evaluations of personal relationships. This becomes vivid when his brother Haubold von Einsiedel writes to Herder on February 11, 1783: “Is there soon hope that Göthen's folly will rise to Tollhauß?” This 'folly' questions all values ​​found, ideas of law and morality. It is precisely this that connects Einsiedel and Goethe at this early stage. The spiritually agile, open-minded Goethe von Einsiedel was able to and learned to do with questions of natural science and philosophy. Einsiedel also made friends with Knebel , who was interested in literature , the tutor of Prince Constantine. Between 1777 and 1783 August von Einsiedel visited Weimar several times. Einsiedel wrote several letters to Herder that have survived.

Einsiedel could have confidently rested on his won position of the Mining Commission Council and here and there - with a little more patience - introduced innovations. In addition to his inclination towards the mountains, he was also interested in another topic from an early age: the interior of Africa. The African coast was known from shipping, but the interior of Africa was a blank area, the people, their circumstances, their way of life, the diversity of nature in Europe completely unknown. So Einsiedel studied everything tangible about trips to Africa, analyzing them for success and failure. He prepared for such a trip by studying natural sciences, including celestial science, medicine, and geology. First he won over his brother Alexander von Einsiedel (1760–1849), who also studied all the literature about Africa that was available to him. Einsiedel created personal connections, financial support and equipment. When he received a special commitment to travel support, the parental family around the father August Hildebrand von Einsiedel (1722-1796) and the uncle Friedrich Heinrich von Einsiedel (1721-1793) couldn't help but agree to the trip and financial support from Provide family. With these commitments, Einsiedel gave up his work as a mountain commissioner and took up residence in Oberweimar in 1784. The release of his brother Alexander from Prussian military service took a while and so he used the time for further preparations. In Oberweimar he set up a laboratory for the time being, according to his scientific interests, which Goethe was also allowed to use and which Fritz von Stein took with him. In addition, the brother Georg Carl von Einsiedel (1759-1835), who was in the service of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg in Gotha, joined the trip. Because of the premature claims of other nobles, there was no opportunity for his efforts to get a job in the forest service.

In Weimar, the intended trip was on everyone's lips. In the spring of 1785, the three brothers set out from Weimar across half of Europe via Frankfurt, Darmstadt, and Strasbourg to Marseilles, in order to finally reach the North African coast by ship. Einsiedel expected to be able to gain knowledge about the original, natural conditions of the people there in the interior of Africa - based on the thinking of Rousseau. He was interested in the natural relationships, ways of thinking and behavior of people who are not encrusted and deformed by social development and arbitrary, artificial rules.

The brothers initially intended to get to Senegal by ship and then into the interior of the country via this river. However, since the captains of the sea-going ships demanded a full fee for the considerably shorter crossing, as for a trip to India, the Einsiedel brothers decided to cross over to North Africa. From there they wanted to use the caravan routes for their onward journey. They reached Tunis , where the plague was still raging. All of North Africa suffered from it, which meant many deaths, danger, rising food prices and the abandonment of caravans. Georg Carl, as an advance scout, went to Tripoli by ship . Ultimately, because of the impossibility of getting into the interior of Africa, the travelers had no choice but to return to Germany.

With August von Einsiedel, Weimar and the trip to Africa the very special love story with Emilie von Werthern (1757–1844), née. from Münchhausen , connected. The daughter of the Hanoverian minister Philipp Adolph von Münchhausen belonged to the Freundeskreis in Weimar and in early 1784 they fell in love. Only, Emilie was married to Christoph Ferdinand Freiherrn von Werthern . When the Einsiedel brothers left for Africa in May 1785, the young woman traveled to see relatives. From there, news of her sudden death from a highly contagious disease soon reached Weimar and caused great consternation. Her funeral took place at the Münchhausen castle in Leitzkau . A short time later, however, it was suddenly rumored in Weimar that the deceased had been seen with August von Einsiedel in Strasbourg . Her grave was opened and, according to legend, a wooden bust was found on a straw doll. This mock funeral has now scandalized Germany.

Although August and Emilie could have lived quite unmolested in Africa, the return to Europe that was necessary due to the plague also opened up a legal problem in addition to the social scandal: according to the legal provisions for Saxony-Altenburg in 1786, adultery was still punishable by the death penalty Sword threatened. Nevertheless, after some effort, the divorce was obtained in 1788. On September 25, 1788 August von Einsiedel married his Emilie. The serious crime was kept under the covers. Both then lived for some time with Emilie's brother Georg von Münchhausen at Leitzkau Castle, where the wooden bust from her coffin could still be seen in 1938, according to the hear-say. Other places of residence were August's parents' house in Lumpzig , then Ilmenau and Jena and, from 1825, the Einsiedel'sche Burg Scharfenstein (Erzgebirge) , which August had inherited with his brothers.

As a result of this love affair, but later also because of Einsiedel's permanent pro-revolutionary stance towards the French Revolution after 1789, he was barely able to gain a foothold in public after his return from North Africa. However, in 1791 in Tunis he published news about North Africa collected by the brothers. Einsiedel is highly remarkable with his trip to Africa, as a natural scientist and philosopher and as a critic of the social conditions of absolutism.

"Ideas"

Einsiedel's philosophical thoughts and reflections are primarily passed down through two excerpts in Herder's handwritten estate. They were first edited in 1957 by Wilhelm Dobbek . Einsiedel appears in it as a free-spirited enlightener , who thus represents an alternative German variant of Enlightenment thinking and was critical to hostile to the ruling direction of Kant. He was of the opinion that the “influence and support that the Kantian philosophy has found is proof of how little culture is making progress in Germany.” Einsiedel's criticism concerns e.g. B. the moral philosophy : “One is now making a great outcry as to how all morality would fall away if religious and political opinions ceased […] The cessation of them will not only do no harm, but it will then become true, appropriate to human nature Morality just beginning; for if people have advanced in culture with the previous opinions and institutions that contradict their nature and instincts, how much faster will their progress be when the obstacles of their prejudices are lifted, the institutions are made in accordance with human nature [...] . “The Africa explorer August von Einsiedel combined a cultural progress and a. with a connection and mixing of peoples. In his opinion, the culture of thought and behavior - with an ordinary twelve-hour working day from Monday to Saturday - needed to be freed from the too much work that would create leisure for thought. The development of culture is connected with inventions of a technical nature but also with regard to the organization of society. He criticized that the extra work, i.e. H. the product that the workers create beyond their own needs or those of their families, is appropriated by others. The capitalist who gains an advantage by exchanging goods is an absurdity. In fact, with the development of the productive forces of handicraft, farming and trade at that time, Einsiedel pleaded for labor ownership. Einsiedel tended more towards the French Enlightenment. Among other things, he also attacked the traditional morality of love, marriage and intimacy. The extent to which his considerations in this regard, including sexual morality , still caused astonishment in the 1950s can be seen in the fact that the editor of his “ideas” had three points set where the author “excessively touches on sexual matters”.

War and culture

After the French Revolution, Einsiedel assumed a historical perspective on the development of human culture. On the other hand, as a former officer, he has thoughts about war and the military. The starting point of his way of thinking is the creation of products through human work and the self-authorization of every human individual. Maintaining the military and producing the weapons and equipment would waste human labor (Dobbek No. 238). The war itself would destroy the products of human activity and human individuals (Dobbek No. 238). The praising of the military institutes is extremely indecent, since it is known that they serve nothing but to make people worse (Dobbek No. 236). The soldier often turns into a fratricide in war (Dobbek No. 235). In this respect, the soldier is no different from a bandit, because both are murderers hired for money, whereby the bandit is still free to make an immediate decision (Dobbek No. 235). During war, soldiers are deprived of their moral values ​​through killing, robbery and stealing, and they become blunted with regard to compassion for other people (Dobbek No. 237). The blind obedience that exists in the military, combined with the private financial advantage of the soldier, only makes him worse (Dobbek No. 234). In times of justification of wars under imperial, feudal and inheritance law, he finds out that the princes actually get a benefit, a financial and economic advantage, from new lands and subjects. The elimination of wars is therefore associated with an elimination of the beneficiaries or usufructs of war and the military and further cultural development. Anyone who contributes to the war with advice and action should be viewed as a criminal of offended humanity (Dobbek No. 238). The war itself already proves lack of culture (Dobbek No. 239).

Works

• News from the inner countries of Africa, on a journey to Tunis made in 1785, collected from the reports of the natives. 1791.
• Ideas. Introduced and annotated and selected from JG Herder's copies edited by Wilhelm Dobbek. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin / GDR 1957.
• Veit Noll (Ed.): Johann August von Einsiedel (1754-1837) - life, way of thinking and sources. Part II: Sources - publications, letters and records , Vol. II / 1: Publications by Johann August von Einsiedel and about him during his lifetime, as well as Einsiedel's writings on the trip to Africa. Forschungsverlag Salzwedel 2017, ISBN 978-3-9816669-1-5 ; Vol. II / 3: Correspondence, diary notes and contemporaries about Einsiedel. Forschungsverlag Salzwedel 2019, ISBN 978-3-9816669-7-7 .

literature

• Adalbert Elschenbroich:  Einsiedel, Johann August von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 4, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1959, ISBN 3-428-00185-0 , p. 398 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Heinz Stolpe: Materialist currents in classical Weimar. Critical remarks on W. Dobbeks Einsiedel edition . In: Weimar Contributions, Zschft. for German Literature History , 1963, pp. 485-511.
• Wolfgang Förster: Classic German philosophy, basic lines of its development. Peter Lang, Frankfurt a. M. 2008, ISBN 978-3-631-53693-3 , pp. 292-297 (on Einsiedel's ideas).
• Karl Eitner, Henry Crabb Robinson, An Englishman on German Spiritual Life in the First Third of this Century , p.303 Einsiedel and Werther

Web links

• Veit Noll: The views of Johann August von Einsiedel (1754–1837) on culture and war in connection with his trip to Africa in 1785.
• Veit Noll: August von Einsiedel (1754–1837) and Emilie von Werthern, b. von Münchhausen (1757–1844).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Udo von Alvensleben (art historian) , visits before the downfall, aristocratic seats between Altmark and Masuria , compiled from diary entries and edited by Harald von Koenigswald, Frankfurt / M.-Berlin 1968, p. 117
2. ↑ ^{a b c} August von Einsiedel: Ideas.