Bernhard Groethuysen

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Bernhard Groethuysen (later Bernard Groethuisen ; born September 9, 1880 in Berlin , † September 17, 1946 in Luxembourg ) was a German-French philosopher, historian and translator . His scientific work moved on the borderline between the research areas of history and sociology .

Live and act

Groethuysen was the second son of five children of the doctor and medical adviser Philipp Groethuysen from Straelen on the Lower Rhine . His mother Olga, nee Groloff, came from a Russian immigrant family.

Groethuysen came from the educated bourgeoisie in Berlin, learned the French language at an early age and was baptized according to the Roman Catholic rite. His father suffered from a mental illness and from 1885 required treatment in a sanatorium . For this reason the family moved from Berlin to Baden-Baden . Groethuysen started school in Baden-Baden and also attended a grammar school there. In 1898 he received his Matura and then went to study in Vienna . In the winter semester of 1898/99 he began to study philosophy , economics and art history .

Further studies followed at the universities of Munich and Berlin. Groethuysen attended lectures at the universities in Vienna and Berlin and attended seminars with Theodor Gomperz , Georg Simmel , Heinrich Wölfflin and Wilhelm Dilthey . For the winter semester of 1901/02 he returned to Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1903 with Carl Stumpf with a thesis on Compassion .

Now a student of Wilhelm Dilthey, he submitted a habilitation thesis on the history of philosophy on natural law in the period before the French Revolution . In 1907 habilitated he and was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Berlin. His research on the intellectual and cultural-historical prerequisites of the French Revolution was continued by him, and so a multi-volume analysis of the intellectual history of the Ancien Régime followed , a complex of topics that occupied him for over twenty years. He presented the result with The emergence of the bourgeois worldview in France (1927).

Groethuysen's name also stands for Denis Diderot's reception in the 20th century . His work La pensée de Diderot (1913) became the focus for further reflections, questions and work that should influence the understanding of Diderot in the further course. For Groethuysen, the Enlightenment philosopher is an esprit scientifique and an esprit imaginatif, i.e. a scientific and imaginative mind. Groethuysen tried in ideruvres de Denis Diderot and their thematic philosophical diversity with ostensible contradictions in terms of content to emphasize a unity and uniqueness of the way of thinking of Denis Diderot.

He experienced the outbreak of the First World War in Paris, where he stayed, as he had often before, for study purposes. Groethuysen originally wanted to travel to Rouen . However, he and many other Germans were interned in February 1915. A total of four years until the end of the war he remained under official supervision near Châteauroux ( Indre ) and Déols in Camp de Bitray .

He had a close friendship with Margarete Susman . At the so-called weekly jours in Georg Simmel's house, which represented a center for intellectuals, artists and scientists, Susman not only got to know Groethuysen, but also Ernst Bloch , Martin Buber and Georg Lukács . He was also part of the circle around Aline Mayrisch-de Saint-Hubert (1874–1947), which also included Paul Claudel , Jean Guéhenno , Jacques Rivière , Karl Jaspers , André Gide, Jean Schlumberger , Ernst Robert Curtius , Annette Kolb , Walter Rathenau , Marie Delcourt and Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi .

Even if he seemed to be close to communism in his political views , his philosophical worldview was shaped by phenomenology . In the post-war years, France and especially Paris became Groethuysen's center of life. Here he met the communist and reform pedagogue Alix Guillian (1876–1951), who lived in France . The partner lived in an artist's studio on Rue Campagne-Première . Here he befriended the writer André Gide , whom he had met through Jean Paulhan and Charles Du Bos . He was also friends with André Malraux . He only gave his lectures in Berlin in the few months of the summer semester. For the French publishing house Éditions Gallimard he translated works by Goethe into French and wrote a foreword to the work of Franz Kafka , Der Process, which was translated by Alexandre Vialatte (1901–1971) . In this publishing house Gallimard, Groethuysen founded the publication series Bibliothèque des Idées with the publisher Jean Paulhan in 1927 .

In 1933, in protest against National Socialism , he stopped giving lectures in Berlin and in 1937 took French citizenship . His teaching license was revoked in the German Reich in 1938.

Groethuysen died in Luxembourg of complications from lung cancer in the Sainte-Élisabeth clinic.

Works (selection)

  • The compassion. Dissertation (1903).
  • La pensée de Diderot (1913).
  • The emergence of the bourgeois worldview in France (1927 and 1930).
  • Philosophical Anthropology (1928).
  • The Dialectic of Democracy (1932).
  • Under the bridges of metaphysics (1968).

literature

  • Hannes Böhringer: Bernhard Groethysen. From the context of his writings . Agora, Berlin 1978.
  • Klaus Große Kracht : Between Berlin and Paris. Bernhard Groethuysen (1880-1946). An intellectual biography. Max Niemeyer , Tübingen 2002, ISBN 3-4843-5091-1 .
  • Jean Paulhan: Groethuysen's death in Luxembourg. In: Neue Rundschau , vol. 81, no. 1, 1970.
  • Eberhard Schmitt: Bernhard Groethuysen. In: Hans-Ulrich Wehler : German historians. Volume VI, Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, Göttingen 1980, ISBN 3-525-33443-5 , pp. 89-102.
  • Meike Seiffert: Bernhard Groethuysen: Philosophy of the French Revolution. Term paper at the University of Karlsruhe (TH). Grin Verlag 2004.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In memoriam Bernhard Goethuysen. In: Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte (ZRGG) , 1948, pp. 79–85, online. Name misspelling in the original.
  2. ^ Klaus Große Kracht: Between Berlin and Paris. Bernhard Groethuysen (1880-1946). An intellectual biography. Max Niemeyer, Tübingen 2002, ISBN 3-4843-5091-1 , p. 23.
  3. ^ Bernard Groethuysen: La pensée de Diderot (1913). In French in: Jochen Schlobach (Ed.): Denis Diderot. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft , Darmstadt 1992, ISBN 3-534-09097-7 , p. 39.
  4. ↑ Klaus Große Kracht: Between mysticism and literary politics. Berhard Groethuysen on the trail of Master Eckart. In: François Beilecke, Katja Mametschke: The intellectual and the Mandarin (= intervals 8. Writings on cultural research ). University of Kassel 2005, ISBN 3-89958-134-2 , pp. 379-401.
  5. ↑ Margarete Susman: I have lived many lives. Deutsche Verlagsanstalt , Stuttgart 1964, p. 53.
  6. ↑ Luxembourg authors' dictionary of the Center national de littérature in Mersch ( Memento of December 11, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ↑ Alix Guillian and Bernard Groethuysen .
  8. ^ André Gide and Bernard Groethuysen .
personal data
SURNAME Groethuysen, Bernhard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Groethuysen, Bernard; Groethuisen, Bernard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Franco-German philosopher, historian and translator
DATE OF BIRTH September 9, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH September 17, 1946
Place of death Luxembourg