Bruno Wille

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bruno Wille
Bruno Wille around 1900
Senftenau Castle

Bruno Wille (born February 6, 1860 in Magdeburg , † August 31, 1928 at Senftenau Castle in Aeschach , which has belonged to Lindau again since 1922 ) was a German preacher , journalist, and fiction and popular philosophy writer .

Life

Bruno Wille was the son of a Prussian court clerk. The future engineer Max Wille was his older brother. Until 1872 Wille attended the monastery of our dear women high school . Later he moved to the grammar schools in Tübingen and Aachen . When his father died in early 1872, the mother and two sons settled in Bonn in the summer of the same year .

At Easter 1881 Wille began to study Protestant theology at the University of Bonn . But after only two semesters he switched to mathematics , physics and philosophy . In the latter subject he became a student of Joseph Dietzgen , who was able to inspire him for Marxism . In the spring of 1883, Wille settled in Berlin with his mother and brother and, after further studies, did his military service there as a one-year volunteer . In 1884 he was released as a private .

He then worked as a private tutor in Berlin for some time . From summer 1884 to autumn 1886 Wille was tutor in Bucharest in the house of the writer Mite Kremnitz . Through Kremnitz he got to know Queen Elisabeth of Romania . At the court in Bucharest, Wille made the acquaintance of the geographer and cartographer Heinrich Kiepert , who hired him as a travel companion to Constantinople from the autumn of 1886 .

At the end of 1887, Wille returned to Germany and completed his studies the following year with a dissertation on Thomas Hobbes . In the same year Wille got a job from Georg Ledebour as a journalist and editor for his newspaper, Demokratische Blätter . During this time, Wille joined the free religious community in Berlin , of which he was elected speaker and religion teacher in 1889.

In 1890 Wille married Auguste Krüger in Berlin.

As a member of the Berlin Naturalist Association, Wille soon became friends with Karl Bleibtreu , Wilhelm Bölsche , Heinrich Hart , Julius Hart , Gerhart Hauptmann and Arno Holz , John Henry Mackay , Johannes Schlaf and many others. In 1888 Wille founded his “ Genie-Konvent ”, which used to meet in the restaurant in the cowshed , and independently of that the “ Ethical Club ”. In 1890 he settled in the Berlin suburb of Friedrichshagen , where, together with Bölsche, he pioneered the Friedrichshagener poet circle . Among many others, only Otto Erich Hartleben , August Strindberg and Frank Wedekind should be mentioned here as members .

In 1890, Wille founded the Freie Volksbühne Berlin together with Wilhelm Bölsche and Julius Türk in order to bring the theater closer to “ ordinary workers from the people ” (Wille quote). The Volksbühne had its premiere with Henrik Ibsen's pillars on October 19, 1890 in the Ostend Theater rented for this purpose. Just two years later, Wille was no longer in agreement with the political concept (for which, among others, Franz Mehring was responsible) and therefore founded the Neue Freie Volksbühne . The artistic, educational and political direction was taken over by Wille, Max Dreyer , Ludwig Jacobowski , Gustav Landauer , Emil Lessing and Fritz Mauthner .

Competition arose when Otto Lilienthal bought into the Ostend Theater in the summer of 1892 and also launched a Volksbühne. At the beginning of 1892 Wille was appointed to the board of directors of the German Freethinkers Association and entrusted him with the management of the federal newspaper Der Freidenker . Wille was also editor of the anarchist magazine Der Sozialist of the Association of Independent Socialists around Gustav Landauer. Until 1894, Wille was a full-time preacher for the free religious community in Berlin, but also traveled through the country as a speaker for various workers' education associations. A professional ban was issued by the Prussian minister of education, whereupon Wille was arrested on November 9, 1895. On the occasion of a lecture tour to the Freethinker Congress in Vienna , he was arrested again on July 2, 1897 for “spreading disbelief” and interned in Graz .

Wille was only able to return to Germany in February 1898. In the following years he turned more and more to religious topics. Since 1899 he was a board member of the Federation of Free Religious Congregations in Germany (BfGD). In honor of Giordano Bruno , Wille named his association Giordano-Bruno-Bund, founded in 1900 with Bölsche and Rudolf Steiner . In 1901, together with Bölsche, Wille opened the Free University in Friedrichshagen, entirely in the spirit of workers' education , where he also became a lecturer in theology and philosophy. In 1906 he was a co-founder of the Deutscher Monistenbund . From 1916 Wille was the publisher of Freethinker until the magazine was discontinued in 1921. After the First World War, Wille founded the Volkskraft-Bund in 1919 with the aim of understanding and reconciliation between peoples, denominations, classes and parties to get active. The covenant did not last long and its will was disappointed.

After his divorce in 1920, Wille married Emmy W. Friedländer, widow of the zoologist Benedict Friedländer , in the same year . After a short time in Stuttgart , Wille settled in Senftenau Castle in Aeschach near Lindau. There he died at the age of 68 on August 31, 1928. Bruno Wille was cremated on September 3, 1928 in St. Gallen and found his final resting place in the forest section of the Lichterfelde park cemetery in Berlin-Steglitz. His urn was buried there on October 10, 1928 at Heideweg 35 in the grave of Benedict Friedländer. His grave in the Lichterfelde park cemetery was an honorary grave of the city of Berlin from 1987 to 2009 .

Bruno Wille's grave in Berlin-Lichterfelde
Auguste Wille's grave in Berlin-Friedrichshagen

plant

As a philosophical writer, Wille represented a “philosophy of liberation”, referring to Friedrich Nietzsche , Max Stirner and Buddhism . In his late work he turned more to a pantheistic mysticism of nature, with which he leaned on the philosophy of Gustav Theodor Fechner , but also developed it further.

Works

  • The phenomenalism of Thomas Hobbes . (Inaugural dissertation, 1888)
  • The death. Berlin 1889.
  • Hermit and Comrade. Social poems with a prelude. Berlin 1890.
  • The life without God . Berlin 1890.
  • Philosophy of Liberation through the Pure Means Contributions to the pedagogy of the human race. Berlin 1894.
  • The free religious community in Berlin. Historical review. Berlin 1895.
  • Siberia in Prussia. A wake-up call from prison. Stuttgart 1896.
  • Hermit art from the pine heather. Berlin 1897.
  • Never matter without a spirit . Berlin 1901.
  • Revelations of the juniper tree, novel of an all-seer. Leipzig 1901. (vol. 1–2)
  • The Christ myth as a monistic worldview. A word for understanding between religion and science . Berlin 1903.
  • Resurrection. Ideas about the meaning of life . Berlin 1904.
  • The living space. Idealistic worldview on a scientific basis in the sense of Fechner. Hamburg 1905.
  • The sacred grove. Selected poems. Jena 1908.
  • Wisdom - An interpretation of our existence in sayings of leading spirits. Berlin 1913.
  • The evening castle. Chronicle of a gold prospector in twelve adventures. Jena 1909.
  • The Prussian Eagle Prison. A self-experienced bourgeoisie, novel. Jena 1914.
  • The glass mountain. A novel by a youth who wanted to go up. Berlin 1920.
  • From dream and struggle. My sixty years of life. Berlin 1920.
  • Holderlin and his secret maiden. Novel. Dresden 1921.
  • Legends of the secret maiden. Dresden 1922.
  • The maiden from Senftenau. A Lake Constance novel. Dresden 1922.
  • The Bruno Wille Book. Dresden 1923.
  • The machine man and his redemption. 1930.
  • Emmy Wille (Ed.): Collected works. Pfullingen
    • 1. The Eternal and his masks. 1929.
    • 2. The machine man and his redemption. 1930.
    • 3. Philosophy of love. 1930.

literature

Web links

Commons : Bruno Wille  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Bruno Wille  - Sources and full texts

supporting documents

  1. ↑ a b c Martin Buchner: Dr. Bruno Wille. In: Eckhart Pilick (Hrsg.): Lexicon of free religious people. Rohrbach / Pfalz 1997, p. 175 f.
  2. ↑ Erik Lehnert: "Deep mind, clear mind and brave cultural work". Bruno Wille and the Friedrichshagener Dichterkreis as the starting point for monistic cultural policy in the empire. In: Arnher E. Lenz, Volker Mueller (eds.): Darwin, Haeckel and the consequences. Past and present monism. Angelika Lenz Verlag, Neustadt am Rübenberge 2006, pp. 247-273, p. 250.
  3. ↑ Erik Lehnert: "Deep mind, clear mind and brave cultural work". Bruno Wille and the Friedrichshagener Dichterkreis as the starting point for monistic cultural policy in the empire. In: Arnher E. Lenz, Volker Mueller (eds.): Darwin, Haeckel and the consequences. Past and present monism. Angelika Lenz Verlag, Neustadt am Rübenberge 2006, pp. 247-273, p. 258.
  4. ↑ Erik Lehnert: "Deep mind, clear mind and brave cultural work". Bruno Wille and the Friedrichshagener Dichterkreis as the starting point for monistic cultural policy in the empire. In: Arnher E. Lenz, Volker Mueller (eds.): Darwin, Haeckel and the consequences. Past and present monism. Angelika Lenz Verlag, Neustadt am Rübenberge 2006, pp. 247-273, p. 264.
personal data
SURNAME Will, Bruno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German preacher, philosopher, journalist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 6, 1860
PLACE OF BIRTH Magdeburg
DATE OF DEATH August 31, 1928
Place of death Senftenau Castle in Aeschach near Lindau