Carl Friedrich Cramer

Carl Friedrich Cramer

Carl Friedrich Cramer (born March 7, 1752 in Quedlinburg , † December 8, 1807 in Paris ) was a German theologian, bookseller, translator, journalist and music writer. As a staunch supporter of the French Revolution , Cramer lived in Paris from 1795, where he was an important mediator between France and Germany as a translator of texts by Rousseau and Diderot into German and works by Klopstock and Schiller into French. As a contributor to various journals, he spread his belief in the ideals of the Enlightenment in Germany.

life and work

Carl Friedrich Cramer grew up as the eldest son of the Danish court preacher and enlightened theologian Johann Andreas Cramer near Copenhagen . In 1771 his father lost his job and was expelled from the country. The family moved to Lübeck , where Carl Friedrich attended the Katharineum in Lübeck until 1772 . After studying in Copenhagen, Göttingen , where he joined the group of poets “ Göttinger Hain ”, and Leipzig , Cramer received a call in 1775 at the University of Kiel , then part of Denmark , where his father was chancellor at the time. Here he married Maria Cäcilia Eitzen, the daughter of a wine merchant from Itzehoe . While his lectures were not very popular, he was extremely productive as a writer during his time in Kiel. He wrote a multi-volume biography of his friend Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, translated opera libretti - including Antonio Salieri's Armida - and published a music magazine. From 1791 he published his journal Menschliches Leben , in which he committed himself to the ideas of the French Revolution and took action against reactionary thinking in Germany. When he announced in 1794 that the texts of the Paris mayor and Girondin Jérôme Pétion , who a year earlier for the beheading of Louis XVI. had voted to want to translate, he was dismissed from Kiel University and expelled from the city.

After a brief activity as a private teacher in Hamburg , Cramer went to Paris in 1795. Here he won a representative house in the rue des Bons Enfants, not far from the Palais Royal, in the raffle for confiscated real estate in the state lottery . The Hamburg merchant Georg Heinrich Sieveking - himself an ardent supporter of the revolution at the time - financed Cramer to set up his own print shop and bookstore. In the period that followed, Cramer, who had since been declared an "enemy of the state" in his home country, translated texts by Rousseau and Diderot into German and works by Klopstock and Schiller into French. He reported from revolutionary Paris for the monthly France published in Altona , Denmark . His house became a meeting place for Germans, Danes and French, including Wilhelm von Humboldt and Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès . In 1796 he bought the manuscripts of the widow of the radical enlightener Marquis de Condorcet, who had died two years earlier, and which he printed six years later as Oeuvres Complètes in Paris and published in Braunschweig . A six-volume Encyclopédie allemande , with which Cramer wanted to increase the French's knowledge of Germany, remained unfinished. As an employee of the Tübingen publisher Johann Friedrich Cotta , he wrote French miscelles and European annals for the latter's magazines .

From 1798 onwards, Cramer came under increasing financial pressure until, in 1805, he was finally forced to sell his house and printing house. In addition, the death of his patron Sieveking in 1799 and of the poet Klopstock, whom he enthusiastically admired, and his only son Hermann in the spring of 1803 had hit him hard. After the Altonaer Zeitschrift Frankreich was discontinued in 1805 , Cramer reported in Die Individualitäten from and about Paris , a paper from the French capital by Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus , a publisher founded in the same year . However, after a serious illness, Cramer died two years later and was soon forgotten. A biography of Cramer, written in 1979 by the French literary historian Alain Ruiz , has not yet appeared due to a lack of interest on the part of the publishers.

literature

• Rüdiger Schütt (Ed.): A man of fire and talents: Life and work of Carl Friedrich Cramer , Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-885-X , full text at Google Books
• Petra Blödorn-Meyer / Michael Mahn / Rüdiger Schütt (eds.): Carl Friedrich Cramer: Revolutionary, Professor and Bookseller , Nordhausen 2002, ISBN 3-88309-111-1 - Catalog of the exhibition "From Kiel to Europe: Carl Friedrich Cramer - Revolutionary, Professor and Bookseller ”in Kiel University Library from February 14th to April 18th, 2003
• Henning Ratjen :  Cramer, Karl Friedrich . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 4, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1876, p. 557 f.
• Detlev L. Lübker, Hans Schröder : Lexicon of Schleswig-Holstein-Lauenburg and Eutinian writers from 1796 to 1828 , 1. Dept. A – M, Verlag K. Aue, Altona 1829, pp. 112–114 No. 223 ( digitized version ) .

Web links

• Literature by and about Carl Friedrich Cramer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Sheet music and audio files by Carl Friedrich Cramer in the International Music Score Library Project
• Carl Friedrich Cramer - the website of the Kiel University Library offers access to digitized documents from the Cramer estate, an overview of Cramer's printed work, and references to further literature

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See the entries in his album amicorum , today in the Kiel University Library ( digitized version ).