Christian Konrad Wilhelm von Dohm

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Christian Konrad Wilhelm von Dohm, painting by Karl Christian Kehrer , 1795, Gleimhaus Halberstadt

Christian Konrad Wilhelm Dohm , from 1786 from Dohm , (born December 11, 1751 in Lemgo , † May 29, 1820 in Pustleben ) was a German lawyer , Prussian diplomat , historian and political writer . As the author of the pioneering book On the Civil Improvement of the Jews from 1781, he advocated Jewish emancipation in the interests of enlightenment and promoted it across Europe.

life and work

Life

Christian Dohm was the son of pastor Wolrad Dohm von St. Marien in Lemgo and his wife Anna Elisabeth, née Topp. His mother was the daughter of the then Lemgo mayor. Both parents died before the age of seven, so that he grew up under the tutelage of his relatives and spent his childhood in various priest, teacher and cantor households in Lemgos.

As a high school student he was noticed by intensive and varied literature studies in the private libraries of his relatives. a. the bookstore of Christian Friedrich Helwing (1725–1781), his later father-in-law, attached to the Meyerschen Hofbuchdruckerei . Through his classmate Lorenz Benzler he won the lifelong friendship of the poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim from Halberstadt .

He had to declare his visit to a university to the Lemgoer Magistrate . He first studied philosophy and theology in Leipzig , then law in Göttingen and Kassel . He got to know the Imperial Constitution well. While studying in Göttingen, he published geographic works. 1774/75 he was editor of the Encyclopedic Journal . From 1776 to 1779 he was professor of camera and finance at the Collegium Carolinum in Kassel. He was co-editor of the Deutsches Museum magazine , which existed from 1776 to 1791. Dohm shared editorial responsibility with Heinrich Christian Boie . Boie was responsible for the literary and literary critical part of the journal, Dohm for the historical and political. While Boie advocated more and more literary newspaper supplements, the Enlightenment Dohm insisted on political contributions. The temporary attempt to resolve the imbalance by having sole responsibility for one issue resulted in very different expenses. Dohm left the editorial team in 1778.

His admiration for Friedrich II made Dohm seek employment in the Prussian civil service. In 1779 he was appointed archivist in Berlin . Later he became a secret war council in the Prussian Foreign Ministry and secretary at the secret state chancellery in Berlin. In 1786 Dohm was raised to the nobility by King Friedrich Wilhelm II . From 1786 to 1794 he was envoy and authorized minister in Cologne and Aachen . Dohm played an important role as a defender of the Liege Revolution between 1789 and 1791 . He lived in Halberstadt since 1794. He was present at the Rastatt Congress in 1798/99. Eichsfeld-Erfurt war and domain chamber president he was 1804, 1807 then royal Westphalian state councilor. From 1808 to 1810 he was the royal Westphalian envoy in Dresden and from 1810 a privateer and writer.

Christian Konrad Wilhelm von Dohm, engraving by Christophe Guérin

Dohm was a member of the Freemason Lodge Zum krönten Löwen in Kassel, member of the Berlin Wednesday Society (Society of Friends of the Enlightenment) and with Anna Henriette Elisabeth (* 1762 in Lemgo; † after 1808), born. Helwing, married. The couple had a daughter and two sons. His relationships with important personalities of his time such as Gleim, Herder , Lavater , Garve , Engel , Sulzer , Lichtenberg , Freiherr vom Stein and Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling shaped Dohm's life.

Dohm was also a member of the Halberstadt Literary Society, which existed from 1785 to 1810 .

In 1797 he became an honorary citizen of the Hanseatic city of Bremen , as he campaigned as the Prussian envoy in various negotiations for Bremen's neutrality and the preservation of its independence.

In 1806 he founded the secondary school for girls in Goslar , today's Christian-von-Dohm-Gymnasium . Since 1808 he was a foreign member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences .

plant

As an enlightened advocate of civil rights for the Jews , Dohm became known across Europe primarily through his work on the emancipation of Jews, On the bourgeois improvement of the Jews (1781), which was the first work of this kind. He got the idea for this from Moses Mendelssohn , who tried in this way to pass on a request for help from oppressed Alsatian Jews. Dohm attributed the negative characteristics widely attributed to the Jews at the time to the legal restrictions under which they suffered, not to alleged idiosyncrasies as a people or as a religious community. The existing Jewish regulations forced the Jews to a way of life that was the cause of anti-Judaism , the hostility and contempt shown towards the Jews . He wanted to free them from their professional discrimination through equal rights and thus educate them to be useful citizens. In doing so, he influenced representatives of human rights such as Mirabeau , through whose commitment the French National Assembly decided in 1791 the equality of French Jews.

Works (selection)

  • About the civil improvement of the Jews. 2 parts in 1 volume Berlin u. Stettin 1781-83 a. Kaiserslautern 1891. Reprint: Olms, Hildesheim [u. a.] 1973.
    • Volume 1, Berlin and Stettin 1781 ( e-copy ), 2nd edition, Berlin and Stettin 1783 ( e-copy )
    • Volume 2, Berlin and Stettin 1783 ( e-copy )
  • About the civil improvement of the Jews. Critical and annotated study edition. Edited by Wolf Christoph Seifert. Wallstein, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-8353-1699-7 .
  • Memories of my time or contributions to history from the last quarter of the eighteenth and from the beginning of the nineteenth century 1778 to 1806
    • Volume 1, Lemgo and Hanover 1814 ( e-copy )
    • Volume 2, Lemgo and Hanover 1815 ( e-copy )
    • Volume 3, Lemgo and Hanover 1817 ( e-copy )
    • Volume 4, Lemgo and Hanover 1819 ( e-copy )
as translator

literature

  • Franz Reuss: Christian Wilhelm Dohm's work “On the bourgeois improvement of the Jews” and its impact on the educated classes in Germany. A study of the history of culture and literature. University of Leipzig 1891. Newly published by the Duisburg Institute for Linguistic and Social Research and the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute for German-Jewish History, Duisburg 2010. Online version (PDF; 698 kB).
  • Ilsegret Dambacher: Christian Wilhelm von Dohm. A contribution to the history of the Prussian enlightened civil service and its reform efforts at the end of the 18th century. Peter Lang, Frankfurt / M. u. Bern 1974.
  • Heinrich Detering : Christian Wilhelm von Dohm - Selected writings. At: Natural Science and Historical Association for the State of Lippe. Detmold 1988.
  • Günter Laue: Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, shaped by his hometown Lemgo? In: Lippische Mitteilungen aus Geschichte und Landeskunde , Vol. 70, 2001, pp. 231–250.
  • H. Möller: Christian Wilhelm von Dohm and his critics. In: Stefi Jersch-Wenzel : Image and self-image of the Jews of Berlin between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Berlin 1992, pp. 59-79.
  • Falkmann:  Dohm, Christian Wilhelm von . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 5, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1877, pp. 297-299.
  • Karl G. Bruchmann:  Dohm, Christian Wilhelm v .. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 4, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1959, ISBN 3-428-00185-0 , p. 42 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Ronald Schechter: Improvement. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 6: Ta-Z. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2015, ISBN 978-3-476-02506-7 , pp. 246-251.

Web links

Commons : Christian Konrad Wilhelm von Dohm  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Christian Konrad Wilhelm von Dohm  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Member entry by Christian Wilhelm von Dohm at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , accessed on January 27, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Dohm, Christian Konrad Wilhelm von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dohm, Christian Konrad Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician and writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 11, 1751
PLACE OF BIRTH Lemgo
DATE OF DEATH May 29, 1820
Place of death Pustleben