David Assing

David Assur Assing (born December 12, 1787 in Königsberg , Prussia , † April 25, 1842 in Hamburg ) was a German doctor , poet and editor . He was the husband of Rosa Maria Assing , father of Ottilie and Ludmilla Assing , brother-in-law of Rahel and Karl August Varnhagen von Ense and the uncle of Fanny Lewald .

Youth and Studies

David Assing was born the penultimate of thirteen children of a Jewish Orthodox family who immigrated to Königsberg from Kurland and Posen . His parents were the merchant Assur Levi and Caja, née Mendel; his younger sister Zipora (1790-1841) later married David Marcus and was the mother of Fanny Lewald . Max von Schenkendorf was one of his childhood friends .

As his daughter reports in a biographical manuscript, Assing suffered from depressive moods and had his books bound in black, for example: Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther "he read again and again" whose costume he imitated by wearing a skirt and a yellow vest.

Assing did not want to go into the trading house his parents ran. After five years of philosophical and surgical-medical studies in Königsberg, Tübingen , Göttingen and Vienna , he passed his doctorate on August 26, 1808.

Circles of friends

Assing remained on friendly terms with his fellow student Justinus Kerner , whom he followed to Tübingen. Kerner's fiancée and future wife Friederike Ehmann was successfully treated by David Assing. In 1809 Kerner and Assing stayed in Vienna, where they met Karl August Varnhagen. Assing also got to know his sister Rosa Maria through Kerner, who worked as an educator in Jewish families in Hamburg and had founded a boarding school for girls in Altona in 1811 .

In an accident during a chemical experiment, David Assing became blind in one eye. In Altona he found “strength and consolation, because I am sitting at the Rosaquell, from which clear water gushes in the cloudy, foggy weather”; she discovered "much higher and divine in him", but wished him "a little more strength and propriety for the outer life". Together with Rosa Maria's friend Amalia Schoppe , the couple participated in the literary projects of the Swabian Poet School , in Kerner's German Poet Forest (1811), in the German Muses Almanac by Chamisso and Schwab and in the Rhenish Odeon . Assing published under the name "Assur" in the Hesperides of Isodorus Orientalis . As a true romantic he preferred folk song forms and wrote drinking songs , historical ballads and love poetry . The plan of a living and working community in southern Germany with Justinus and Friederike Kerner and other friends of the Swabian School of Poetry was not realized.

War participation, honors

When the wars of liberation against the Napoleonic occupation broke out in the spring of 1813, David Assing volunteered to Berlin, took over the Russian hospital with 200 wounded and served in Königsberg military hospitals before he went into the field as a regimental doctor with the second Kurmark Landwehr regiment. He said goodbye at the end of September 1814 and settled back in Hamburg, awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class. In 1840 he also received the Imperial Russian Order of St. Georgen 5th Class No. 3373. On February 23, 1826, the Societas Medico-Chirurgica Berolinensis elected him as a corresponding member.

Poet and medicin

In order to be able to practice in Hamburg, Assing was baptized as a Protestant on February 26th, 1816 in the Hamburg Katharinenkirche and took the Hamburg Citizenship Oath on March 29th , which he drew as "David Assur Assing", as well as his lyrical contributions in magazines and Almanacs . In May 1816 he married Rosa Maria Varnhagen, who gave up her daughter's school, and in November of the same year was appointed as a municipal doctor for the poor for the Jewish quarter on Hamburg's Marienstrasse. The first child of their marriage, Carl Eginhard, was born on June 9, 1817 and died after ten months. Ottilie was born on February 11, 1819, and Ludmilla (February 22, 1821) two years later.

From here, the Assings later moved to Poolstrasse, where Rosa Maria ran a salon that was frequented by writers from Junge Deutschland such as Theodor Mundt , Karl Gutzkow and Ludolf Wienbarg , but also by representatives of Jewish emancipation such as Gabriel Riesser and Salomon Ludwig Steinheim . In this circle, the landlord was considered a gifted narrator, despite his pessimistic attitude. One of the guests was Heine , whom Assing valued less than his wife; He also increasingly distanced himself from Gutzkow, who published his memoirs in 1845. According to his own testimony, Friedrich Hebbel saved Assing's life through his healing skills; he also advised his sister-in-law Rahel Varnhagen on her frequent illnesses, and Kerner, who was gradually going blind, only wanted Assing the star to sting him.

Last years

Rosa Maria died in 1840 after a long, debilitating illness. The inconsolable widower published her collected poems and short stories and dedicated a volume with Nenien to her . In his grief he withdrew more and more from the world and even wanted to give up the medical profession.

David Assing died on April 25, 1842. His estate is part of the Varnhagen Collection and came to the Royal Library after the death of his daughter Ludmilla . Today the handwritten part of this collection is kept under the so-called “Berlynka” in the Biblioteka Jagiellońska of the University in Krakow .

The estate of the Assing couple has been cataloged editorially and digitally since 2015 with the support of the Polish National Center for Science ( Narodowe Centrum Nauki ) by the Germanist Paweł Zarychta from the German Department of the Jagiellonian University .

Works

• Materiae alimentariae alineamenta ad leges chemico-dynamicas adumbrata. Diss. Göttingen 1809
• Concerning sketch: the possible similarity of the cholera described by older doctors with the cholera orientalis, a lecture given in the medical association in Hamburg, August 9th 1831. Hamburg 1831
• Nenia after the death of Rosa Maria. As handwriting for friends. FWC Menck, Hamburg 1840; that., 2nd probable edition, Hamburg 1841 ( digitized version )
• David Assur Assing (Ed.): Rosa Maria's poetischer inheritance. Hammerichs, Altona 1841 ( partially digitized ).

literature

• Johann Friedrich Ludwig Theodor Merzdorf:  Assing, David . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 1, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1875, p. 624 f. ( Digitized version )
• August Hirsch (Hrsg.): Biographical lexicon of the outstanding doctors of all times and peoples. Urban & Schwarzenberg, Berlin / Vienna 1929, vol. 1, p. 228 f.
• Nikolaus Gatter: “What good women Assing and August have.” Heine's friend Rosa Maria. In: Irina Hundt (ed.): From the salon to the barricade. Women of the Heine Age. JB Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002 (Heine studies), pp. 91–110, ISBN 3-476-01842-3
• Paweł Zarychta: “I would be silent if you were there.” On the poetics of the memorial letter after 1800 using the example of the letters Rahel and Karl August Varnhagen to Rosa Maria and David Assing. In the S. / Ingo Breuer / Katarzyna Jaśtal (eds.): Conversation games & idea magazines. Heinrich von Kleist and the letter culture around 1800. Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2013, pp. 305–322, ISBN 978-3-412-20932-2
• Paweł Zarychta: "On the estate of Rosa Maria and David Assings in Krakow or: Why the Varnhagen Collection should be re-cataloged." In: International Yearbook of the Bettina von Arnim Society 28/29 (2016/2017), Saint Albin, Berlin, p. 31-50, ISBN 978-3-930293-28-5

Web links

• Varnhagen Gesellschaft e. V.
• Family Assing in the family book Euregio
• Poem to Adelbert von Chamisso ( digitized version )
• Letters to Adelbert von Chamisso ( digitized ), ( digitized ), ( digitized ), ( digitized ), ( digitized ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ludmilla Assing: Manuscript of the biography of her parents. In: Varnhagen Collection , Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Krakau, box 12
2. ↑ Ludwig Geiger: Poets and women. Treatises and communications. New collection. Berlin 1899, p. 276
3. ^ Karl Gutzkow: Rosa Maria and JD Assing. In: Heinrich Hubert Houben (Ed.): Karl Gutzkows Selected Works. Max Hesse, Leipzig 1908, vol. 8, p. 212 f.
4. ↑ See Paweł Zarychta: “Cult of Memory and Artistic Sociability.” The estate of Rosa Maria and David Assings in the Varnhagen Collection: A preliminary project report. In: Monika Jaglarz / Katarzyna Jaśtal (ed.): Holdings of the former Prussian State Library in Berlin in the Jagiellonian Library. Research status and perspectives. Peter Lang, Berlin 2018 (History - Memory - Politics, Vol. 23), p. 293.