David Koigen

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

David Koigen (born October 28, 1879 in Verkhnyaki near Starokonstantinov, today Ukrainian Starokostjantyniw ; † March 7, 1933 in Berlin ) was a Russian-German cultural philosopher and sociologist from a Jewish family who published mainly in German.

Life

He was one of four children of the landlord Mordechai Kohen and his wife Jente Dyzinin, attended the state Jewish school in Starokonstantinow, then the grammar school in Nemirow and Odessa , where he worked with his nine-year older brother and political mentor Fischel Koigen alias Fedor M. Ionov lived, who at that time was active in the revolutionary movement as a member of the General Jewish Workers' Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia and later, after the October Revolution , switched to the Bolsheviks . Threatened by arrest by the tsarist police, Koigen fled Odessa to Paris in 1896. He studied in Paris, Bern, Zurich, Munich, Berlin. In 1901 he received his doctorate under Ludwig Stein at the University of Bern with a thesis on the history and philosophy of Young Hegelianism "On the prehistory of modern philosophical socialism in Germany". From 1903 to 1912 he lived and worked as a private scholar in Berlin. In those years he wrote his main publications "Die Kulturanschauung des Sozialismus" (1903), "Ideen zur Philosophie der Kultur" (1910) and "Die Kultur der Demokratie" (1912). The social democratic politician Eduard Bernstein has been his mentor since that time . In 1912 Koigen returned to the Russian Empire , to Saint Petersburg , taught at the university there as a private lecturer from 1914 and published the weekly "Westnik kultury i politiki" [messenger of culture and politics]. The First World War kept him in Petrograd , where in 1917 he founded and directed the "Society for the Study of the Russian Revolution". In May 1918, disappointed with the progress of the revolution, he accepted Ukrainian citizenship and went to Kiev , then the capital of the Ukrainian People's Republic . From the summer of 1918 to the end of 1920 he worked as a professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Kiev . When the Bolsheviks took control of Ukraine , he fled west for the second time. Koigen recorded memories of the war and revolutionary years in Russia and the Ukraine as well as the flight in his book "Apokalyptische Reiter" (1925). From 1921 and until his death he lived and worked again as a private scholar in Berlin, giving lectures and applying to various universities in vain. Despite the advocacy of Werner Sombart and Ismar Elbogen and a longstanding relationship with Ferdinand Tönnies , Koigen remained an academic outsider. Together with Albert Einstein and Simon Dubnow , he planned the establishment of a "Jewish World University" in non-communist Eastern Europe, which however did not materialize. In 1922 he took over the deputy chairmanship of the "Russian Scientific and Philosophical Society" in Berlin. From 1925 to 1927 he edited the magazine "Ethos" together with the pedagogue Franz Hilker and the social psychologist Fischl Schneersohn . Since 1930 he organized a private college in his private apartment at Mommsenstrasse 3 - the "Religious Philosophical Working Group", in which the religious philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel , the journalist Zevi Woyslawski and the philosophy historian Ernst Hoffmann took part. Koigen received financial support thanks to the initiative of the social democratic politician Adolf Grimme in his final years from the Prussian Ministry for Science, Art and Education. Out of his numerous original studies, which at the end of his life also approach Hasidic lines of thought, his theory of the act of culture stands out, according to which " culture " is a continuous judgment based on human conscious will and action, that is, culture represents a form of social action . In Judaism he saw the completion of the development of religion in general.

He was married to Helene Eugenia Salzmann and had two children with her, Marusja and Georg.

Works

  • On the prehistory of modern philosophical socialism in Germany: on the history of the philosophy and social philosophy of Young Hegelianism (Bern studies on philosophy and its history 26), Bern: Sturzenegger 1901.
  • The cultural outlook of socialism. A contribution to reality idealism (foreword by Eduard Bernstein ), Berlin: Dümmler 1903.
  • Ideas for the Philosophy of Culture , Munich, Leipzig: Müller 1910 (the “cultural act” as a central term); online .
  • The culture of democracy. From the spirit of popular humanism and from the spirit of the time , Jena: Diederichs 1912.
  • The moral god. A treatise on the relationship between culture and religion , Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag 1922.
  • Apocalyptic horsemen. Notes from recent history , Berlin: Reiss 1925 (autobiographical).
  • History and culture. Basics of a sociology of history and culture :
    • Part 1: The historical process in general, in: Ethos. Quarterly journal for sociology, history and cultural philosophy , Karlsruhe: Braun, 1st year 1925/26, 6–53.
    • Part 2: The act of culture and its fourfold roots, in: Ethos. Quarterly journal for sociology, history and culture philosophy , Karlsruhe: Braun, 1st year 1925/26, 231–258.
  • The structure of the social world in the age of science. Outlines of a sociological structure theory , Berlin: Heymanns 1929.
  • Concept formation in sociology, in: Negotiations of the 7th German Sociological Conference from September 28 to October 1, 1930 in Berlin , Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1931, 92–207.
  • Das Haus Israel , Berlin: Schocken 1934. (Excerpts from his work, edited by Ernst Hoffmann . The article giving the title is an abbreviated version of Koigen's lecture The Ethos in Judaism from 1923, which he had previously published in Atidenu , Berlin 1924, and Menorah , Vienna 1929, 131–151. In addition, Das Haus Israel contains, inter alia, several chapters from Der moral Gott .)
  • Das Ethos im Judentum, extended version of the 1923 lecture by Koigen, in: Martina Urban: Theodicy of Culture and the Jewish Ethos: David Koigen's Contribution to the Sociology of Religion , Berlin: de Gruyter 2012, 187–260.

literature

  • Franz Menges:  Koigen, David. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-428-00193-1 , p. 437 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Walter Tetzlaff: 2000 short biographies of important German Jews of the 20th century . Askania, Lindhorst 1982, ISBN 3-921730-10-4 .
  • Ferdinand Tönnies : David Koigen † (1879–1933) [1933], in: Ferdinand Tönnies Gesamtausgabe , Vol. 22. De Gruyter, Berlin and New York 1998, pp. 391–401.
  • Edward K. Kaplan, Samuel H. Dresner: A Jewish Philosophical Mentor (1928-1931). In: Dies .: Abraham Joshua Heschel. Prophetic Witness. Yale University Press, New Haven 1998, pp. 121-139. ISBN 0300071868
  • Verena Dohrn: 'We Europeans par excellence'. The Koigen family in Russian-Jewish Berlin. In: Impulses for Europe. Tradition and Modernity of the Jews of Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe 58, 2008, vol. 8-10, pp. 211-232. ISBN 978-3-8305-1434-3 .
  • Martina Urban: Religion of Reason Revised. David Koigen on the Jewish Ethos. In: Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 16, 2008, pp. 59-89.
  • Martina Urban: Theodicy of Culture and the Jewish Ethos: David Koigen's Contribution to the Sociology of Religion . De Gruyter, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-024772-5
  • Verena Dohrn: David Koigen's 'Apocalyptic Horsemen'. The memories of a Russian Jew in Weimar Berlin. In: Dorothee Gelhard, Irmela von der Lühe (ed.): Who testifies for the witness? Positions of Jewish Remembrance in the 20th Century. Peter Lang, Frankfurt / Main 2012, pp. 123-138. ISBN 978-3-631-62107-3 .
  • Koigen, David. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 14: Kest – Kulk. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-598-22694-2 , pp. 211-217.
  • Archives at The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People Jerusalem (CAHJP) .

Web links

Via the Compact Memory portal . Internet archives of Jewish periodicals are accessible online:

NB! When accessed via the specified links, the texts sometimes appear too small to be read. An increase is possible only if they have the homepage of Compact Memory can be controlled. A solution to the problem is being worked on. (Oct. 2013)

Remarks

  1. ↑ Cf. V. Dohrn: We Europeans par excellence , p. 225
  2. ↑ Cf. V. Dohrn: We Europeans par excellence , pp. 217/218; Pp. 226/227.
  3. ↑ Cf. V. Dohrn: David Koigens 'Apokalyptische Reiter'. The memories of a Russian Jew in Weimar Berlin , p. 124.
  4. ↑ Cf. V. Dohrn: We Europeans par excellence , p. 226.
  5. ↑ Cf. V. Dohrn: We Europeans par excellence , p. 231.
  6. ^ On the history of the text M. Urban: Theodicy of Culture and the Jewish Ethos , 156 f.
personal data
SURNAME Koigen, David
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian-German sociologist and cultural philosopher from a Jewish family
DATE OF BIRTH October 28, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Verkhnyaki at Starokonstantinow, today Ukrainian Starokostjantyniw
DATE OF DEATH March 7, 1933
Place of death Berlin