Eduard Bonnell

Eduard Bonnell (born February 15, 1802 as Charles Guillaume Edouard Bonnell in Berlin , † May 9, 1877 in Berlin) was a teacher and director of the Friedrichwerdersche Gymnasium in Berlin. His Huguenot ancestors originally wrote the family name Bonnel .

Origin and youth

Charles Edouard Guillaume Bonnell was born to a French family, the result of the repeal of the Edict of Nantes in the Mark Brandenburg had emigrated. His great-grandfather Pierre Bonnel, a wine grower in Villiers-le-bel near St. Dénis, north of Paris, left home for religious reasons and moved with his wife Marie Rosignol from Coulome to Prenzlau , where he was cantor of the French Reformed community from 1687–1720 .

Edward's grandfather Jacques Daniel moved to Schwedt , from where his son Pierre Daniel, Edward's father, came to Berlin as a regimental gunsmith (later head of the royal gunsmith's shop) . It was only through Eduard Bonnell's grandmother and mother that the German element penetrated the purely Huguenot family. Nevertheless, the Bonnells, as they now spelled their name, in Berlin adhered to the (German) Reformed Trinity Congregation and especially to Friedrich Schleiermacher . Not until 1850 did Bonnell rejoin the French colony, whose lively ecclesiastical life attracted him.

Education and first employment

Bonnell attended the Friedrich-Werdersche Gymnasium for ten years, which he would later direct for almost 38 years. In addition to Friedrich Schleiermacher , who confirmed him, decisive for his intellectual life was above all his teacher Karl Gottlob Zumpt (1792–1849), who especially since his father's death (1818) took the gifted student under his protection and encouraged him in every respect. In addition to philology, which was chosen as a life profession, he also studied theology and philosophy at the Friedrich Wilhelm University under Schleiermacher. He passed the Examen pro facultate docendi (corresponds to the later state examination) with his patron Zumpt as an examiner in philology.

Bonnell began in the fall of 1823 under his former teacher Gottlieb August Spilleke as a teacher at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Gymnasium , lived a year as a high school teacher in Liegnitz from 1824-25 , but returned in 1825 to the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Gymnasium. In 1829 he moved to the grammar school in the gray monastery , to which he, since 1830 professor , belonged for almost a decade as a teacher, especially in the upper classes.

Bonnell's family life with his wife, b. Boden was happy, but both sons died before him; only two daughters, one of whom was married, survived.

Bonnell as director of the Friedrichwerder Gymnasium

After the death of the director Georg Gustav Samuel Köpke from the Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster (1773-1837), to whom Bonnell had been particularly close, the director August Ferdinand Ribbeck (1790-1847) from the Friedrichswerder Gymnasium was his successor. Bonnell moved to the school he had attended as principal. He remained loyal to the new office, which he took up on January 1, 1838 with a salary of 1,150 thalers. As director of the Friedrichswerder Gymnasium, Bonnell was one of the most respected figures in Berlin's higher education system. The number of students grew during his directorate to almost 600, whose accommodation in the old, inadequate rooms became increasingly difficult. Bonnell experienced and accompanied the high school's move into the new building, which was adapted to the increased demands. But he resigned his office due to illness in October 1875 and was only able to attend the inauguration as a guest of honor. He had barely a year and a half of retirement; He died on the night of May 9-10, 1877.

As in the management of his institution, he was otherwise conservative, averse to any sharp opposition in religious and political matters. But his respect for authority did not prevent him from publicly advocating freedom of conscience where it seemed to him to be endangered. In 1845 he joined the declaration of Friedrich Schleiermacher's supporters against the Evangelical Church newspaper party, which had become powerful under the Friedrich Eichhorn ministry , and in 1873 the protests of the Jenenser professors against the disciplinary persecution of Schleiermacherian Adolf Sydow . The annual celebration of Schleiermacher's birthday by his students and admirers, which he suggested, was maintained with his participation up to the centenary on November 21, 1868. The Philosophical Faculty in Berlin honored him in 1863, the Theological Faculty in Jena in 1873 with a doctorate .

Philology, Theology and Politics

Bonnell's literary work and special academic studies were initially and later mainly devoted to the Quintilian . To continue and complete the great edition of the Roman rhetorician begun by Georg Ludwig Spalding , Philipp Buttmann and Karl Gottlob Zumpt took over after his death (1811) . This fell to the production of the fifth volume, for which he secured the help of younger workers, including his protégé Bonnell. This presented the variants of the text from the second chapter of IV. To the end of VI. together, but at the same time independently took over the production of the “Lexicon Quinctilianeum” , which appeared in Berlin in 1834 as Volume VI of the complete work together with the valuable “ Prolegomena de grammatica Quinctilianea” . With his "Recensus Quinctil." (1854; ed. 1874/75, 2 volumes), as a reviewer in magazines and with smaller contributions, Bonnell continued to promote the study of Quintilian for a long time, also in 1851 the Xth book in the Weidmann collection separately published.

Closely related to this was Bonnell's program of 1836: "De mutata sub primis Caesaribus eloquentiae Romanae condicione inprimis de Rhetorum scholis commentatio historica" . In 1848 he organized a new edition of Cicero's Officia (4th edition of Degen's edition). Also a “Latin. Vocabularium ” (1856; 2nd edition 1879) and Latin exercise books for school were published by him.

As a theologian, he paid tribute to the revered Schleiermacher by publishing his "Church History Lectures" in the complete edition of the works (Berlin 1840).

In 1844 Bonnell suggested the founding of the Berlin High School Teachers Society, in which he gave a series of lectures; In 1846 he also gave the suggestion for the Berlin "Zeitschrift für das Gymnasialwesen" . With Moritz Fürbringer and Wilhelm Thilo , he edited the educational magazine “Berliner Blätter” for several years from 1860 onwards . Much to the "Encyclopedia of the entire education and public education" by Schmid Bonnell contributed the essay "Prussia. The higher schools ”.

Bonnell had a special relationship with Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck , who had been a student in his house (Am Königsgraben 4) in Kost in 1831 and entrusted both sons to the grammar school he ran in 1865 (high school diploma in March 1869). The more frequent contact with the minister and later chancellor that this brought about allowed Bonnell to look deeper into Bismarck's motives and to believe in him and his future earlier than the greater part of his Berlin environment understood.

literature

• Heinrich Bertram: In memory of the director E. Bonnell (Zeitschrift für das Gymnasialwesen, Berlin 1878); therein reports from F. Meister about Bonnell's services to Quintilian.
• Richard Béringuier: The family trees of the members of the French Colonie in Berlin (Berlin 1887).
• Ferdinand Sander :  Bonnell, Eduard . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 47, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1903, pp. 106-109.