Ferdinand Kürnberger
Ferdinand Kürnberger (born July 3, 1821 in Vienna , † October 14, 1879 in Munich ) was an Austrian writer.
Life
Ferdinand Kürnberger was born on July 3, 1821 on the Laimgrube , Obere Gestättengasse 140 (since 1862 Luftbadgasse) in Vienna. He came from a working-class household: his father worked as a lighter, his mother was a stallholder at the Naschmarkt.
The young Kürnberger distanced himself from Austria at an early age ; for him Germany was the great progressive model. He himself found the domestic conditions to be downright "Asian, backward, lazy, stupid and reprehensible". He described the Austrian civil service as "Greater Ethiopian".
He earned his living by writing for several Viennese newspapers, including the Wiener Zeitung . His participation in the Vienna October Uprising in 1848 as a member of the Academic Legion forced him to flee to Germany, where he settled in Dresden . Because of the alleged participation in the Dresden May Uprising in 1849 - in fact, only his cap and his long hair were the reason for arrest - he was imprisoned; He was imprisoned for ten months. The Dresden writer Auguste Scheibe organized his escape. In 1854, while Kürnberger was in Germany, his father died.
In 1856 Kürnberger returned to Vienna and in 1857 published his “Selected Novellas”. In 1858 the mother died. As general secretary of the German Schiller Foundation (1867 to 1870) he worked in its branch in Vienna, which was the foundation's headquarters from 1865 to 1869. Among other things, he worked as a journalist for the Deutsche Zeitung in the years 1873–75 and 1879. After repeatedly unsuccessful attempts to come to the Burgtheater , he withdrew from his hometown to Graz , disappointed . Shortly before his death he compared himself to the eternal Jew ; they would have viewed both life and death with a sharp sense of humor. Kürnberger died on October 14, 1879 as a result of pneumonia in Munich while visiting the house of his friend, the painter Wilhelm von Kaulbach . He is buried in Mödling near the grave chapel of one of his best friends, Josef Schöffel .
In 1890 in Mödling and in 1894 in Vienna Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus (15th district) one street was named after him as Kürnbergergasse .
Act
In his articles, Kürnberger repeatedly denounced the conditions in his hometown (for example in Believed and Forgotten , 1866) and his country in a humorous way . So he became a chronicler of the "Austrian" and especially the "Viennese soul". Karl Kraus counted him, along with Daniel Spitzer and Ludwig Speidel, to the most linguistically powerful authors and to his role models in the historical Viennese feature pages of the liberal daily press.
The novel Der Amerika-Müde processes Nikolaus Lenau's experiences in the USA. He had never been there himself, wrote Kürnberger sarcastically and increasingly bitterly about a country without a spirit, ruled by pragmatism and capitalism.
In his famous work, The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber draws on the same sentences from Benjamin Franklin ,
- "Who ridiculed Ferdinand Kürnberger in his spirit and poisonous 'American cultural image' as an alleged creed of Yankeeism ",
and explains:
- “'Der Amerikamüde' (Frankfurt 1855), as is well known, a poetic paraphrase of Lenau's American impressions. The book would be a bit difficult to enjoy today as a work of art, but it is as a document of the (now long faded) contrasts of German and American feelings, one can also say: that inner life, as it has been for German Catholics and Protestants despite everything since the German mysticism of the Middle Ages stayed together , absolutely unsurpassed against puritanical-capitalist drive. "
Theodor W. Adorno found the motto for the first part of his Minima Moralia , written in the USA, in Der Amerika-Müde :
- "Life doesn't live!"
Ludwig Wittgenstein used a sentence from Kürnberger's essay, first published in 1873, The setting of memorials in the opposition as the motto for his Tractatus logico-philosophicus :
- "... and everything you know , not just heard rustling and roaring, can be said in three words."
Works
- Der Amerika-Müde, American cultural image (1855) ( digitized and full text in the German Text Archive ; on Google Books )
- Selected short stories (1858)
- Believed and Forgotten (1866)
- Literary affairs of the heart. Reflections and Reviews (1877)
- The Castle of Iniquities (1903)
- The dragon . In: German Novell Treasure . Edited by Paul Heyse and Hermann Kurz. Vol. 11. 2nd edition Berlin [1910], pp. [263] -310. In: Weitin, Thomas (Ed.): Fully digitized corpus. The German novella treasure . Darmstadt / Konstanz 2016 ( digitized and full text in the German text archive )
literature
- Constantin von Wurzbach : Kürnberger, Ferdinand . In: Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich . 13th part. Kaiserlich-Königliche Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, Vienna 1865, pp. 330–332 ( digitized version ).
- Elisabeth Pablé : Kürnberger Ferdinand. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 4, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1969, p. 327 f. (Direct links to p. 327 , p. 328 ).
- Karl Kraus: Ferdinand Kürnberger and the Viennese press , with the first publication of a letter by Kürnberger from June 8, 1871 to Adolf Fischhof . Torch No. 124 , mid-December 1902
- Wolf Dieter Kühnel: Ferdinand Kürnberger as a literary theorist in the age of realism . Kümmerle, Göppingen 1970 (also dissertation, University of Munich 1970).
- Fritz Martini: Kürnberger, Ferdinand. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-428-00194-X , pp. 232-234 ( digitized version ).
- Andreas Wildhagen: Ferdinand Kürnberger's political feature pages. Topics and technology of a small literary form in the age of German liberalism in Austria. Lang, Frankfurt / M. 1985.
- Karl Riha : On Ferdinand Kürnberger's critical position. A philosopher in newspaper garb. In: criticism, satire, parody. Collected Essays […]. West German Verlag, Opladen 1992, pp.119-131 books.google
- Andreas Wildhagen: Ferdinand Kürnberger's political feature pages. Topics and technology of a small literary form in the age of German liberalism in Austria. Lang, Frankfurt / M. 1985.
- Wolfgang Klimbacher: Ferdinand Kürnberger and Adolf Fischhof . Two former "March fighters" in German national euphoria. Literary-political reactions to war and the founding of an empire in 1870/71. In: Klaus Amann (Ed.): Literature & Nation . Böhlau, Vienna 1996, pp. 369-394 books.google
Web links
- Literature by and about Ferdinand Kürnberger in the catalog of the German National Library
- Works by and about Ferdinand Kürnberger in the German Digital Library
- Works by Ferdinand Kürnberger in the Gutenberg-DE project
- Kürnberger's manuscripts and letters in libraries and archives
- Kürnberger in the Internet Archive
Individual evidence
- ↑ Rebecca Unterberger: From Diarium to Newspaper: Wiener Zeitung on litkult1920er.aau.at, written in March 2017, editorially amended in February 2019
- ^ Streets and alleys in Mödling , accessed on August 18, 2014.
- ↑ The Protestant Ethics […] II 2, zeno.org .
- ↑ Der Amerika-Müde (1855) p.372 books.google
- ↑ In: “Deutsche Zeitung”, Vienna, late autumn 1873, then in: “Literarisches Herzenssachen”, published by L. Rosner, Vienna 1877, p. 338 ff., P.340 archive.org
- ↑ First as a "Logical-Philosophical Treatise". In: "Annalen der Naturphilosophie", Volume 14, 1921, S.185 books.google
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kürnberger, Ferdinand |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Austrian writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 3, 1821 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Vienna |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 14, 1879 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Munich |