Ferdinand Lotheissen

Monument to Ferdinand Lotheissen in the arcade courtyard of the University of Vienna

Georg Wilhelm Philipp Karl Ferdinand Lotheissen (born May 20, 1833 in Darmstadt , † December 19, 1887 in Vienna ) was a German-Austrian Romance scholar and cultural historian .

life and work

Ferdinand Lotheissen was the son of the later Darmstadt court president Friedrich Lotheissen (1796–1859) and Sophie Kröncke (1809–1872), daughter of the Rhine construction inspector Claus Kröncke (1771–1843). From 1851 he studied classical philology in Göttingen, Berlin and Giessen . In Göttingen he became a member of the Corps Saxonia . He received his doctorate in 1856 in Giessen on the figure of the parasite in the old comedy . From 1858 to 1863 he was a high school teacher in Büdingen , then went to Geneva, France and Italy (where he became friends with Ludmilla Assing ) and worked as a journalist. At the suggestion of Rudolf von Ihering, the Vienna Ministry brought him to Austria in 1870 to reorganize the secondary school system. At the University of Vienna he qualified as a professor in 1871 for modern French literary history with literature and society in France at the time of the revolution 1789–1794. On the cultural history of the 18th century (Vienna 1872) and in 1872 became chairman of the newly founded seminar for French and English together with Adolf Mussafia . In 1881 he was appointed associate professor. Lotheissen was married to Luise Amalie Thudichum (1838–1919) the youngest daughter of the theologian and philologist Georg Thudichum (1794–1873). The surgeon Georg Lotheissen (1868–1941) was his son.

From a letter of January 13, 1867: “I sometimes mean if one limited the study of the ancient languages ​​[in schools] and instead pursued the modern scientifically, if one were to study German and French grammar, German, English and French writers and explained - more would come out of it ”. (quoted from Fränkel in: ADB sv)

Other works

• Studies of John Milton's life and poetic works , Büdingen 1860
• History of French Literature in the 17th Century , 4 vols., Vienna 1877–1884, 2nd edition in 2 vols., Vienna 1897
• Molière. His life and works , Frankfurt 1880
• Queen Margaret of Navarre. A picture of culture and literature from the time of the French Reformation , Berlin 1885
• On the moral history of France. Pictures and histories , Leipzig 1885
• On the cultural history of France in the XVII. and XVIII. Centuries with a biographical introduction by Anton Bettelheim, Vienna 1889

literature

• L. Fränkel:  Ferdinand Lotheißen . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 52, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1906, pp. 87-93.
• Sofer:  Lotheissen Ferdinand. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 5, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1972, p. 329 f. (Direct links on p. 329 , p. 330 ).

Web links

Wikisource: Ferdinand Lotheißen  - Sources and full texts

• Literature by and about Ferdinand Lotheissen in the catalog of the German National Library
• Lotheißen, Georg Wilhelm Philipp Karl Ferdinand. Hessian biography (as of August 5, 2014). In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS). Hessian State Office for Historical Cultural Studies (HLGL), accessed on October 23, 2014 .