Franz Wilhelm Jung

Franz Wilhelm Jung (born December 3, 1757 in Hanau ; died August 25, 1833 in Mainz ) was a German poet , translator, and publicist .

Life

Jung was the son of Johann Philipp Jung, a Hanau councilor and rentmaster. His father died in 1768 when Jung was 11 years old, and training and management were in the hands of his uncle Johann Kaempf , who took him to Diez in 1769 , where he worked from 1770 as an Oranien-Nassau court advisor and general practitioner, at the same time as Bademedicus in Ems . Jung, like him, was to be trained to be a doctor and a philanthropist , but the boy showed an insurmountable aversion to medicine. So it remained with a somewhat unsystematic and unregulated self-study, through which Jung nevertheless acquired an extensive literary-philosophical education. In addition, after moving to Hanau in 1768, he received private lessons in economics and camera studies from Johann Friedrich von Pfeiffer . His uncle also arranged for the barely 18-year-old to be accepted into a Masonic lodge , from where he joined the Illuminati order . However, he did not stay long in either order.

In 1780 Jung went to Holland as court master of the Earl of Athlone , where he married a relative of the Earl, Jacoba Maria de Perponcher-Sedlnitzky (1764–1800), in The Hague in 1786 . After this marriage, he returned to Germany with the earl's sons and settled in Homburg vor der Höhe , where his uncle had again given him the post of court counselor in the Hesse-Homburg government and, above all, dealt with problems of popular education and dealt with the small country's economic difficulties. However, he had sufficient leisure time for literary work, which resulted in close contact with Landgrave Friedrich , who was also very interested in literary and scientific research .

Both were enthusiastic admirers of Rousseau , Klopstock and Schiller and were enthusiastic about idealized freedom among Greeks and Swiss. However, when Jung saw a concrete form of freedom realized in France after the French Revolution, opinions began to part. There was a break between the Hofrat and the Landgrave, who in 1794 dismissed the heads of the democratic circle around Jung from his service. These included the assessor Jakob Wilhelm Kaempf , a son of Jung's uncle, a cousin, a radical democrat and Mainz Jacobin , as well as Hofrat Heinrich Schneidler, the educator of the landgrave's children. Out of solidarity with his friends, Jung also submitted his farewell, but during the time of the French occupation he successfully campaigned for the interests of the small country and achieved that Hessen-Homburg was given almost neutral status. In 1798, Jung went to Mainz, where he became head of the Bureau for Public Works and later the Police Commissioner of the Mainz Republic .

Jung's importance lies less in his literary work and his translations (he translated Rousseau and submitted a three-volume Ossian translation), but rather in his role as a mediator between radical democratic and revolutionary strivings on the one hand and his friends with exponents of German philosophy and literature especially in the vicinity of the Hessen-Homburgischer Hof. These include Lavater , Schiller and Jean Paul , with whom he exchanged letters from 1814. He was friends with Isaak von Sinclair , who was a friend and helper of Holderlin . Sinclair was the tutor of the landgrave's sons and had given Holderlin a position as his librarian. From that time on, Jung was also known and friends with Hölderlin, and contact with Johann Gottlieb Fichte came through Sinclair . When the University of Mainz was to be revived as the Lycée superieur , Jung tried to enforce an appointment by Fichte there, but failed. These and other disappointments prompted Jung to step down in 1804 and henceforth lived as a private citizen in Frankfurt.

From 1814 Jung lived again in Mainz, where he became general secretary of the Donersberg department , later he became director of studies, co-founder of the “Association for Literature and Art” and did a lot for the cultural development of the city. In 1816 there was also a rapprochement with Landgrave Friedrich, who appointed him privy councilor in 1820. In 1822 an eye disease led to almost total blindness.

Works

• About the evil on earth. A word of reassurance and exaltation. Frankfurt a. M. 1806.
• Heinrich Frauenlob. A poem. Dedicated to the residents of Mainz with a preliminary reminder. Mainz 1806, 2nd edition Mainz 1819.
• Memories of Johann Kaspar Lavater. Read in the Museum zu Frankfurt am Main on February 14, 1812. Frankfurt a. M. 1812
• Clare. A poem. Frankfurt a. M. 1813.
• Odmar. A dramatic poem. Heidelberg 1814, 2nd edition Mainz 1821.
• Contribution to ideas about church and church customs. Mainz 1814.
• The echoes of the High German language, or the listing of their related words for the sake of poetry. Also under the cover title: German Rhyming Dictionary. Darmstadt (or Leipzig), 1834.

Translations

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau: From the social contract or about the principles of the political theory. Frankfurt a. M. 1800.
• Ossian's poems. 3 vols. Frankfurt a. M. 1808.

literature

• Biographical-literary lexicon of the writers of the Grand Duchy of Hesse in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Volume 2: The writers of the year 1843 in partly new communications, partly in continuation of the articles contained in the first section together with the necrologists of the writers of the Grand Duchy of Hesse who died between 1800–1843. Pp. 361-362.
• Heiner Boehncke : Jung, Franz Wilhelm. In: Wilhelm Kühlmann (Ed.): Killy Literature Lexicon . Authors and works from the German-speaking cultural area. 2., completely revised Ed. De Gruyter, Berlin 2009, vol. 6, p. 211 f.
• Martin Glaubrecht:  Jung, Franz Wilhelm. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 10, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1974, ISBN 3-428-00191-5 , pp. 672-674 ( digitized version ).
• Werner Kirchner: Franz Wilhelm Jung's copy of the "Hyperion". In: Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 1954, pp. 79–92, PDF .

Web links

• Works by and about Franz Wilhelm Jung  in the German Digital Library
• Jung, Franz Wilhelm. Hessian biography. In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).