Friedrich Eckstein

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Friedrich Eckstein, portrayed by Broncia Koller-Pinell

Friedrich Eckstein (born February 17, 1861 in Perchtoldsdorf near Vienna , † November 10, 1939 in Vienna) was an Austrian writer , patron and theosophist .

Life

Friedrich Eckstein was born on February 17, 1861 in Perchtoldsdorf as one of ten children of Albert and Amalie (née Wehle) Eckstein. The father was a chemist and inventor as well as the owner of a parchment paper factory. The Jewish family belonged to the Viennese upper middle class .

Through his father's regulars' table, the young Eckstein got to know personalities such as the general and inventor Franz von Uchatius , the social philosopher, inventor and writer Josef Popper-Lynkeus , the forest engineer Wilhelm Franz Exner, and the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud . He was friends with him all his life.

Eckstein was Franz Hartmann in the Theosophy introduced. In June 1886 he received a deed of foundation, personally signed by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky , for the Vienna Lodge of the Theosophical Society . In 1887 he founded the first official lodge of this society in Austria, of which he became president. He was friends with Gustav Meyrink and associated with the theosophist Henry Steel Olcott and with Rudolf Steiner until his departure from Vienna . He held him in high esteem and stayed with Marie Lang around 1890 among the theosophists , but then rejected theosophy as “weak-mindedness”.

Eckstein had early contacts with life reform circles ( vegetarianism ). He had been married to Bertha Helene Diener (1874–1948) since 1898 , and to make this marriage possible he converted to the Protestant faith beforehand. The couple ran a salon in the St. Genois Schlössl in Baden , in which Peter Altenberg , Arthur Schnitzler , Karl Kraus and Adolf Loos , in other words, "all of Vienna" frequented. Schnitzler used the Ecksteinvilla in Baden and his son Percy Eckstein, born in 1899, as models for his drama Das weite Land . He portrayed Friedrich as "Gustl Wahl". In 1904 Eckstein was left by his wife, who after their divorce in 1909 made a name for herself as a journalist and writer under the pseudonym Sir Galahad .

At literary get-togethers (e.g. in the Café Imperial, second room, left) Eckstein met Karl Kraus , Arthur Schnitzler , Felix Salten , Hugo Wolf , Hugo von Hofmannsthal , Franz Werfel , Rainer Maria Rilke , Robert Musil , Adolf Loos , Leon Trotsky and especially Anton Bruckner , whose pupil and later patron and private secretary he was.

Eckstein's sister Emma went down in psychoanalysis history as Irma . She had a catastrophic nose operation by Freud's friend Wilhelm Fliess behind her. Another sister of his, Therese Schlesinger , was a well-known politician and women's rights activist who belonged to the constituent National Assembly and the National Council from 1919 to 1923, and then to the Federal Council until 1930.

Anecdotes

René Fülöp Miller about Friedrich Eckstein:

“In Vienna, where literature, art, music, philosophy and business had their home in coffee houses, it was only natural that Mac Eck, wisdom in person, should also be enthroned at a café table. He sat in a corner of the Café Imperial from morning until midnight. He had a goatee and a Mongolian cutout. His age was not known even to his closest friends ... Julius, the old head waiter, said he had found Mac Eck in the same corner of the café when he began his career as Piccolo . Even among the most famous Viennese celebrities there was not one who would not have liked to come to Mac Eck's regulars' table. Hugo Wolf , Johann Strauss , E. Blavatsky and Annie Besant , Ferdinand Bruckner , Sigmund Freud , Alfred Adler and Leon Trotsky - they all consulted with him. When Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Werfel and Rilke were in doubt about a poem, they made a pilgrimage to Mac Eck. Architects submitted their blueprints to him, mathematicians their equations, physicists their formulas, and composers their scores for assessment. Lawyers and psychoanalysts discussed their cases with him. Actors asked him about their roles and historians about their theories of history. Even the imperial court master of ceremonies appeared one day to consult Mac Eck on a contentious issue of Spanish court etiquette. Mac Eck was familiar with all areas. If someone wanted to know the main rivers and tributaries in Paraguay, information about Neuthomism , the first romantic poem or the earliest mention of the toothbrush, he turned to Mac Eck. The mocking Karl Kraus , who had set up his seat at the next table in the Imperial, was the only one who dared to make fun of Mac Eck's omniscience. 'I had a nightmare last night,' he once said. 'A volume of Brockhaus came down from the shelf to look up something in Mac Eck.' Mac Eck, who was well versed in all intellectual matters, naturally also knew about all practical questions. He could tell art dealers which enthusiast would be interested in a particular painting from the early Renaissance; at first glance he saw the difference in the weave of Brno and English fabrics, he could tell booksellers the value of first editions and he knew who would finance what in Europe. "

- The fool in the tailcoat. In: The Month (4) 1952, pp. 401f

Friedrich Torberg told the following story about Eckstein:

“... the polyhistoric Eckstein was the most famous of the regulars at Café Imperial ... the author of a unfortunately lost Bruckner monograph with the beautiful title 'The World Spirit on the Organ', enormously well read and enormously educated, the old Eckstein had a reputation for knowing everything . There was no question that he could not answer immediately; indeed, sometimes he anticipated the answer knowingly and knowingly without waiting for the question. It was whispered that if the big Brockhaus did not know something, he would secretly get up and look in the old corner stone. When the 'press' once brought a report that spoke of a new work by the poet Kun-Han-Su, the old Eckstein was able to immediately provide his inquiring disciples with precise information about the work of this important Chinese poet, the only one attempted to revive a verse form that flourished under the last emperors of the Ming dynasty . The next day it turned out that Kun-Han-Su was merely a transmission error on the part of Knut Hamsun , but old Eckstein had once again known everything, and he was so respected that one was inclined to continue to believe in the existence of a Chinese poet named Kun-Han-Su. "

- The Aunt Jolesch or The Downfall of the Occident in Anecdotes , Munich 1975, p. 202

Works

  • Old, ineffable days. Memories from seventy years of apprenticeship and traveling . Reichner, Vienna 1936 (autobiography)
    • New edition (reprint): Edition Atelier in Wiener Journal Zeitschriften-Verlag, Vienna 1988, ISBN 3-900379-25-4
  • Older theories of the unconscious . In: Almanach des Internationale Psychoanalytischen Verlag 11, Vienna 1936
  • The unconscious, heredity and memory in the light of mathematical science . In: Almanach des Internationale Psychoanalytischen Verlag 5, Vienna 1930
  • The Escape into the Infinitely Small, A Leibniz Study . International Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Vienna 1932
  • Memories of Anton Bruckner . Universal Edition, Vienna 1924
  • Experiences with mathematicians and magicians . In: Wiener Tagblatt, April 6, 1935, No. 9 (about his deceased friend Oskar Simony )
  • Further psychoanalytic publications in the journal "Die Psychoanalytische Movement" edited by Adolf Josef Storfer . International Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Vienna

literature

  • Gregor Gatscher-Riedl: The polyhistor from Perchtoldsdorf. Notes on the 150th birthday of Friedrich Eckstein. In: Local history supplement [to the official gazette of the district authority Mödling], Volume 46, F. 1, (Mödling March 5, 2011), p. 3f.
  • Eckstein, Friedrich. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 6: Dore – Fein. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-598-22686-1 , pp. 57-64.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. See Schlesinger Therese, geb. cornerstone
  2. See On Edward Bulwer-Lytton