Friedrich Rühs

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Friedrich Rühs

Friedrich Rühs (born March 1, 1781 in Greifswald , † February 1, 1820 in Florence ) was a German historian and university professor . He first taught at the University of Greifswald in Swedish Pomerania , then from 1810 at the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin . He dealt with Scandinavian and Germanic history. During the wars of liberation he emerged as a nationalist with xenophobic, anti-France writings and wrote anti-Jewish texts that are classified in the early history of ethnic anti-Semitism .

Life

Attending school and studying

Friedrich Rühs grew up in Greifswald , which at that time belonged to Swedish Pomerania . He came from an old Greifswald merchant family, his father Joachim Rühs († 1811) was a merchant and councilor in Greifswald. Rühs first attended the Greifswald city school .

Rühs began his studies at the University of Greifswald in 1797 , where he heard history from Johann Georg Peter Möller and Thomas Thorild . In 1800 he moved to the Georg-August University in Göttingen , where he received his doctorate under August Ludwig von Schlözer . At that time he wrote a first paper on Scandinavia ( attempt at a history of religion, state constitution and culture of the old Scandinavians , Göttingen 1801) which was criticized by Friedrich David Gräter as too declamatory and insufficiently investigative.

Privatdozent and associate professor Professor in Greifswald

In autumn 1801 Rühs returned to his hometown Greifswald. During this period the University of Greifswald was shaped by Swedish science policy, and the city was the seat of the highest judicial and church authorities for Swedish Pomerania . Rühs became vice librarian at the University Library Greifswald and after his habilitation in 1802 private lecturer . Rühs offered himself as a translator of foreign language scripts and in 1802, as a Swedish subject, received the royal commission to work as an “advisor” on the German translation of the Italian Joseph Acerbi's “ trip to Sweden” . He had portrayed the Swedish king Gustav IV Adolf as a narrow-minded censor of intellectual life in his countries. In 1803 the Berlin edition of the travelogue appeared without attacks on Sweden, which Rühs had erased. He was not named.

With this, Rühs had gained the trust of the Swedish royal family and received further orders. In the following years he translated a counter-writ to Acerbi, Carl Gustaf af Leopold's letters on "Sweden's newest conditions" (1804), also his "mixed prosaic writings" (Rostock / Leipzig 1805) and the works of Gustav III. in three volumes (Berlin 1805–1808). He also published his own works on Nordic history and philology, for example on " Finland and its inhabitants" (1809). Rüh's five-volume story of Sweden was very positively received and widely received (especially in Scandinavia).

In 1808 Rühs became associate professor at the philosophical faculty in Greifswald. In this position he succeeded his friend Ernst Moritz Arndt , who had fled to Sweden before Napoleon's troops.

Professor in Berlin

In 1810 Rühs was appointed to the chair of history there when the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin was founded . According to Heinz Duchhardt , "the choice of the 30-year-old from Greifswald was a courageous decision that one in Berlin never had to regret".

In Berlin, Rühs continued his Scandinavian research and in 1812 translated the Edda into German before the Brothers Grimm . The translation appeared “with an introduction to Nordic poetry and mythology ” and was in prose form. Rühs relied on a Danish edition by Edda researcher Rasmus Nyerup , whom he had visited in Stockholm in 1810 . Its transfer, however, met with criticism, from which an Edda dispute developed. Rühs were accused of translation errors due to a lack of knowledge of Old Norse. The Dane Rasmus Rask had published a dictionary in 1811 that Rühs had not used.

Nevertheless, Rühs found new tasks with the support of the Greifswald-based publisher Georg Andreas Reimer (1776–1842). In 1813 On the Origin of Icelandic Poetry appeared . Later he wrote, among other things, a five-volume Swedish story , which was translated into Swedish in 1823 and was also well received by the Swedish historian Erik Gustaf Geijer .

Formerly an anti-Semite and a nationalist

Through his publisher in Berlin, Rühs won the trust of the historian and politician Barthold Georg Niebuhr , who persuaded him to work on the Prussian Correspondent . As a result, Rühs emerged with emphatically nationalistic writings. After Greifswald fell to Prussia in 1815, he sharply criticized the "Swedish times" there in an essay fictitious as a letter. In the same year his very emotional work “Historical Development of the Influence of France and the French on Germany” appeared, which portrayed them as “archenemies” and “eternal oppressors”.

Also in 1815 the radically anti-Jewish pamphlet “On the Claims of Jews to German Citizenship” was published. In it, Rühs denied the Jews their German citizenship if they were not prepared to convert to Christianity . He followed a folkish and anti-Judaistic argument that Johann Gottlieb Fichte had put forward before him :

A foreign people cannot obtain rights which the Germans in part only enjoy through Christianity.

The future German state will again be “Christian-Germanic”. As in the High Middle Ages , the Jews should be identified again with a dress code , "so that a German, even if he was misled by appearance, behavior and language, could recognize his Hebrew enemy." The Jews should convert to the "mild character" of Christianity appropriating the “German national peculiarities” “in order to bring about the downfall of the Jewish people over time.” With this, Rühs turned away from the basic ideas of the Enlightenment and showed himself to be an opponent of Jewish emancipation , which at that time in Prussia was based on the political Agenda stood.

Rühs was not alone with such demands: in 1815–1819 a wave of anti-Jewish and anti-emancipatory inflammatory writings reached its first peak in the 19th century. So the philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries from Jena joined Rühs in 1816 with his own treatise, but demanded beyond the “downfall” of the Jewish religion through conversion that this “caste be exterminated with stump and handle”. In 1818 Count Karl Christian Ernst von Bentzel-Sternau responded to both tracts with a satire entitled “Anti-Israel. A lecture in the secret academy on the green donkey as the opening speech given by Horatius Cocles ”.

History theorist

With his draft of a propaedeutic of historical studies published in 1811 , Rühs presented a book that was very innovative at the time in the field of the methodology and theory of history, which was only just beginning to be established. Rühs stood here in the tradition of Johann Gottfried Herder and, like him, turned against the philosophy of history of the Enlightenment , since it only judged the past according to the value standards of its own time. In contrast, Rühs emphasized, for example, the importance of methodically guided source criticism and demanded that history as a scientific discipline must historicize the past it investigates.

Historiographer of Prussia

In the following years, Rühs published a "Handbook of the History of the Middle Ages" (1816) and a book on "The Relationship of Holstein and Schleswig to Germany and Denmark" (1817). In the same year he was appointed historiographer of the Prussian state. He now devoted himself increasingly to research on Germanic antiquity and was significantly involved in preparatory work for the "Society for Germany's Older History" founded in 1819. The initiative for this came from Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom Stein . After the death of Rühs, the General Management of Monumenta Germaniae Historica emerged. In 1819 he became a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences .

Rühs fell ill in 1820 during a trip to Italy with his nephew Karl Gustav Homeyer (1795–1874). He died in his care in Florence. His nephew took care of his work and emphasized the need for Nordic studies at the University of Berlin.

Friedrich Rühs was married to Eleonore Hyppolithe Kriebel, a daughter of the Wolgast provost Johann August Kriebel . He was a knight of the Swedish North Star Order .

Fonts

  • History of Sweden . 5 volumes Hall 1803–1814. (Swedish translation published 1823-1825)
  • Finland and its people . Greifswald 1809.
  • Draft of a propaedeutic for historical studies. 1811. (New edition as Volume 7 of the Knowledge and Criticism series , edited and introduced by Dirk Fleischer and Hans Schleier , Waltrop 1997.)
  • About the origin of Icelandic poetry . Berlin 1813.
  • Historical development of the influence of France and the French on Germany and the Germans . Berlin 1815.
  • About the claims of Jews to German citizenship . Berlin 1815.
  • The relationship of Holstein and Schleswig to Germany and Denmark . Berlin 1817.
  • Handbook of the history of the Middle Ages . (New, improved edition: Arnold, Stuttgart 1840)

As editor

  • Carl Gustaf af Leopold (Author): Sweden's newest conditions . Greifswald 1804.
  • Carl Gustaf af Leopold (Author): Mixed prosaic writings . Rostock / Leipzig 1805.
  • Gustav III (Author): Works in three volumes. Berlin 1805-1808.
  • The Edda, along with an introduction to Nordic poetry and mythology . Berlin 1812. ( Online )

literature

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ^ Heinz Duchhardt : Technical history and "political" history: the medievalist, regional historian, cultural historian and publicist Friedrich Rühs. In: Paul-Joachim Heinig et al. (Ed.): Empire, regions and Europe in the Middle Ages and modern times. Festschrift for Peter Moraw (= historical research. Vol. 67). Berlin 2000, pp. 715-730, here p. 718.
  2. ↑ See on this Michael Rohrschneider: The historian Christian Friedrich Rühs and the French. A study of the German image of France in the early 19th century . In: Francia. Research on Western European History, Vol. 33 (2006), Issue 2, pp. 129–146.
  3. ↑ quoted from LOTTA No. 11/97: 1815–1848–1933: “German” revolutions
  4. ^ Cf. Michael F. Scholz: The historian Christian Friedrich Rühs and the ambivalence of the early German national movement. In: German-Finnish Society e. V. (Ed.): Pro Finlandia 2001. Festschrift for Manfred Menger, Reinbek 2001, pp. 125–139.
  5. ↑ Michael Czolkoß: The development of historical science at the University of Greifswald 1765–1863 . In: Niels Hegewisch / Karl-Heinz Spieß / Thomas Stamm-Kuhlmann (eds.): History in Greifswald. Festschrift for the 150th anniversary of the Historical Institute of the University of Greifswald ( Contributions to the history of the University of Greifswald 11 ), Stuttgart 2015, pp. 9–52, here pp. 42–49.
  6. ^ Heinz Duchhardt : Friedrich Rühs and the Berlin Academy of Sciences . In: Dieter Hein / Klaus Hildebrand / Andreas Schulz (eds.): History and life. The historian as a scientist and contemporary. Festschrift for Lothar Gall on the occasion of his 70th birthday, Munich 2006, pp. 15–20.
personal data
SURNAME Rühs, Friedrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rühs, Friedrich Christian; Rühs, Christian Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH March 1, 1781
PLACE OF BIRTH Greifswald
DATE OF DEATH February 1, 1820
Place of death Florence