Friedrich Wilhelm August Murhard

The Murhard brothers, Eduard Handwerck, lithograph around 1840

Friedrich Wilhelm August Murhard (born December 7, 1778 in Kassel ; † November 29, 1853 there ) was a German mathematician, legal scholar, writer and librarian. Modern research counts Murhard with his scientific and journalistic work among the intellectual pioneers of political and economic liberalism in the Vormärz .

At the same time, Murhard is also considered a plagiarist and compiler , who used texts by others for his works and wrote about journeys that he most likely did not take himself.

Friedrich Murhard and his brother Johann Karl Adam Murhard (1781–1863) donated the Murhard Library, named after them, to the city of Kassel .

Family and education

Friedrich Murhard came from an established and wealthy family of officials; his father was the government procurator Henrich Murhard (1739-1809), his mother was his wife Maria Magdalena, née Fischer (1747-1807).

Friedrich Murhard attended the Lyceum Fridericianum (today Friedrichsgymnasium) in Kassel and from 1795 studied mathematics and physics at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen , among others with Kästner and Lichtenberg . In addition, he attended political science lectures at Schlözer and became familiar with French and English liberalism . Murhard soon became an ardent supporter of the ideas of the French Revolution .

In 1796 Murhard received his doctorate on Lagrange's calculus of variations and initially worked as a private lecturer in Göttingen, where he gave lectures and, among other things, devoted one to Immanuel Kant , but at the same time presented a number of publications on mathematics and physics. 1797–1798 he was an assessor at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences .

Murhard remained unmarried.

to travel

On October 8, 1798, Friedrich Murhard ended his academic career and set out on a journey to an unknown destination. It was not until the end of February 1801 that he reappeared in Germany, in Dresden.

Murhard himself claims to have traveled to Vienna , Pressburg , (Buda-) Pest , Großwardein (Oradea) and Klausenburg (Cluj Napoca) before he came to Hermannstadt (Sibiu). He claims to have spent the winter in Hungary and Transylvania and left Sibiu on April 10, 1799 for Bucharest , then crossed the Black Sea to Constantinople (Istanbul) and from there traveled via the Dardanelles , the islands of Tenedos and Imbros to Chios . He did not describe his return journey, but did mention that he had attended Napoleon's campaign to Egypt .

Murhard is said to have been the first German who undertook a trip to the Ottoman Empire out of political interest without belonging to a diplomatic embassy or making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land or to the sites of antiquity .

To this day it cannot be reliably clarified how far Murhard actually traveled. His stays in Dresden and Vienna are just as secure as his trip to Bucharest - but beyond that there is no evidence or serious clues.

Professional activities

In August 1798 the General Litterarian Gazette charged that Murhard's treatise of 1798 Principia novae theoriae Cometarum was a plagiarism of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling's ideas on a philosophy of nature and a note by Lichtenberg in the revised edition of Johann Christian Polycarp Erxleben's Beginnings of the theory of nature from 1768.

Shortly afterwards, in autumn 1798, the mathematician Konrad Dietrich Martin Stahl (1771–1833) accused Murhard of not only literally using entire passages for his system of general size theory from 1798, but also including the printing errors from his initial foundations of the previous year I copied numerical arithmetic and letter arithmetic .

These two allegations of plagiarism, which were raised almost at the same time, were probably the reason why Murhard ended his work as a university lecturer relatively suddenly in autumn 1798 and left Göttingen after only two years. As a scientist, he was discredited, especially since his history of physics supposedly also consisted of “plagiarism”.

After these allegations, which Murhard was never able to refute, after his return from 1801 he increasingly shifted his professional activity to travel literature and published his alleged travel experiences in three writings. From 1805 he published together with the publicist H. Chr. Von Reimers "Konstantinopel und St. Petersburg" , the first German magazine, which moved the Ottoman Empire into the center of their interest. However, doubts about the authenticity of his travelogues quickly arose, Murhard was met again with suspicion, and the magazine was discontinued after 24 copies.

The fact that scholars and writers wrote travelogues without ever having set foot in the country they described in great detail was neither unusual nor disreputable per se at the time. For example, the entertainment author Friedrich Schulz made his literary journey through Germany in 1786 at his own desk, just as Johann Kaspar Riesbeck wrote his much-read letters from a French traveler (1783) there. Only in particularly blatant cases did alleged, but never undertaken, trips cause public offense. One such example, alongside Murhard, is the journeyman bookbinder Joseph Schrödter alias Zacharias Taurinius alias Christian Friedrich Damberger , who wanted to have traveled to all continents (with the exception of Australia) but never left Vienna.

Now Murhard shifted to the field of political theories. After a (undoubtedly undertaken) France Travel in 1806 he published, the life in political opposition to the Hessian was ruling house, in Reichsanzeiger Deutsche an article in which he criticized the Hessian court system.
Thereupon he was arrested by the Hessian police.

In 1808 - after the founding of the Kingdom of Westphalia  - he became editor of the governmental newspaper "Moniteur Westphalien" and second librarian of the Kassel State Library. In 1810 he took over the management of the Kasselsche Allgemeine Zeitung .

Political persecution

The Hessian state government brought several legal proceedings against Murhard for political writing.

After the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, the Hessian elector Wilhelm I returned from exile in 1813 and restituted his electorate. Murhard was dismissed from the civil service and lost his librarianship as well as all possibilities of a journalistic activity in Kurhessen.

Therefore Murhard settled in the Free City of Frankfurt am Main in 1816 . In 1817 he took over the editing of the "European newspaper" , which he co-founded , but which was banned on March 31, 1818. In 1820, at the request of the publisher Johann Friedrich Cotta, he founded the national political journal “Allgemeinepolitische Annalen” , which should serve to spread politically liberal ideas and promote the development of liberal constitutions. Here he found another forum in which he could develop his ideas of early constitutionalism as a “continuous painting of the life of the people and the state”. In addition to numerous articles written by him and other well-known liberal journalists, articles by his brother Karl Murhard, who had followed him to Frankfurt, also appeared.

These journalistic activities once again aroused the suspicion of the Hessian authorities who expelled Murhard from Frankfurt, arrested Murhard on January 18, 1824 in Hanau and took him to the state prison in Kassel, where he was imprisoned until August 1824 and acquitted in 1827, but under a professional and Publication ban was placed and the royal seat was not allowed to leave until 1830.

After the progressive Electoral Hesse constitution of 1831 came into force , Murhard was able to devote himself to political journalism again, albeit always under the suspicion of the Electoral Hesse police and the threat of political censorship. He was involved with 14 central articles in the Rotteck-Welcker State Lexicon and between 1831 and 1834 published various articles in the liberal Kassel newspaper Der Verfassungsfreund . In 1836, Interior Minister Ludwig Hassenpflug tried to track down the author of an anonymous article critical of the government in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung . Murhard was the author, but the government could not determine his authorship.

In 1843 Murhard was arrested again because of the critical article "State Court" in the "State Lexicon". In 1844 he was tried, but it was delayed for years until the revolution of 1848 resulted in an amnesty. In 1852 Murhard was again interrogated by the police on charges of "lese majesty".

The testament

The brothers Friedrich Wilhelm August and Johann Karl Adam Murhard, who were overshadowed by the Brothers Grimm in their hometown , bequeathed their entire fortune to their hometown Kassel in their will of 1845, with the stipulation that a “... public library ... ... for the best of the local inhabitants and in the interests of science and civilization ... ” . The Murhard library was opened in 1905.

This generous gift was appreciated by the city of Kassel and its citizens, but not adequately. The Murhard brothers were viewed by the public as "French people" and Friedrich Murhard in particular was shunned because of the professional and political allegations made against him. Their memory was little looked after, and it is not known where they are buried.

On November 29, 1853 Murhard died “a broken man of exhaustion”, as his brother Karl noted in the family chronicle. "He, the lifelong fighter for civil liberty and human rights, ... has not received any public satisfaction for the disenfranchisement and abuse he had to endure in his hometown of Kassel."

Fonts

• Fragments from a travel diary. 1802.
• Painting of Constantinople. Dienemann, Penig; Kretschmar, Chemnitz 1804.
• Painting of the Greek Archipelagus. Vossische, Berlin 1807-1808.
• The unlimited principality. Bohné, Kassel 1831.
• The royal veto. Bohné, Kassel 1832.
• Popular sovereignty in contrast to so-called legitimacy. Bohné, Kassel 1832.
• About resistance, indignation and compulsory exercise of citizens against the existing state authority in moral and legal relationships. Braunschweig 1832.
• The purpose of the state. A propolitical investigation in the light of our century. Dieterich, Göttingen 1832.
• The right of nations to strive for contemporary state constitutions appropriate to their level of culture. Hermann, Frankfurt am Main 1832.
• The initiative in legislation. Illumination of the question: "Who should propose the laws in state society?" Along with an appendix: From the exercise of the right to petition by public assemblies and associations. Bohné, Kassel 1833.
• The Hessian constitutional document, explains and illuminates according to its individual paragraphs. A handbook for estates, businessmen, constitutional officials, and citizens. 2 Dept. Bohné, Kassel 1834/1835.
• Christian Friedrich Damberger Land trip into the interior of Africa . Uhlenhorst-Verlag Hamburg, undated (probably around 1930).

literature

• Moritz Cantor :  Murhard, Friedrich . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 23, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1886, p. 62 f.
• Julia Chatzipanagioti-Sangmeister: From Kassel to Chios: Ways and Works of Friedrich Wilhelm Murhard (1778-1853). In: Horst-Dieter Blume, Cay Lienau (Ed.): Approaching Greece. Festschrift for Anastasios Katsanakis. Münster 2002, pp. 12–27 ( online , PDF file; 181 kB).
• Peter Michael Ehrle:  Murhard, Friedrich Wilhelm August. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-428-00199-0 , p. 610 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Norbert Fuchs: The political theory of Friedrich Murhard 1778-1853. A contribution to the history of German liberalism in the Vormärz. Dissertation. University of Erlangen-Nuremberg 1973.
• Theodor Griewank : The brothers Friedrich and Karl Murhard. Political scientist and publicist. In: Ingeborg Schnack (Hrsg.): Life pictures from Kurhessen and Waldeck. Volume 1. Elwert, Marburg 1939, pp. 212-219.
• Ewald Grothe : Friedrich Murhard and the idea of ​​self-administration. A contribution to the beginnings of administrative science in Germany. In: Yearbook on Liberalism Research . 10, 1998, pp. 155-168.
• Ewald Grothe: The brothers Murhard and Napoleon. To the echo of the French occupation policy in journalism. In: Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte . 54, 2004, pp. 163-175.
• Axel Halle, Karl-Hermann Wegner, Jörg Westerburg (eds.): The Murhard brothers. Living for human rights and civil liberty. Kassel university press, Kassel 2003, ISBN 3-89958-037-0 .
• Hans-Jürgen Kahlfuß (Ed.): 125 years of the Murhard Foundation of the City of Kassel and its library 1863–1988. Association for Hessian History and Regional Studies, Kassel 1988 (= Hessian Research on Historical Regional and Folklore Studies , 17), ISBN 3-925333-14-2 .
• Dirk Sangmeister: Friedrich Murhard's fake trips to Constantinople and the Greek archipelago. Two reports from the early days of German philhellenism. In: Evangelos Konstantinou (Ed.): Expressions of European and international philhellenism from 17th to 19th Century. (= Philhellenic Studies , 13), Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 2007, pp. 269-282.
• Herbert Schäfer: Friedrich Murhard (1778-1853). On the history of political persecution. In: Friedrich and Karl Murhard, learned writers and donors in Kassel. Edited by Stadtsparkasse Kassel, Kassel 1987, pp. 14–35.
• Rainer Schöttle : Political Theories of Southern German Liberalism in the Vormärz. Studies on Rotteck, Welcker, Pfizer, Murhard. Nomos, Baden-Baden 1994 (= Nomos-Universitätsschriften, Politik , Vol. 49).
• Wilhelm Weidemann: Friedrich Murhard (1778-1853) and old liberalism. In: Journal of the Association for Hessian History and Regional Studies . 55, 1926, pp. 229-276.

Web links

Commons : Books by Friedrich Murhard  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Friedrich Wilhelm August Murhard in the catalog of the German National Library
• RegioWiki Kassel

Remarks

1. ↑ Other sources give the year of birth 1779.
2. ↑ Ludwig Thilo added an appendix to his work The People's Sovereignty in Its True Form from 1833 with the title Is Friedrich Murhard a Compiler? in which he accuses Murhard of literally copying various passages from Thilo's work The State of 1827 for The People's Sovereignty of 1832 .
3. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 176.
4. ↑ Julia Chatzipanagioti-Sangmeister: From Kassel to Chios: ways and works of Friedrich Wilhelm Murhard (1778-1853). In: H.-D. Blume, Cay Lienau (ed.): Approaching Greece. P. 15.
5. ↑ Julia Chatzipanagioti-Sangmeister: From Kassel to Chios: ways and works of Friedrich Wilhelm Murhard (1778-1853). In: H.-D. Blume, C. Lienau (Ed.): Approaching Greece. P. 16.
6. ↑ According to Horst-Dieter Blume, C. Lienau (Ed.): Approach to Greece by an anonymous in May 1801 in the Allgemeine Litterarian Anzeiger alleged.
7. ^ Digitales Archiv Marburg: The journalistic work of the brothers Friedrich and Karl Murhard. online ( Memento of the original from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
8. ↑ Ewald Grothe : Hassenpflug and the revolution. On the worldview and politics of a highly conservative Electorate of Hesse , in: Winfried Speitkamp (Ed.): State, Society, Science. Contributions to modern Hessian history , Marburg 1994, pp. 53–72, here pp. 66–71.
9. ^ Herbert Schäfer: Friedrich Murhard (1778-1853). On the history of political persecution. P. 23.