Scholarly coffee house

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The learned coffee house association , which no longer exists, was one of the oldest sociable civil associations in Berlin . It existed from 1755 to probably 1759.

history

Johann Georg Müchler
Friedrich Gabriel Resewitz

The association was founded in 1755 by the pedagogue, translator and publicist Johann Georg Müchler (1724-1819) together with the theologian and later abbot of the Berge monastery and general superintendent of the Duchy of Magdeburg Friedrich Gabriel Resewitz (1729-1806). Because of the outbreak of the Third Silesian War, better known as the Seven Years' War 1756/63, the club's activities came to a standstill because the military had to go to their units and other members left Berlin for professional reasons. The final dissolution took place “in the middle of the Seven Years War”.

The members of the Monday Club , which was founded in 1749 not as a scientific association, reading society or salon , but as a place for a “free, cheerful conversation” between congenial men and still exists, also met from 1789 in the “ English House ”.

organization

The association had two rooms in the “Englischen Haus” restaurant, at Mohrenstrasse 49, for social education and for the expansion of learned knowledge and social exchange on all areas of science and the arts. There the members and their guests could meet to drink inexpensive coffee and read newspapers and journals and have conversations. In addition to billiards , the members also played tarot .

The members gathered around the pool table first weekly and later every four weeks. Scientific lectures were given. After registering, each member was allowed to give their own speech.

In the style of English clubs, offices with the designations "Secretaire, Stuarts and Overseer" were awarded. Each new member had to pay an admission fee of two Reichstalers. Since billiards and tarot were played for money, the association had additional income.

Known members

Friedrich Nicolai, painting by Ferdinand Collmann after Anton Graff , 1790, Gleimhaus Halberstadt
Moses Mendelssohn (1771, portrait by Anton Graff , art collection of the University of Leipzig)

Shortly after it was founded, the number of members was forty. The membership was limited to a hundred. Women were not allowed. On the other hand, Jews were admitted. Since only 15 members are known by name, no general statements can be made about the selection of members. It can be assumed, however, that the majority “scholars or at least friends of learning” were among the members. Three members known by name were also members of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences .

  • Aaron Emmerich Gumpertz (1723–1769), a doctor for the Berlin Jewish community, had close contacts with educational institutions and academics in Christian society.
  • Friedrich Paul Jacobi (1727–1758) lieutenant in the artillery and teacher of mathematics in the artillery corps. Member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences. He was appointed by the king because of his knowledge in the philosophical and mathematical sciences to instruct the "senior officers as fireworkers and bobardiers". During the siege of Olomouc he was killed by a cannonball.
  • Friedrich Germanus Lüdke (1730–1792) Protestant theologian of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, writer of theological works, court master to the Prussian Minister of Justice Levin-Friedrich von Bismarck (1703–1774) field preacher in the Seven Years' War and then archdeacon at the Nikolaikirche in Berlin.
  • Middleton was the younger son of a family of counts from Scotland and lived in Berlin around 1760. Unfortunately, his first name has not been passed down. He was an admirer of Mendelssohn.
  • Johann Georg Philipp Müchler (1724–1819) was a German pedagogue, publicist and translator. In 1784 he became head of the Schindler orphanage in Berlin. From 1785 he was also professor of Latin at the military academy.

Relationship between members

Copper engraving by Friedrich Germanus Lüdke (Chodowiecki, Allg. D. Bibli. 1785)
Johan Carl Wilcke

Aepinus met Wilcke during his studies in Rostock and took him to Berlin in 1755. Both did research there on electricity and magnetism and were students with the mathematician and physicist Leonhard Euler (1707–1783), whose son Johann Albrecht Euler was later also a member of the coffee house. During his two years as director of the Berlin observatory, Aepinus lived with Leonhard Euler and met his son there.

Around 1748 Gumpertz met Moses Mendelssohn, who was six years his junior, in Berlin and gave him lessons in Hebrew literature and mathematics, in Latin, English and French. He brokered the acquaintance between Friedrich Nicolai and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing .

In 1769 Lüdke mediated together with the dispute between Mendelssohn and the Swiss theologian Johann Caspar Lavater , with whom Lüdke was friends. Lavater publicly urged Mendelssohn to either refute Christianity in all forms or to become a Christian himself. Lüdke demanded that both opponents have the same right to defend their position. In his 1774 pamphlet “About Tolerance and Freedom of Conscience” he spoke out in favor of tolerance also against Jews, since any intolerant policy could not be “without horrible murder and bloodshed”.

Middleton was an admirer of Mendelssohn and translated his "Letters on Sensations" into English. Middleton spoke German almost as well as English and also wrote a letter novel in German , which he showed Nicolai for review. Unfortunately, the novel and the translation cannot be found in an internet search.

Müchler was friends with Mendelssohn. Together with him he wanted to have a monument erected in Berlin for the three deceased philosophers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz , Johann Georg Sulzer and Johann Heinrich Lambert and therefore wrote a letter to Frederick the Great, which he replied on April 24, 1785. In 1789 he published some of Mendelssohn's journal articles as a collection of volumes under the title Small philosophical writings .

In 1752 Naumann moved into an apartment with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) in Berlin and through him made the acquaintance of Mendelssohn and made friends with him. In 1759 he published together with Friedrich Nicolai the "Letters concerning the latest literature" with essays by Lessing, Nicolai and Mendelssohn.

The General German Library (after 1793 New General German Library ) published by Nicolai was the most important organ of the Enlightenment in German. At times more than 150 employees reviewed all the important publications of the time. A total of over 80,000 new publications were discussed. Together with Moses Mendelssohn , who was also friends , a library of fine sciences and free arts was brought out in twelve volumes from 1759 . Lüdke took care of the registration of the reviews. Wilhelm Abraham Teller (1734–1804), Resewitz and Lüdke represented the neological direction in Protestant theology. They handled the third that theological reviews made up in the ADB's early years.

From 1755 Resewitz lived as a private scholar in Berlin. During this time he came into contact with the philosopher Mendelssohn, with whom he was in close correspondence, and the publisher Nicolai. From 1764 to 1765 he worked as a reviewer for the publication Letters concerning the latest literature , then until 1780 for the General German Library edited by Nicolai , where he was in charge of theology alongside Teller and Lüdke.

During his studies at the University of Rostock , Wilcke met Aepinus, the son of a friend of his father's, and he nourished Wilcke's passion for the natural sciences, especially physics. When Aepinus went to Berlin to work as an astronomer in 1755, he took Wilcke with him. Both did research there on electricity and magnetism and were students of the mathematician Euler , the father of Johann Albrecht Euler.

Meetings and lectures

Johann Albrecht Euler

In a note on a letter from Mendelssohn to Lessing dated March 9, 1756, who visited the philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) with the “Lieutenant Jacobi” and found him “a very skilled man, a good mathematician and thorough Metaphysician ”, Nicolai described that Jacobi was an accurate head and an excellent mathematician. At the end of 1755 a coffee house for a closed society of a hundred people, mostly scholars, was set up in Berlin, of which Jacobi, according to Moses (Mendelsohn) and himself, was also a member. Nicolai then goes on to describe that every four weeks the society “around the billiards” and then lectures were given. He remembered the following lectures and incidents:

  • The mathematician and physicist Johann Albrecht Euler read a profound treatise on “billiards” with the title “The Movement of Two Balls on a Horizontal Surface”, which he later also gave to the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences.
  • Resewitz presented his treatise on genius, which Nicolai published anonymously in 1759.
  • Between February 1756 and January or February 1757 there was an exchange of blows between the mathematician and astronomer Aepinus and the philosopher Mendelssohn on four days of the meeting. Mendelssohn had presented his "Thoughts of Probability", to which Aepinus presented a refutation. Mendelssohn responded with a “counter-answer”.
  • The physicist Wilke held a "college" on electricity, for which he acquired an excellent apparatus, which he left with the company on his departure. During his time in Berlin, Wilke and his friend Aepinus researched electrical influenza .
  • Mendelssohn was once appointed to referee when Euler, Gumbertz and Jacobi were playing tarot. There was a disagreement about the tarots being played. Mendelsohn exclaimed: “What a miracle! Drey mathematicians can't really count one us twenty! "

In the paper by Falk mentioned below, the following lectures are also mentioned:

  • Jacobi spoke "about the lifting tools".
  • Martini gave a lecture on "the shelled sea animals and zoopytes".

When everyone present at a meeting was asked to introduce themselves, Mendelssohn , who had a humpback and stuttered , demonstrated humor in which he self-deprecatingly and courageously poeticed his linguistic and physical mistakes with a poem:

You call the Demosthen big
The stuttering speaker from Athens
You call the humped Aesop wise
Triumph: I will be in your circle
To be doubly great and wise
Because you have with me in the club
What to do with Aesop and Demosthen
Heard and see separately.

literature

  • Rainer Falk: learned coffee house. In: Handbook of Berlin Associations and Societies 1786–1815. Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-05-006015-6 , pp. 17ff. (on-line)
  • M. Kayserling, Moses Mendelssohn, His life and work , Leipzig 1888, 2nd verm. And new work. Ed., Chapter 10 The learned department store and Mendelssohn mathematical studies, p. 58 ff, digital: [4] '
  • Thomas Lackmann, Das Glück der Mendelssohns: History of a German Family , Berlin 2011, First Chapter, Scholars Become Confidants , ISBN E-PUB 978-3-8412-0299-4, reading sample [5]

These treatises form the basis of the preceding article.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Franz Ulrich Theodosis Aepinus. In: Members of the predecessor academies. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , accessed on February 12, 2015 .
  2. ^ Johann Carl Conrad Oelrichs: Contributions to history and literature. Berlin 1760, p. 229. (digitized version)
  3. ^ Directory of members of the predecessor academies of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. ( Digitized version , accessed on September 7, 2015)
  4. ^ Britta L. Behm: Moses Mendelssohn and the Transformation of Jewish Education in Berlin. Münster 2002, ISBN 3-8309-1135-1 , pp. 88ff. (Digitized version)
  5. ^ Eberhard Wolff: Medicine and Doctors in German Judaism of the Reform Era: The Architecture of a Modern Jewish Identity. Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-525-56943-6 , p. 64ff. (Digitized version)
  6. ↑ Moses Mendelssohn and Lavater in the public religious dispute. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung. January 6, 2001 (digitized version)
  7. ^ Ulrich Wyrwa: Jews in Tuscany and Prussia in comparison: Enlightenment and emancipation in Florence, Livorno, Berlin and Königsberg i. Pr. London 2003, ISBN 3-16-148077-5 , pp. 102f. (Reading sample)
  8. ^ Hermann M. Meyer: Moses Mendelssohn Bibliography: With some additions to the intellectual history of the late 18th century. 1965, ISBN 3-11-000466-6 , p. 305. (digitized version )
  9. ^ Friedrich Nicolai (editor), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's correspondence with Karl-Wilhelm Ramler, Johann-Joachim Eschenburg and Friedrich-Nicolai. Along with a few comments on Lessing's correspondence with Moses Mendelssohn. Berlin 1794, p. 504Ff, digital [1]
  10. ^ Johann David Erdmann Preuss (Ed.): Œuvres de Frédéric le Grand. Volume 27, Berlin 1856, pp. Xxvii .
  11. ↑ Moses Mendelssohn : Small philosophical writings. With a foreword by Johann Georg Müchler and a sketch of his life and character by D. Jenisch. Berlin 1789. (full text)
  12. ↑ Friedrich Nicolai: Letters concerning the latest literature. 1759-66. (Digitized version)
  13. ↑ F. Nicolai, M. Mendelssohn (ed.) From volume 5: CF Weisse (ed.): Library of the beautiful sciences and the free arts Leipzig. (Vol. 1.1757-12.1765). (Digitized version)
  14. ↑ Ute Schneider: Friedrich Nicolais General German Library as an integration medium of the learned republic. Wiesbaden 1955, ISBN 3-447-03622-2 , p. 138 f. (Digitized version)
  15. ^ Uwe Förster, Resewitz, Friedrich Gabriel, University of Magdeburg, biographies. (Digitized version)
  16. ^ Karl Lachmann (Ed.): Gotthold-Ephraim Lessing: Sämmliche Schriften. New edition, Volume 13, Berlin 1840, p. 19. (digitized version)
  17. ^ Johann Albrecht Euler: Research of the mouvemens d'un globe sur un plan horizontal / You mouvement d'un globe sur un plan horizontal. Mémoire second. In: Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences et des Belles-Lettres de Berlin. Volume 14, 1758, pp. 284-253 and Volume 16, 1760, pp. 261-284.
  18. ↑ Attempt on Genius. In: Collection of mixed writings for the promotion of the fine sciences and free arts. Berlin 1760, Volume 3, first piece, pp. 1-69. (Digitized version)
  19. ^ Albert Meier: The origin of the concept around 1800. Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-11-021780-3 , p. 79 f. (Digitized version)
  20. ^ ED Sylla In: Moses Mendelssohn's Metaphysics and Aesthetics. 2011, ISBN 978-94-007-2450-1 , pp. 60 f. (Digitized version)
  21. ↑ Alexander Altman: Moses Mendelssohn's early writings on metaphysics. Tübingen 1969, p. 209 ff. (Digitized version)
  22. ^ E. Hoppe: History of Physics. In: Handbook of Physics. Volume 1: History of Physics Lecture Technique. Springer, Berlin 1926, p. 54. (Reprint: ISBN 978-3-642-49646-2 ) (digitized version)
  23. ↑ (Abraham Jacob) Kayserling, Moses Mendelssohn, in Nieuw Israelietisch weekblad ". Amsterdam, edition of November 1, 1895, digitally accessed from Delpher on September 12, 2015, (in Dutch) [2]
  24. ↑ Rolf-Bernhard Essig, Doubly great and wise, Lessing's friendship with Moses Mendelssohn in Vera Forester's double biography, Literaturkritik.de No. 8 of August 1, 2002, digitally accessed on September 12, 2015, [3]
  25. ↑ Unless there are any special comments, the above articles are quoted without a separate reference to the source.