Georg Friedrich Daumer

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Georg Friedrich Daumer

Georg Friedrich Daumer (born March 5, 1800 in Nuremberg , † December 13, 1875 in Würzburg , pseudonyms: Dr. Amadeus Ottokar, Eusebius Emmeran ) was a German religious philosopher and poet . He was also known as the tutor of Kaspar Hauser .

biography

Georg Friedrich Daumer was the son of a Nuremberg master furrier . He attended the Aegidianum or Egidiengymnasium in Nuremberg, where Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was rector at the time. Since 1933 it has been called Melanchthon Gymnasium .

After graduating from school, he began studying theology at the University of Erlangen in 1817 . During his studies in Erlangen he became a member of the Bubenreuther fraternity in the winter semester of 1817/18 . In Erlangen, he joined a pietistic student group whose ascetic self-image shaped Daumer for the rest of his life: a fellow student died of self-castration , another went mad , a community operating in parallel led to a suicide and a civil servant theologian became removed from office for a moral offense . Daumer himself tried to put an end to his life by fasting for nine days . The philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach , one of the few friends he had, described the Erlangen student community as a pietistic dung puddle . Daumer's sermon concepts have been criticized by his professors for being too rationalistic or too mystical. Finally he broke off his studies and moved to Leipzig to study philology .

After completing his philology studies, Daumer became a teacher at the Latin school in 1822 and soon afterwards in 1823 a professor at his former grammar school in Nuremberg. However, conflicts with his rector, persistent sickness and eye problems forced him to retire temporarily in 1828 and finally in 1830.

In July 1828, Daumer was entrusted by the Nuremberg Council with the education of the foundling Kaspar Hauser , whom he took into his apartment. After Hauser was allegedly the victim of an assassination attempt there in October 1829, his safety with Daumer, whose health had continued to deteriorate, no longer seemed to be guaranteed. Kaspar Hauser was housed with the Biberbach merchant family. In the following years Daumer wrote a total of four publications about Hauser's mysterious origins and his development.

In 1834 Daumer married Marie Friederike Rose, the sister of Heinrich Rose, the rector of the Nuremberg trade school. The marriage turned out to be very difficult due to lack of money, poor cuisine and jealousy. The couple lived separately more often.

In 1840 Daumer and his brother-in-law founded the 1st German Animal Welfare Association. They received a letter of approval from King Ludwig I of Bavaria.

In 1844 the daughter Ottilie was born.

In 1856 Daumer moved with the family to Frankfurt am Main and in 1860 to Würzburg . He worked there as a private scholar and earned his living with a small pension, little income from his writings and with financial support from his brothers.

On August 15, 1858, Daumer converted to Catholicism.

In November 1874, Daumer suffered a stroke. Gottlieb von Tucher, Nuremberg and the Duchess Marie von Hamilton supported him financially.

Georg Friedrich Daumer died on December 13, 1875 in Würzburg. The words are written on his tombstone in Würzburg

Qui quondam Saul
Pauli vestigia pressit

(“The one who once walked in Paul's footsteps as Saul”).

plant

Georg Friedrich Daumer

Philosophy of religion

Due to his Erlangen experiences, Daumer developed into a sharp critic of Protestant Christianity , especially Pietism .

His early works are based on the influences of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling , Franz von Baader and Jakob Böhme and have a romantic-theosophical character.

With the book Is Cholera Morbus a Judgment of God , published in 1832 ? he first attacked Christianity openly. In it he accused the preachers, who saw God's punishment in the then rampant cholera epidemic , of Old Testament thinking.

With the writing The Fire and Moloch Service of the ancient Hebrews , which was published in 1842, he tried to prove that the original religion of the ancient Hebrews was the Moloch service , which only later turned to more humane forms and still in the old Yahweh image live on. His views culminated in the sentence Jehovah and Moloch were originally one and the same God .

Daumer's main work, The Secrets of Christian Antiquity , appeared in 1847 and is his general accounting for Christianity . He claimed that the Christians had offered child sacrifices well beyond the early days, and accordingly he interpreted the Jesus word let the children come to me . In contrast to the equally anti-Christian philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche , he did not exclude the person of Jesus from his criticism. The basic thesis of his work was that the Christian antiquity was essentially Moloch service with cultic anthropophagy continued for centuries .

Despite all this, Daumer was not an atheist . He described his romanticized worldview as theistic naturalism or, more rarely, as theistic materialism . His work, published under a pseudonym in 1841, The Glory of the Blessed Virgin Mary shows the philosophical contradiction in which he was entangled. The work led to the end of the close friendship with Ludwig Feuerbach . He received strong rejection in 1850 from Karl Marx , who until then was also a partisan of Daumer. The cause of Marx's departure was Daumer's work, The Religion of the New World. Attempt of a combinatorial-aphoristic attitude.

While he turned mainly to poetry in the 1850s, his work is characterized by “a strong inner leaning towards Islam and, in the short term, also from Judaism ”. But to the great surprise of his contemporaries, he converted to Catholicism on the Assumption Day in Mainz Cathedral in 1859 . In his conversion works, Meine Conversion and Die Dreifache Krone Roms , published in the same year , he explained his step with desperation for himself and his fellow men and for time in general. According to this confession, the trigger for his conversion was reading a work by Charles Nodier , a French romantic who believed that man would be replaced by a higher being, whose existence would be not only temporary but permanent - an angel of the future . Daumer believed he recognized Christ in this being .

Although the Catholic Church welcomed his conversion with satisfaction, it distanced itself from Daumer. Catholic publishers did not want to publish his new writings. Daumer had expected the church to be transformed into a reforming religious community. Instead, the worried Syllabus of 1864 with its list of the Curia damn mistakes and beliefs - who was greeted only by the ultra-right clerics - and the proclamation of the infallibility of the pope by the Vatican Council under Pius IX. for disillusionment.

Daumer spent the last years of his life doing occult research on parapsychological phenomena.

Poetry

As a lyricist, Daumer emerged primarily with love poems and translations of oriental poems (including by Hafis ). Along with Friedrich Rückert and August Graf von Platen , he is one of the most important poets in the Arab-Persian poem form of the Ghazel . According to Thomas Bauer, his three oriental poetry collections are among the most successful examples of a "curious and open-minded" reception of the Orient. Over 50 of his poems and translations were set to music by Johannes Brahms , which is why they are known to this day, especially the love song waltzes based on texts from Daumer's Polydora .

Publications

Religious philosophical writings

  • About the course and progress of our spiritual development since the Reformation and about their position in the present time . Nuremberg: Riegel and Wießner, 1826, 32 pp.
  • Prehistory of the human spirit. Fragment of a system of speculative theology with special reference to Schelling's doctrine of the reason in God , Berlin 1827
  • Suggestion of a system of speculative philosophy , Nuremberg 1831
  • Is Cholera Morbus a Judgment of God? Letter to Pastor Kindler of Nuremberg , 1832
  • Philosophy, Religion and Antiquity , 1833
  • On the theft of Egyptian property when the Israelites left Egypt , 1833
  • Polemical papers on Christianity, biblical beliefs and theology. A book for educated readers of all classes , 1834
  • Traits towards a new philosophy of religion and the history of religion, primarily in relation to the Christian ideas of the divine trinity, the primeval procreation of the Son, the cacodemonic principle, apostasy from God, world creation, the incarnation of God, redemption and reconciliation, suffering, Death, the resurrection and transfiguration of the son, the exit of the holy. Spirit of the same, the return of Christ to the millennial kingdom, purgatory, hell and heaven, doomsday and judgment and the future higher world and on the existence and symbolism of this idea in the religions of pre-Christian antiquity , 1835
  • Discovery of a complot against religion and Christianity. Made from Eschenmayer's writing 'Conflict between Heaven and Hell observed on the demon of a possessed girl' , 1837 (under the pseudonym Amadeus Ottokar)
  • Anti-satan. Letter to Professor Eschenmayer regarding his reply to the work 'Discovery of a Complots against Religion and Christianity' , 1838 (under the pseudonym Amadeus Ottokar)
  • Sabbath, Moloch and Tabu , 1839
  • The fire and Moloch service of the ancient Hebrews , printed and published by Fr. Otto, Braunschweig 1842.
  • The anthropologism and criticalism of the present in the maturity of its self-revelation together with ideas for the foundation of a new development in religion and theology , 1844
  • The Voice of Truth in Contemporary Religious and Confessional Struggles , 1845
  • The mysteries of Christian antiquity , 1847
  • The Religion of the New Age , 1850
  • The triple crown of Rome. Attempt to illuminate and characterize the Roman Catholic priesthood and church life in a new light, particularly with regard to its elementary and principled content provisions and their preliminary justification and appearance in pre-Christian times and the world , 1859 ( digitized and full text in the German text archive )
  • My conversion. A piece of soul and contemporary history , 1859
  • From the attic. Polemics, reviews, studies, and poems. A magazine in casual notebooks , 1860–1862
  • Flowers and fruits from the garden of Christian worldview and life development , 1863
  • Christina mirabilis , the miraculous creature of the 12th century, and Saint Joseph von Copertino , the miracle man of the 17th century, as preliminary representatives of a new, future human species , Paderborn 1864
  • Christianity and its originator. With reference to Renan, Schenkel, Strauss, Bauer, Feuerbach, Ruge, Stirner and the entire modern negation , 1864
  • Aphorisms on Death and Immortality , 1865
  • The spirit realm in faith, imagination, legend and reality , 1867
  • The realm of the miraculous and the mysterious. Fact and Theory. With the publication of many as yet unknown apparitions and observations , drawn from reliable sources and accredited by named authorities , 1872
  • The wonder. Its meaning, truth and necessity, presented to Messrs. Strauss, Frohschammer, Lang, Renan, Reinkens, etc. in the light. Along with factual evidence from history and tradition , 1874
  • Max Stirner. The development of German philosophy according to Hegel as an old Adamic self-affirmation and self-disclosure process. Verlag Max-Stirner-Archiv, Leipzig 1999 ISBN 3-933287-28-6 (reprint of a chapter from Christianity and its authors , 1864)

Seals

  • Bettina. Poems from Goethe's correspondence with a child . 1837.
  • The Glory of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Legends and poems based on Spanish, Italian, Latin and German relations and original poetry . 1841. (Under the pseudonym Eusebius Emmeran)
  • Hafez. A collection of Persian poems. Along with poetic additions from different peoples and countries. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1846.
  • Mahomed and his work. A collection of oriental poems . 1848.
  • Images of women and homage . 1853.
  • Polydora. A world poetic songbook . 1855.
  • Marian legends and poems . 1859.
  • Beautiful souls. A bouquet of legends and novels . 1862.

Other fonts

  • Messages about Kaspar Hauser . Edited and introduced by Peter Tradowsky. Unabridged reprint of the first edition published in Nuremberg in 1832. Geering, Dornach 1983, ISBN 3-7235-0359-4 .
  • About cruelty to animals and animal abuse. A conversation published and distributed by the Nuremberg Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals . 1840 (published anonymously).
  • Revelations about Kaspar Hauser . Reprint of the 1859 edition. Kaspar Hauser Verlag, Offenbach am Main 2004, ISBN 3-9806417-7-5 .
  • Kaspar Hauser. His essence, his innocence . Edited and introduced by Peter Tradowsky. Unabridged reprint of the edition published by Coppenrath, Regensburg, in 1873. Geering, Dornach 1984, ISBN 3-7235-0387-X .
  • Kaspar Hauser speaks for himself. Kaspar's own writings . TWT, Whitby 1993, ISBN 1-897839-02-2 .
  • Georg Friedrich Daumer, Anselm von Feuerbach : Kaspar Hauser . With a report by Johannes Mayer and an essay by Jeffrey M. Masson . Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-8218-4129-X .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ernst Höhne: The Bubenreuther. History of a German fraternity. II., Erlangen 1936, p. 32.
  2. ^ Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume II: Artists. Winter, Heidelberg 2018, ISBN 978-3-8253-6813-5 , pp. 125–127.
  3. ↑ a b Thomas Bauer: Abrahm is my little father. A selection from the "Seals of the Orient" by Georg Friedrich Daumer . In: Thomas Bauer, Thorsten Gerald Schneiders: Children of Abraham: Religious Exchange in Living Conflict . Münster 2008, p. 101ff.
  4. ↑ Thomas Bauer, Thorsten Gerald Schneiders: Children of Abraham. Religious exchange in a living context . Münster 2005, p. 103.

Secondary literature

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Daumer, Georg Friedrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dr. Amadeus Ottokar, Eusebius Emmeran
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philosopher, Protestant critic and teacher of Kaspar Hauser
DATE OF BIRTH March 5, 1800
PLACE OF BIRTH Nuremberg
DATE OF DEATH December 13, 1875
Place of death Wurzburg