Gustav Adolf Bilfinger

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Gustav Adolf Bilfinger (born March 6, 1840 in Alsace ; † March 29, 1914 in Stuttgart ) was a German historian , pedagogue and chronologist .

Life

Gustav Adolf Bilfinger was born as the second son of a Swabian civil servant family. His father, Hermann Bilfinger, was currently employed as a hut manager in Alsace. At the age of six he moved with the family to Stuttgart, where his father was appointed to the Bergrat .

In 1854, the students led the passed state examination in the seminary in Urach . From there, in 1858, he went to the Evangelical Monastery in Tübingen and then to the university there to study Protestant theology . In this way, the offspring has been recruited for a career as a civil servant in administration , school and church for many generations in Württemberg .

Gustav Bilfinger has enriched the compulsory theological and philosophical studies and, after passing the theological exam, deepened them by studying philology and the French language . His goal was not the pastor's office , but teaching . For example, he made a name for himself in the school service, did his doctorate and passed the professorial examination.

In 1876 he got a permanent job at the Stuttgart Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium . His subjects were Latin and Greek , as well as the recently separated from the classic reading ancient history . His delight in the ancient languages ​​is well known. The language skills required for studying theology, his great knowledge of literature, which spanned from antiquity to the Middle Ages , his good memory and the joy of mathematical and technical contexts made Gustav Bilfinger a high-ranking scholar and a very good teacher.

Bilfinger itself didn't have it easy. He suffered from a handicap that severely restricted intellectual work such as reading and writing. When he was nineteen, during his student days, his right eye was shot out in an accident during target practice. With increasing age he then felt a rapid decrease in vision in the remaining left eye, so that in 1903, at the age of 63, he had to give up his work at the grammar school. He died in Stuttgart on March 29, 1914 at the age of 74.

Services

About his work, which was probably inspired by dealing with cultural contexts from antiquity to modern times, and which was relevant for his teaching, but which found its literary expression only through intensive work in his extracurricular activities.

We can distinguish three periods of time in his spiritual work.

  • from 1882: horological studies (chronology)
  • from 1892: Old Norse studies
  • from 1902: Studies on popular beliefs and customs

It is not clear how Gustav Bilfinger came into the field of chronological studies. The thorough researcher and scholar must have noticed the different results in the efforts of his contemporaries to process the two volumes of Christian Ludwig Ideler's "Handbuch der Technische und Mathematischen Chronologie" published in 1825 and 1826 .

Due to his visual impairment, hardly any publications from his later years are known.

Fonts

 The Babylonian Double Lesson
 The ancient hours ; On-line

literature

  • Hermann Kretschmer: Gustav Bilfinger . Kohlhammer Publishing House, Stuttgart 1914

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rudolf Schmid: With Gustav Bilfinger on the traces of the time measurement of the ancient peoples , DGC lecture documents, Stuttgart 1990.
personal data
SURNAME Bilfinger, Gustav Adolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian, educator and chronologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 6, 1840
PLACE OF BIRTH Alsace
DATE OF DEATH March 29, 1914
Place of death Stuttgart