Johann Friedrich Unger (publisher)

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Johann Friedrich Gottlieb Unger (* August 1753 in Berlin ; † December 26, 1804 there ) was a German printer , typographer and wood cutter.

Life

Unger was the fifth son of the Berlin woodcutter Johann Georg Unger (1715–1788) and his wife Susanna Katharina (nee Strucken). He did an apprenticeship in the print shop of the Oberhof book printer Georg Jacob Decker . In 1779, Unger applied for the privilege to set up his own printing press, which he was granted in January 1780. He later expanded the print shop to include a publishing bookstore, in which he published works by Johann Wolfgang Goethe , Friedrich Schiller , Friedrich Schleiermacher and August and Friedrich Schlegel , among others .

From 1784 he tried repeatedly to get permission to publish a newspaper that was to be the first in Berlin to appear daily. The applications were rejected because the two existing Berlin newspapers (the Vossische Zeitung and the Haude & Spenerschen Berlinische Nachrichten ) were found to be sufficient and overseeing another newspaper would overload the censor. In 1802, however, Unger became a co-owner of the Vossische Zeitung.

In 1788 Unger was appointed academic bookseller and was thereby the publisher of all of the Academy's publications . In 1794 he also leased the academy privilege to print and distribute all Prussian calendars.

In 1790 Unger was elected a member of the Academy of Arts ; from 1800 he occupied the professorship for woodcutting created for him there.

Detail from Unger's book Something about the book trade, printing and printing outside the country , Berlin 1788, an early example of printing in Antiqua in Germany
Example of the Unger fracture from 1794

Unger also took part in the attempts to popularize the new antiqua typefaces by purchasing the German license for Didot from Firmin Didot in 1789 . Since the public still preferred the Fraktur typeface , he began developing a modernized Fraktur type as early as 1789 with the help of Didot and Johann Christoph Gubitz (1754–1826), for which he established his own type foundry in 1791. The finished typeface, the Unger Fraktur , was introduced in 1794 and was intended to help "remove the many angular elements from the common ones , and the Krause, Gothic frills from the large letters ".

The influential Don Quixote translation by Ludwig Tieck , which appeared in Berlin between 1799 and 1801 , also goes back to Unger's initiative . At first Unger offered the work to the Schlegel brothers, but they passed the order on to Tieck.

In 1798 Unger began to set up his own sheet music foundry.

From 1785 he was married to the writer Friederike Helene Unger (born von Rothenburg; 1751-1813), who had already achieved fame in 1784 with her novel "Julchen Grünthal". She continued to run the publishing house after his death, albeit with less success, so that it went bankrupt in 1811.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Unger's biography ( Memento of the original from February 26, 2014 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. at the BBAW  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.berliner-klassik.de
  2. ^ Johann Friedrich Unger: Sample of a new kind of German letters . 1793 ( online ).
  3. ↑ Cf. Werner Brüggemann: Cervantes and the figure of Don Quixote in the view of art and poetry of the German Romanticism. Aschendorffsche Verlag Buchhandlung, 1958.

literature

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personal data
SURNAME Unger, Johann Friedrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Unger, Johann Friedrich Gottlieb (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German printer and typographer
DATE OF BIRTH August 1753
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH December 26, 1804
Place of death Berlin