Johann Kaspar Steube

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Johann Kaspar Steube (born January 25, 1747 in Gotha , † April 12, 1795 in Stedtfeld , today a district of Eisenach in Thuringia ) was a German shoemaker, soldier, language teacher and writer.

Life

Johann Kaspar Steube was the son of a butcher. Since his father left the family at an early age , emigrated to Ceylon, today's Sri Lanka , and died there, Steube lived with his mother in poor circumstances and began an apprenticeship as a shoemaker .

As a sailor to Malaya

Malacka on the Malaya Peninsula in the 18th century

On his journeyman hike in Stralsund , which at that time belonged to the Kingdom of Sweden , he did Swedish military service. Steube initially served as a corporal and later as a non-commissioned officer in the Queen's body regiment . When he seriously wounded an opponent in a duel, he fled to the United Netherlands and went on a nineteen- month voyage via Morocco to Malacca on the Malay Peninsula as a bottelier ( steward ) for a warship .

On his return he first traveled to the Netherlands, hired a merchant ship and came to Livorno on the Tuscan coast. There he first worked as a shoemaker, learned Italian and visited Rome and Florence . He worked as a valet in Florence and joined the imperial army as a Fourier in Cremona .

Soldier and innkeeper in the Banat

The Turkish-Austrian border area around Orșova in the 18th century

When he fell ill with gout after two years , he was transferred as a semi-invalid to the area of ​​the Banat Military Frontier , a section of the Habsburg military frontier that lay in what is now Romania , Serbia and Hungary . There he served in the garrison of the border town of Schuppaneck in the valley of the Cerna , near the city of Orșova . The Cerna formed the eastern border between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire . The place Schuppaneck ( Romanian Jupalnic ) was flooded by the reservoir in the 1960s when the Danube power station Iron Gate was built .

After a few years he said goodbye to military service to support a soldier's widow in running an inn in Timişoara, today Timişoara in western Romania. When the woman died after 21 months, he took over the position of translator, tutor and accountant.

At the end of 1781 he traveled to Vienna in the hope of finding a secure job. There he experienced the festivities around the visit of Pope Pius VI in March and April 1782 . His efforts to find a job in Vienna were unsuccessful, and on the advice of his older brother, the court gardener of the abbess of Steterburg monastery , Steube returned to his home town of Gotha in June 1782. There he married the daughter of his former teacher and settled down as a shoemaker.

Schumacher and teacher in Thuringia

In Gotha, Steube began to give lessons in Italian and translated the then much-read “ Noth- und Helfsbüchlein ” by the Enlightener Rudolph Zacharias Becker (1752–1822) into Italian, but found it despite the support of the Weimar court advisor and librarian Christian Joseph Jagemann (1735– 1804) no publisher. After he had offered himself as an interpreter, valet and travel companion in vain, he switched to trading in fur boots, which he bought in Leipzig and sold at the Frankfurt and Kassel trade fairs .

At that time Steube wrote his autobiography and published it in 1791 under the title “ Wanderings and fates of Johann Caspar S. ” at his own expense. The modest wish to be able to “buy a mediocre little house and a few pieces of land” with the yield was not fulfilled. The “ wanderings ” remained a financial failure.

In the autumn of 1791 Steube was appointed to the Reinhardt School of Education in Stedtfeld near Eisenach, where he taught young Englishmen in Italian. A year later, Christian Gotthilf Salzmann (1744–1811) appointed him “language master” and shoemaker of his philanthropic educational institution, today's Salzmannschule in Schnepfenthal , today a district of Waltershausen in Thuringia . Steube returned to Stedtfeld after only six months and wrote the letters from the Banat there , which he also self-published in 1793. This work also became an economic failure from which Steube could no longer recover.

One last trip took him to England to accompany a sick student back home. He stayed in London for six months and there came up with the plan to publish his journeys in English translation. He had already found a publisher and had started translating when he got home when he fell ill and died on April 12, 1795. Johann Kaspar Steube left his widow and four children.

Works

  • Wanderings and fates: From Amsterdam to Temiswar . Ettinger, Gotha 1791
  • Letters about the Banat . Wittekindt, Eisenach 1793

literature

  • August Beck : Ernst the Second, Duke of Saxe-Gotha and Altenburg . Perthes, Gotha 1854, p. 145
  • Françoise Knopper, Wolfgang Fink: The natural prose writers Johann Kaspar Steube and Johann Christoph Sachse . In: Offside as a center. Autobiographies of outsiders in the 18th century . Universitätsverlag, Halle-Wittenberg 2017, pp. 359–386.
  • Johann Georg Meusel : Lexicon of the German writers who died from 1750 to 1800 . Volume 13. Leipzig 1813, pp. 376-377
  • Alfred Opitz: A shoemaker at the “writer's theater”, wanderlust - wanderlust: Forms of spatial and social experience between the Enlightenment and early industrialization . In: Hallesche Contributions to the European Enlightenment , Volume 11. ISBN 3-484-81011-4 , pp. 13–24
  • Friedrich von Schlichtegroll : Nekrolog for the year 1795 . 6th year, Volume 1, Gotha 1797, pp. 350–371
  • Albert Schumann :  Steube, Johann Kaspar . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 36, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1893, pp. 140-142.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Opitz, p. 16
personal data
SURNAME Steube, Johann Kaspar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German shoemaker, soldier, language teacher and writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 25, 1747
PLACE OF BIRTH Gotha
DATE OF DEATH April 12, 1795
Place of death City field