Josef Hofmiller
Josef Max Maria Hofmiller (born April 26, 1872 in Kranzegg near Sonthofen , † October 11, 1933 in Rosenheim ) was a German essayist, critic, translator and high school teacher.
Life
School and study
Josef Hofmiller was born as the son of a teacher in the Allgäu , attended grammar schools in Scheyern and Freising and graduated from the Wilhelmsgymnasium in Munich in 1890 . He read the writings of the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche at an early age . He first studied theology and philosophy, then German and modern philology at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , where he passed the state examination as a grammar school teacher for French in 1894 and in English in 1896. In 1902 he received his doctorate as Dr. phil. ( Ben Jonson 's first six masks in their relationship to ancient literature ).
Career as a teacher
In 1894 he became a prefect and secondary school assistant. Afterwards Hofmiller was a realteacher in Freising, from 1903 at the Luitpold-Kreisrealschule Munich , 1907 high school professor in Freising, 1912–1921 in Munich ( Ludwigsgymnasium ), from 1922 vice rector at the humanistic high school in Rosenheim . He turned down appointments as a critic in Berlin and as a professor of Romance studies in Cologne .
Activity as a writer
- Hofmiller wrote essays, music, theater and literary reviews (partly as a permanent contributor) in newspapers and magazines such as Münchner Allgemeine Zeitung , Münchner Neue Nachrichten , Die Zukunft , Der Kunstwart
- He was a co-founder and editor of the Süddeutsche monthly magazine .
- He worked as an editor of anthologies of German and foreign language poetry
- In the books of education and the most beautiful stories of the Langen publishing house , he published 16 individual volumes.
- He worked on the Altöttingen homeland books
- He wrote translations from French and English, as well
- Letters, educational, historical and political treatises and much more
Hofmiller as a Nietzsche researcher
Josef Hofmiller has a certain significance for the early history of the Nietzsche archive and for the German-speaking Nietzsche reception .
On the one hand, he was in correspondence and personal contact with Heinrich Köselitz from 1894 , then with Fritz Koegel, the editor employed at the Nietzsche Archive , and with Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche from 1895 ; In 1904 an exchange of letters began with Ernst Holzer , a respected scholar who worked for a time on the Nietzsche archive. These correspondence in particular are today a valuable source of information on the early history of the Nietzsche Archive. Hofmiller received excerpts from Koegel himself from the "Koegel excerpts", which he advocated in 1909 to be authentic. Ernst Holzer informed Hofmiller about events in the archive and spoke openly about Förster-Nietzsche's forgeries and their character and intellectual deficiencies. Hofmiller's estate came to the Basel University Library through the mediation of the critical Nietzsche researcher Erich Podach and was used by Podach in his Nietzsche writings. Hofmiller can thus be assigned to the wider area of the “Basel tradition” of Nietzsche research.
On the other hand, some of Hofmiller's own writings, especially a long essay from 1931, are of importance for Nietzsche's reception.
Hofmiller had participated in discussions about Nietzsche between 1895 and 1909 with reviews and essays. At first he emphatically praised the work of the archive and Förster-Nietzsche, but after the first arguments in the archive he kept his distance without breaking the polite contact with Förster-Nietzsche. In 1909 he finally used a discussion of the correspondence just published by the archive between Nietzsche and his mother and sister to fundamentally criticize the work of the archive. After that he was silent - apart from a rather unimportant article in 1919 - about Nietzsche until 1931.
In 1931 he published a long essay in a special issue of the Süddeutsche Monatshefte , in which he subjected not only the Nietzsche archive but also Nietzsche himself to sharp criticism. He rejected all the “main terms” usually highlighted in Nietzsche's philosophy ( eternal return , superman , will to power , master morality and slave morality, Apollonian and Dionysian) and after a lengthy analysis came to the conclusion that Nietzsche's late philosophy was only against the background of one of these long-standing latent mental illness is understood. Despite all the criticism, he showed a deep connection with Nietzsche. In the same year Hofmiller had another controversy with Alfred Baeumler , who had appeared as the editor of a new Nietzsche edition.
The essay caused quite a stir because it made known two of the previously suppressed passages in The Antichrist - they were communicated to Hofmiller by Köselitz in 1894. Kurt Tucholsky mentioned Hofmiller's essay with praise, although he thought neither of the Süddeutsche Monatshefte nor of Hofmiller because of its political right- wing orientation.
The concise closing words of his essay became well known:
-
What remains of Nietzsche then? There remains enough. It remains more and more valuable than a system that never was.
- It remains the critic and diagnostician of the time. The moralist remains, not in German but in French: the miniaturist and outsider of philosophy, the aphorist. The three middle works will stay the longest: “Human, All Too Human”, “Dawn”, “The Happy Science”. What will remain is les plus belles pages, as the French call their fine selections. Details will remain: observations, ideas, thoughts, moods, maxims and reflections, insofar and because they are independent of his supposed system. The artist will stay, the poet will stay.
Works
A detailed literature list with works by and about Hofmiller can be found in the biography, written by H. Werner. Many of his works were only published in book form by his widow Hulda Hofmiller after his death. She dedicated the revolution diary to the "young Greater Germany".
Selection of individual titles:
- Revolution diary 1918/19 from the days of the Munich revolution. Digitized
- Selected letters
- tries
- Last attempts
- Contemporaries
- Benefactor of humanity
- Paths to Goethe
- Fontane's art of living
- Old Bavarian legends
- Bayernbüchlein
- The king travels through his Bavaria (1925)
- South of the Main
- Of poets, painters and inns
- Hiking pictures and pilgrimages
- Three essays on school reform
- From the old high school
- Form is everything. Aphorisms on literature and art
- On dealing with books, A. Langen, Munich (1927)
- Chansons d'amour
- Contes de ma mère l'oie
- French essays
- Manon Lescaut
- Ballads and songs of love
- Sonnets
Political stance
Josef Hofmiller signed the appeal of October 2, 1917 to found the Bavarian regional association of the right-wing extremist and proto-fascist German Fatherland Party (DVLP), which campaigned for an uncompromising victory peace for the German Empire and the annexation of Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the Baltic provinces during the First World War as well as parts of France, Poland, Ukraine and Belarus.
Others
The Josef-Hofmiller-Gymnasium in Freising was named after him.
literature
- Manfred Dehn: Hofmiller, Josef. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 9, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1972, ISBN 3-428-00190-7 , p. 471 ( digitized version ).
- David Marc Hoffmann: On the history of the Nietzsche archive. de Gruyter, Berlin and New York 1991, ISBN 3-11-013014-9 . In it: Josef Hofmiller as a Nietzsche researcher (1893–1933) , pp. 286–336.
Web links
- Literature by and about Josef Hofmiller in the catalog of the German National Library
- Josef Hofmiller's estate in the Basel University Library
- Works by Josef Hofmiller in the Gutenberg-DE project
- Photo in the SZ from February 20, 2019
Individual evidence
- ^ Annual report from the K. Wilhelms-Gymnasium in Munich. ZDB ID 12448436 , 1889/90
- ↑ Biography at the Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS) of the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich ( Memento of the original from September 2, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Biography on the website of the Josef Hofmiller Gymnasium in Freising with links to a detailed biography of Harald Werner, Heimaten des Geistes. Reminder of Josef Hofmiller, 1997 ( Memento of the original from October 9, 2007 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. PDF file
- ↑ One passage had already been "revealed" by Rudolf Steiner in 1924 , but the general public took no notice: cf. Hoffmann, pp. 493-495.
- ↑ Kurt Tucholsky [as Ignaz Wrobel]: Fräulein Nietzsche in Die Weltbühne , No. 2/1932, January 12, 1932, pp. 54ff. Internet ; he cites the Süddeutsche Monatshefte “only with extreme overcoming” ; zu Hofmiller: "Once a good European, today a good Bavarian".
- ^ Quoted with approval by Erich Podach in Ein Blick in Notebooks Nietzsches , Heidelberg 1963, p. 10f .; rejected by Alfred Baeumler in his epilogue to Der Wille zur Macht , Kröner-Taschenausgabe 1964, p. 711 f.
- ↑ Hofmiller, Josef: Nietzsche in: Süddeutsche Monatshefte , 29th year, issue 2 (November 1931), p. 131.
- ↑ Literature list as PDF file ( Memento of the original from October 9, 2007 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.
- ^ German Fatherland Party (DVLP), 1917/18 - Historisches Lexikon Bayerns. Accessed December 30, 2018 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hofmiller, Josef |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Hofmiller, Josef Max Maria (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German essayist, critic, translator and high school teacher |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 26, 1872 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Kranzegg in the Allgäu |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 11, 1933 |
| Place of death | Rosenheim |