Karl Friedrich Neumann

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Karl Friedrich Neumann. Graphic by Adolf Neumann .

Karl Friedrich Neumann , also: Carl Friedrich Neumann , born as Isaak Lazarus ( December 28, 1793 in Reichmannsdorf near Bamberg ; died March 17, 1870 in Berlin ) was a German orientalist and sinologist .

Life

Neumann was the son of the poor Jewish trader Lippmann Bamberger. After attending a Jewish school in Fürth , he went to his uncle in Frankfurt am Main at the age of thirteen and worked there as a commercial assistant.

In 1815 he enrolled under the name Julius Lazarus Bamberg at the University of Heidelberg , later he also studied in Munich and finally in Göttingen , where he received his doctorate in 1820. On October 10th, he was baptized as a Protestant in Munich and changed the family name Bamberger to Neumann .

From 1822 to 1825 he was a high school teacher in Speyer , but was dismissed for enlightening ideas. Then he privatized in Munich, then he learned the Armenian language in Venice in the monastery on San Lazzaro . A stay in Paris followed .

In 1829 he became a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences .

China trip

Neumann traveled to London in the spring of 1829 to collect materials for a work on the history of Asia. He came into contact with a captain of the East India Company who was looking for a French teacher. As a non-British citizen, he received, with difficulty, permission to make the upcoming trip to China on the Sir David Scott . Before leaving, he compiled a bibliography of Chinese books from the holdings of the Royal Asiatic Society and the London Missionary Society . The almost five-month journey began on April 17, 1830 and ended with the arrival in Macau on September 8. At the beginning of October he traveled on to Canton , where he stayed in the foreigners' quarter for almost three months before the ship returned.

China was closed before the Opium Wars . Actually, contact with foreigners was only allowed to designated merchants. However, Neumann managed not only to receive Cantonese language lessons , but also to acquire coins, curio and books which, in his opinion, included "the rarest and most valuable works of Chinese literature, ancient and modern."

By bribing the responsible mandarins , he managed to have the 6,000 books he had acquired, which represented a cross-section of the printed Chinese works of the time, declared as “paper”, the export of which was not prohibited. The largest European book collection of Chinese works at the time - that of the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale - comprised only 5,000 titles. On May 24, 1831, his ship docked again in England.

In August 1829, after the intercession of a senior librarian of the royal Prussian library , he received 1,500 Reichstaler from the Prussian minister of education, Karl Siegmund Franz von Altenstein, for the purchase of Sinica. On his return he tried to sell all books he had bought to the library. In 1832, however, it only took over 2,410 titles, which corresponded to the amount advanced. Neumann retained a buyback right.

Munich

He offered the remaining 3500 works in Munich, where they were finally acquired for the Bavarian state after tough negotiations and intervention by King Ludwig I. This acquisition was not made for money, however, but in exchange for Neumann's appointment as curator for the Chinese collection of the Bavarian court library and the professorship for "History of literature, Armenian and Chinese ..." at the University of Munich . Neumann had already demonstrated his qualification as a sinologist in Munich in 1829 by compiling a catalog of the Chinese writings in the court library.

Neumann had to resign from his professorship in 1852 because of his participation in the revolution of 1848. He held the position of curator until 1863 when he moved to Berlin . There he wrote several historical works until his death in 1870. Neumann's grave is on Munich's Altes Südfriedhof .

Works

  • Rerum Criticarum Specimen . Goettingen 1820.
  • Mémoire sur la Vie et les Ouvrages de David, Philosopher Arménien . Paris 1829.
  • History of Vartan, by Elisæus. London 1830.
  • Vahram's Chronicle of the Armenian Kingdom in Cilicia. London 1830.
  • History of the Pirates Who Infested the Chinese Seas from 1807 to 1810. London 1831.
  • Pilgrimages of Buddhist priests from China to India. Leipzig 1833.
  • History of Armenian Literature (Leipzig 1836)
  • Asian studies . Leipzig 1837.
  • The peoples of southern Russia (award document awarded by the Institut de France) Leipzig 1847; 2nd edition Leipzig 1855 ( online )
  • History of the Anglo-Chinese War (Leipzig 1846, 2nd edition 1855)
  • History of the Afghans (Leipzig 1846)
  • The tragedy in Afghanistan. In: Friedrich von Raumer (Ed.): Historical paperback new series, ninth year , Brockhaus Verlag, Leipzig 1848, pp. 449-570.
  • History of the English Empire in Asia (Leipzig 1857, two volumes)
  • East Asian History from the First Chinese War to the Treaties in Beijing (Leipzig 1861)
  • History of the United States of America (Berlin 1863–66, three volumes)

In addition, he published Karl Gützlaff's History of the Chinese Empire (Stuttgart 1847) and provided translations from Armenian and Chinese. The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (London 1871) contained a comprehensive list of his work .

literature

  • Julius Jolly:  Neumann, Friedrich . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 23, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1886, p. 529 f.
  • Hartmut Walravens : Karl Friedrich Neumann (1793-1870) and Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff (1803-1851). Two German experts in China in the 19th century. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2001, ISBN 3-447-04392-X .
  • Ingrid Rückert: "The rarest and most precious works of Chinese literature". Karl Friedrich Neumann as the founder of the Chinese book collection at the Bavarian State Library. In: Saeculum 60 / I (2010), pp. 115–142.
  • Yan Xu-Lackner (ed.): The books of the last empire: Catalog for the exhibition about the life of the China researcher Karl Friedrich Neumann with exhibits from his collection of rare Sinica. FAU University Press, Erlangen 2012, ISBN 978-3-944057-00-2 . Full text (PDF; 5.2 MB)
  • Mechthild Leutner : From classical texts to the language of the present: Karl Friedrich Neumann's encounter with China. In: Dies., Dagmar Yu-Dembski (Ed.): Three Hundred Years of Chinese in Germany: Approaching a Distant Land . LIT Verlag, Münster, 2013, ISBN 978-3-643-12385-5 , pp. 31-64.
  • Neumann, Karl Friedrich. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 17: Meid – Phil. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. De Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-22697-7 , pp. 316-320.

Web links

Commons : Karl Friedrich Neumann  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Members of the previous academies. Karl Friedrich Neumann. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences , accessed on February 17, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Neumann, Karl Friedrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Neumann, Carl Friedrich; Lazarus, Isaak (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German orientalist and sinologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 28, 1793
PLACE OF BIRTH Reichmannsdorf near Bamberg
DATE OF DEATH March 17, 1870
Place of death Berlin