Karl Philipp Moritz

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Karl Philipp Moritz, painting by Karl Franz Jacob Heinrich Schumann, 1791, Gleimhaus HalberstadtKarl Philipp Moritz (signature) .jpg

Karl Philipp Moritz (born September 15, 1756 in Hameln , † June 26, 1793 in Berlin ) was a versatile writer of the Sturm und Drang , the Berlin Enlightenment , the Berlin and Weimar Classics , who also gave impulses to the early romantic period . He had an eventful life as a hatter's apprentice , actor, court master , teacher, editor, writer, late enlightener , philosopher and art theorist.

Life

Moritz on an engraving by H. Sintzenich, 1793

Moritz grew up in poor conditions characterized by quietism and pietism . His father was a military musician and religious supporter of the Hayner lord of the castle Johann Friedrich von Fleischbein , a student and translator of the radical quietist Charles Hector de Saint George Marquis de Marsay . Moritz broke off an apprenticeship as a hat maker in Braunschweig with one of his father's brothers in faith because of intolerable treatment. His confirmation pastor discovered his talent and enabled him, with the help of a benefactor, to attend the Ratsgymnasium in Hanover from 1771 . Moritz's apprenticeship and school days are treated with unprecedented ruthlessness in the autobiographical psychological novel Anton Reiser . After several unsuccessful attempts to become an actor - he was still enrolled as a theology student in Erfurt in 1776 - Moritz became a teacher at the Berlinisches Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster in 1778 through the position of information provider at the Potsdam military orphanage , where he became a grammar school teacher in 1784. A Freemason since 1779 , Moritz had contact with the leading Berlin Enlightenmentists .

He cultivated friendships with Goethe , who saw him as a younger brother , Moses Mendelssohn and Asmus Jakob Carstens . Goethe and Moritz met and came to appreciate each other in Rome in November 1786. On his return trip to Berlin at the end of 1788, Moritz therefore also stopped in Weimar , where he taught Duke Carl August in English . Thereupon he campaigned for the poet to get a professorship in theory of fine arts at the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1789 . His students include Ludwig Tieck , Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Alexander von Humboldt . He was a great admirer of Jean Paul . In 1791 Moritz was admitted to the Prussian Academy of Sciences and appointed Prussian Councilor . On August 5, 1792, after a short engagement period, he married Christiane Friederike Matzdorff, then 15 years old. In December the divorce took place because of infidelity of the wife after a kidnapping by a former lover, in May 1793 they remarried. Moritz died shortly afterwards of pulmonary edema , the result of an illness he had suffered from since his youth. His wife had cared for him devotedly, got infected and died shortly afterwards.

In addition to the novels Anton Reiser and Andreas Hartknopf , the Enlightenment also wrote a number of theoretical writings on aesthetics, such as on the visual imitation of the beautiful . The magazine for empirical soul studies he founded in 1783 as a reading book for scholars and ignoramuses can be seen as an early psychological magazine.

Individual works

Blunt or the Guest (Drama)

The drama, which is largely forgotten today, was first printed in the literary and theater newspaper in 1780, and was published as a revised book edition in 1781, represents a swan song for the Sturm und Drang period. Moritz was inspired by George Lillo's play Fatal Curiosity (London 1736 ). Like this play, Moritz's drama is about an economically distressed and socially relegated couple who, out of delusional envy, rob and murder a wealthy stranger who seems to be present by chance. It turns out that this is her missing son after a shipwreck, who came to marry his uncle's daughter. In disregard of all poetological rules, an alternative harmonizing ending is attached to the first edition, which could express the murderer's wish for forgiveness by the son - the "guest" of this broken nuclear family.

Anton Reiser (in four parts)

Berlin memorial plaque in Münzstrasse 7-11 in Berlin-Mitte

The novel describes the life of Anton Reiser and his striving to become an actor. In addition, the work is a description and commentary on the development and failure of the main character Anton Reiser. The novel is one of the first psychological novels in German.

Aesthetic fonts

The aesthetic writings include the essay Attempt to unite all the fine arts and sciences under the concept of the self-perfected , which appeared in the Berlin Monthly Bulletin of March 1785 as an open letter to Moses Mendelssohn , the Manifesto on the visual imitation of the Beautiful , as well as the treatises To what extent works of art can be described and preliminary terms for a theory of ornament . With his aesthetic writings, Moritz became the founder of the Weimar autonomy aesthetic.

About the creative imitation of the beautiful

In the third part of the "visual imitation of the beautiful" Moritz presents his idea of ​​natural development. It can be described as a teleological process of perfecting matter. In a “ladder of organizational forms”, the “unorganized matter” rises first to the plants, these themselves to the animals and finally to the people. This process does not proceed “voluntarily”, every lower form of the life organization is transferred to the next higher one, in that it is dissolved in its individual form, but essentially transformed into the higher-level organization.

This process of natural development is based on the "energy" that is created through destruction. It is also present in humans and manifests itself in two ways: on the one hand as an educational power, on the other hand as a sensory power. The drive always strives towards the whole and therefore strives to take up subordinate forms of organization or to destroy forms of organization of equal rank.

In humans, the "process of refinement" only stops physically. With his spirit he has to beautify reality and thus achieve the real beauty , the goal of natural and human history.

The artistic production process is seen as analogous to natural development. In the productive artist, educational and emotional powers unite in the highest harmony . Opposite him, the creative genius , is the dilettante . The distinction between genius and dilettante is a central one in the art considerations of the Weimar Classic : In the dilettante, the educational power is too little developed. At best he can - promoted by the power of feeling - enjoy art, and Moritz urgently warns against trying to create art as a dilettante. Because dilettantism sees the work of art primarily as an object of enjoyment and only those who put aside this self-interest (creating art in order to be able to enjoy it) can really enjoy the beautiful. Otherwise "he only has to suffer from the beautiful as a perfection that is out of his reach."

The genius, on the other hand, is able to sense the beauty of nature and then imitate it and thus create the art-beautiful. The artistic process is also shaped by and based on destruction. The artist only achieves art beauty through destruction, which expresses itself specifically as the dissolution of reality. He destroys the reality of experience and transfers it transformed into the appearance of his work. Thus the essence of reality appears in appearance, in the deception of art, which is a reflection of the real beauty.

The artist also has to atone for the destruction in his educational work, in the form that he has to forego any enjoyment in his creative activity, but at the same time is driven more and more to educational activity. Moritz justifies the autonomy of art through the energy that is always directed towards the whole, which creates the beautiful as an "afterimage of the great whole of nature". As such an afterimage, which has arisen through the destruction and regeneration of the reality of experience, art does not point back to the artist and the reality in which it was created, and therefore, although it has an inner purposefulness, it also “does not need any relationships to have something outside of oneself ”.

Works

There are various full-text collections of Moritz 'works on the Internet, including Zeno.org and Projekt Gutenberg-DE . Also:

  • Contributions to the philosophy of life from the diary of a freemason , 1780 ( full text on Google books)
  • Blunt or the guest. Drama, 1780
  • A German travels to England in 1782. In letters to Director Gedike . Berlin, Friedrich Maurer 1783.
  • Experiential soul magazine as a reading book for the learned and the ignorant. 1783–1793 ( digitized and full text in the German text archive ), ( full text and digitized from the Bielefeld University Library)
  • Ideal of a perfect newspaper. 1784 ( full text in the Bibliotheca Augustana)
  • Anton Reiser ,
  • Andreas Hartknopf . An allegory , 1785
  • About the concept of what is complete in itself. Essay, 1785
  • Memories, Recorded for the Promotion of the Noble and the Beautiful , 1786
  • Attempt at a German prosody , treatise, 1786
  • An attempt at a little practical children's logic , 1786
  • The noblest in nature essay, 1786
  • Fragments from the diary of a ghost seer , 1787
  • About the visual imitation of the beautiful , 1788, digitized and full text in the German text archive , full text in the Bibliotheca Augustana
  • Italy and Germany , 1789
  • Monthly publication of the Academy of Arts and Mechanical Sciences in Berlin , 1789
  • About a pamphlet by Herr Schulrath Campe, and about the rights of the writer and bookseller , 1789
  • Andreas Hartknopf's years of preaching , 1790
  • New ABC book. Full text , 1790
  • Annals of the Academy of Arts and Mechanical Sciences , 1791
  • Anthusa or Rome's Antiquities , 1791
  • Doctrine of gods or mythological poems of the ancients , 1791. Digitized and full text in the German text archive
  • Basic lines for my lectures on style , 1791
  • Italian language teaching for the Germans , 1791
  • On the Simplification of Human Knowledge , 1791
  • Reading book for children , 1792
  • Mythological almanac for women , 1792
  • Travels of a German in Italy in the years 1786 to 1788 , volumes 1 & 2: 1792, volume 3: 1793
  • From the correct German expression , 1792
  • General German letter holder , 1793
  • The great lodge or the Freemason with scales and plumb bob , 1793
  • Grammatical Dictionary 4 Vols. 1793–1800
  • Mythological Dictionary for School Use , 1793
  • Preliminary terms for a theory of ornamentation , 1793 digitized SLUB Dresden
  • Lectures on Style (Part 1), 1793
  • The new Cecilia , (1793, fragment)
  • Little practical children's logic, which is partly written for teachers and thinkers. 1815 ( digitized version of the Vienna University Library ).

literature

  • Alo Allkemper: Aesthetic Solutions. Studies on Karl Philipp Moritz. Munich 1990.
  • Kim Apel: Sermons in literature: homiletic explorations with Karl Philipp Moritz. Practical theology in the past and present. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2009.
  • Cord-Friedrich Berghahn: The risk of autonomy. Studies on Karl Philipp Moritz, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Heinrich Gentz, Friedrich Gilly and Ludwig Tieck. Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2012, ISBN 978-3-8253-5988-1
  • Jörg Bong : "The dissolution of disharmonies". To convey society, nature and aesthetics in Karl Philipp Moritz's writings (= analyzes and documents. Volume 32). Peter Lang, Frankfurt et al. 1993, ISBN 3-631-46150-X .
  • Alessandro Costazza: Beauty and Usefulness. Karl Philipp Moritz and the aesthetics of the 18th century. Bern / Berlin 1996.
  • Alessandro Costazza: Genius and Tragic Art. Karl Philipp Moritz and the aesthetics of the 18th century. Bern / Berlin 1999 ( review ).
  • Andrew Cusack: The Biographical Imagination in Moritz's Anton Reiser: A Chronotopic Reading. In: Orbis Litterarum. Volume 70, 2015, pp. 234-262.
  • Jutta Eckle: 'He's like a younger brother of mine'. Studies on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's' Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung 'and Karl Philipp Moritz' 'Anton Reiser'. Würzburg 2002, ISBN 3-8260-2458-3 .
  • Martin Fontius , Anneliese Klingenberg (ed.): Karl Philipp Moritz and the 18th century. Niemeyer, Tübingen 1995, ISBN 3-484-10724-3 .
  • Cristina Fossaluzza: Subjective anti-subjectivism. Karl Philipp Moritz as a diagnostician of his time. Wehrhahn, Laatzen, ISBN 3-86525-036-X .
  • Hans-Edwin Friedrich: "The innermost depth of destruction". The dialectic of destruction and education in the work of Karl Philipp Moritz. In: Karl Eibl (ed.): The other side of the beautiful. Meiner, Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-7873-1186-6 , pp. 69-90.
  • Ludwig Geiger :  Moritz, Carl Philipp . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 22, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1885, pp. 308-320.
  • Hans Henning : Karl Philipp Moritz. A contribution to the history of the Goethean age . Löffler, 1908.
  • Alexander Košenina : Literary experiments on the way to the psychological novel. Wallstein, Göttingen 2006; again: Wehrhahn, Hannover 2009, ISBN 978-3-86525-135-0 .
  • Leonardo Lotito: La bellezza tautosemica. Riflessioni sul simbolo e sull'allegoria a partire dall'opera di K. Ph. Moritz. Milan 2009.
  • Albert Meier : Karl Philipp Moritz. Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-15-017620-4 .
  • Albert Meier:  Moritz, Carl Philipp. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-428-00199-0 , pp. 149-152 ( digitized version ).
  • Lothar Müller : The sick soul and the light of knowledge. Karl Philipp Moritz 'Anton Reiser. Athenaeum, Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-610-08913-X .
  • Lothar Müller (Ed.): The Karl Philipp Moritz ABC. Stimulation of language, thought and human knowledge. Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 978-3-8218-0777-5 .
  • Petra Nettelbeck , Uwe Nettelbeck : The comment. In: The Republic. Maransin 2006, ISSN  0724-1461 , issue 120-122.
  • Clara Pacquet: Signature et achevé en soi. Esthétique, psychologie et anthropologie dans l'œuvre de Karl Philipp Moritz. Les presses du réel, Dijon 2017, ISBN 978-2-84066-913-5 .
  • Katja Petersen: "Because there can be no greater quale than a complete emptiness of the soul." Karl Philipp Moritz 'magazine on experiential soul studies as an educational medium for adults in the late 18th century. Klinkhardt, 2013, ISBN 978-3-7815-1926-8 .
  • Norbert W. Schlinkert : The self-illuminating consciousness as poetic self. From Adam Bernd to Karl Philipp Moritz, from Jean Paul to Sören Kierkegaard . A hermeneutical-phenomenological investigation. Wehrhahn, Hannover 2011, ISBN 978-3-86525-152-7 , especially pp. 105–162.
  • Hans Joachim Schrimpf: Karl Philipp Moritz (= realities on literature. Metzler collection. Volume 195). Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-476-10195-9 .
  • Ute Tintemann, Christof Wingertszahn: Karl Philipp Moritz in Berlin 1789–1793. Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2005, ISBN 3-932324-30-7 .
  • Ute Tintemann: teaching grammar and reflecting on language. Karl Philipp Moritz '"Italian language teaching for the Germans". Wehrhahn, Laatzen, ISBN 978-3-86525-041-4 .
  • Volkhard Wels: Perfection, active resignation and the "consecration of real life" with Karl Philipp Moritz. In: Euphorion. Volume 108, 2014, pp. 397-416 ( online ).
  • Volkhard Wels: Palingenesis, perfectibility and "illumination" with Karl Philipp Moritz. In: Euphorion. Volume 110, 2016, pp. 65-91 ( online ).
  • Christof Wingertszahn : Anton Reiser's world. A youth in Lower Saxony 1756–1776. Exhibition catalog for the 250th birthday of Karl Philipp Moritz. Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2006, ISBN 978-3-86525-054-4 .
  • Christof Wingertszahn: Anton Reiser and the Michelein. New finds on quietism in the 18th century. Wehrhahn, Laatzen, ISBN 3-932324-59-5 .
  • Willi Winkler : Karl Philipp Moritz. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2006, ISBN 3-499-50584-3 .

Web links

Commons : Karl Philipp Moritz  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Karl Philipp Moritz  - Quotes
Wikisource: Karl Philipp Moritz  - Sources and full texts

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Matthias Luserke : Sturm und Drang. Stuttgart, supplemented edition 2010, pp. 316–321.
  2. ↑ Jutta Osinski: Psychology and Aesthetics with Karl Philipp Moritz. In: Martin Fontius , Anneliese Klingenberg (ed.): Karl Philipp Moritz and the 18th century. Tübingen 1995, pp. 201-214, here 203.
  3. ↑ Thomas Saine: The Aesthetic Theodicy. Karl Philipp Moritz and the philosophy of the 18th century. Munich 1971, p. 164.
  4. ↑ Alessandro Costazza: Genius and tragic art. Karl Philipp Moritz and the aesthetics of the 18th century. Bern, Berlin a. a. 1999, p. 332.
  5. ^ Albert Meier : Karl Philipp Moritz. Stuttgart 2000, p. 185 ff.
  6. ^ Karl Philipp Moritz 'Fine Imitation of the Beautiful. An analysis based on the destruction fantasies in the last part.
  7. ↑ Karl Philipp Moritz: About the visual imitation of the beautiful.
  8. ^ Works by Karl Philipp Moritz at Zeno.org .
  9. ^ Works by Karl Philipp Moritz in the Gutenberg-DE project
personal data
SURNAME Moritz, Karl Philipp
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer of early romanticism
DATE OF BIRTH September 15, 1756
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamelin
DATE OF DEATH June 26, 1793
Place of death Berlin