Karl Theodor Gaedertz

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Karl Theodor Gaedertz

Karl Theodor Gaedertz (born January 8, 1855 in Lübeck , † July 8, 1912 in Berlin ) was a German writer, librarian, literary historian, Low German poet and translator.

Life

Karl Theodor Gaedertz was a son of the lawyer Theodor Gaedertz (1815-1903) and his wife Emilie von Leesen (1828-1910) and a distant relative of the Lübeck poet Emanuel Geibel . He attended the Katharineum in Lübeck until he graduated from high school in 1876. From 1876 to 1879 he studied German in Leipzig and Berlin and was awarded a doctorate in Halle in 1881, one year late. phil. with a dissertation on the poet Gabriel Rollehagen , after the dissertation that was ready to be handed in had been stolen from him in Berlin a year earlier and he had to rewrite it.

Gaedertz had been a civil servant at the Royal Library in Berlin since May 13, 1880 and was temporarily "borrowed" to the Ministry of Culture in Berlin to organize the library there . Gaedertz got to know the then Prussian minister of culture, Gustav von Goßler , who would give him years of official leave of absence and generous research grants for German research trips to Germany and Europe (the Netherlands, England, Sweden, Denmark). Although most of Gaedertz's large-scale research projects to research medieval and early modern German theater and to research the Low German language remained a desideratum , it was during this time that he found his future research object, the work of the poet and writer Fritz Reuter .

Gaedertz was very demanding in his personal appearance, selfish and at the same time glorious. He did not shy away from demanding honors, promotions and medals from superiors and German princely families. In dealing with the other librarians of the Kgl. Library in Berlin he was considered very unfriendly and used to submit his frequent, sometimes very petty requests, bypassing all superiors, mostly directly to the Minister of Education. His later transfer from Berlin to the small university library in Greifswald resembled a makeshift disguised punitive transfer because Gaedertz made it impossible in Berlin and no one could get along with him.

From 1900 to 1905 he was the senior librarian at the University Library of Greifswald and, using a few tricks (advanced medical certificates), retired before the 25-year minimum period had expired, haggling over pension amounts, medals and ranks on the occasion of his transition to retirement. During his service as a Prussian librarian, Gaedertz tried several times to gain a position as a university professor for German studies, taking advantage of protection and his good relationships with the various Prussian ministers of education and the influential Privy Councilor Althoff. He regularly failed because of the objection of the Germanic specialist world and because of his lack of habilitation , although he was granted that his dissertation was of a scientific quality.

In the second half of his life, Gaedertz made a name for himself as the most important collector and publicist of his time around the Low German poet Fritz Reuter (1810–1874). From a temporal proximity to Reuter and his family and friends, Gaedertz brought together a unique collection and documentation on Reuter's life and work. His sustained efforts to found a "Fritz Reuter National Museum" based on his private collection in Mecklenburg were unsuccessful. By wills, the collections fell to the city of Neubrandenburg in 1912 and in the 1920s became the core of a first Reuter museum there, which, however, was largely destroyed by fire at the end of the war in 1945. The remains of the Gaedertz collection, including numerous autographs, manuscripts and photos by the poet, ended up in the Fritz Reuter Literature Museum in Stavenhagen in the 1970s .

Gaedertz has also translated works by Pierre Corneille , Jean Racine and Washington Irving from French and English.

Gaedertz was married to Agnes Elisabeth Anna von Vangerow (* 1872) since 1902 . His sister was married to Arthur Kopp , who was one of his Berlin colleagues.

With only 57 years of childless Gaedertz 1912 died in Berlin at a pleurisy . He was buried in the Old Twelve Apostles Cemetery in Schöneberg . The grave has not been preserved.

Works (selection)

  • Julklapp! Leeder and Läuschen . With 3 original poems by Klaus Groth , Theodor Storm and Theodor Souchay . Richter, Hamburg 1879. ( digitized version )
  • A comedy . Low German Schwank with singing in one act. With two music supplements. Drewitz, Berlin 1880.
  • Gabriel Rollehagen. His life and his works. Contribution to the history of German literature, German drama and Low German dialect poetry, along with a bibliographical appendix. Hirzel, Leipzig 1881 ( digitized version ).
  • Johann Rist as a Low German playwright . Leipzig 1882
  • Hard leash. A Speigel vör Land un Lüd. (With Heinrich Burmester) Kogge & Fritze, Berlin 1884.
  • The Low German drama. On the cultural life of Hamburg . 2 volumes. Hofmann, Berlin 1884.
Volume 1 ( digitized version )
Volume 2 ( digitized version )
  • Fritz Reuter Gallery. With pictures by Conrad Beckmann . Publishing House for Art and Science, Munich 1884.
  • Fritz Reuter relics . Hinstorff, Wismar 1885. ( digitized version )
  • Emanuel Geibel's Memories . Friedrich, Berlin 1886.
  • Funny and sad. Low German poems . Klönne, Berlin 1886.
  • Goethe's Minchen. Described on the basis of unprinted letters. With the previously unknown portrait of Wilhelmine Herzlieb, painted by Johanna Frommann. Müller, Bremen 1887 ( digitized ).
  • For knowledge of the Old English stage along with other contributions to Shakespeare literature . Müller, Bremen 1888.
  • Archival news about the state of theater in Hildesheim, Lübeck and Lüneburg in the 16th and 17th centuries . Contributions to German cultural and church history. Müller, Bremen 1888. ( digitized version )
  • Goethe and painter Kolbe. An art historical sketch. Müller, Bremen and Leipzig 1889. ( digitized version )
  • Fritz Reuter Studies . Wismar 1890.
  • From Fritz Reuter's young and old days. News about the poet's life and becoming. 3 volumes. Hinstorff, Wismar 1896–1897 [number no. further conditions]
Volume 1 ( digitized version of the 2nd edition)
  • Prince Bismarck and Fritz Reuter. A memorial sheet . Hinstorff, Wismar 1898.
  • What I found on the way. Sheets and pictures from literature, art and life. Leipzig 1902 ( digitized in the Internet Archive).
  • Fritz Reuter . Reclam, Leipzig 1906.
  • Reuter calendar for the year ... Volume 1 (1907) to Volume 6 (1912). Weicher [1906–1910] / Dietrich, Leipzig 1906–1911.
  • Narrative guide through the Fritz Reuter exhibition in the Künstlerhaus zu Berlin . Berlin 1910 ( digitized in the digital library Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania).

Letters

literature

  • Christoph König (Ed.), With the collaboration of Birgit Wägenbaur u. a .: Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950 . Volume 1: A-G. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, ISBN 3-11-015485-4 , pp. 542–543 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  • Alken Bruns: Gaedertz, Karl Theodor. In: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck. Volume 12, Neumünster 2006, pp. 128-131. ISBN 3-529-02560-7
  • Jürgen W. Schmidt: The restless life of the Kgl. Prussian librarian and literary scholar Karl Theodor Gaedertz (1855–1912) . In: Jürgen W. Schmidt (Ed.): Prussia as a lesson for our present - essays on Prussian history . Ludwigsfelde 2015 (series of publications by the Prussian Institute, vol. 14), ISBN 978-3-933022-77-6 , pp. 39–113.

Web links

Wikisource: Karl Theodor Gaedertz  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hermann Genzken: The Abitur graduates of the Katharineum zu Lübeck (grammar school and secondary school) from Easter 1807 to 1907. Borchers, Lübeck 1907 ( digitized version ), no. 754
  2. ^ Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume II: Artists. Winter, Heidelberg 2018, ISBN 978-3-8253-6813-5 , p. 416.
  3. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende: Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , p. 751.
personal data
SURNAME Gaedertz, Karl Theodor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Literary historian
DATE OF BIRTH January 8, 1855
PLACE OF BIRTH Lübeck
DATE OF DEATH July 8, 1912
Place of death Berlin