Lieschen Müller

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article or section needs to be revised. Details should be given on the talk page. Please help to improve it , and then remove this flag.

Lieschen Müller is a placeholder name for an average person in the German-speaking world . The average is often also referred to with idioms such as "like von Lieschen Müller".

References to earlier synonymous usage

The weaver's daughter and later impostor Sophie Sabina Apitzsch posed as a prince in 1714 and was then called "Prince Lieschen". The German writer Heinrich Moritz Heydrich wrote the romantic farce Prinz Lieschen in 1861 . Wilhelmine Heimburg wrote the novel Lumpenmüller's Lieschen in 1879 . Whether these names are based on a usage of "Lieschen" as "ordinary girl" is not proven here. There are statements that the term "Lieschen Müller" found its way into German at least in the first half of the 20th century .

Dissemination of expression through cinema

At the latest after Lieschen Müller appeared as a character - played by Sonja Ziemann - in the 1961 feature film The Dream of Lieschen Müller as a German office worker in the 1960s, the name (comparable to the average consumer ) was present in common parlance. In the film, the title character dreams of belonging to higher society in the USA as Liz Miller .

Modified forms in literature and politics

The journalist Christian Ferber wrote literary translations of shallow entertainment literature in 1963 under the pseudonym Lisette Mullère, a translation of the German Lieschen Müller into French , which he covertly expressed what he thought of this type of literature. Lisette Mullère was a well-known fictional figure in Ferber's political satires in the 1960s .

This term was further coined by the addition of a doctoral degree . "Dr. Lieschen Müller ”has been - since Konrad Adenauer said about the magazine Der Spiegel that it was nothing more than“ the Bild newspaper for Dr. Lieschen Müller “- a synonym for a person who, despite or because of their academic dignity, is just as naive and stupid as Lieschen Müller.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Heydrich, Heinrich Moritz . In: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon . 4th edition. Volume 8, Verlag des Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig / Vienna 1885–1892, p. 507.
  2. ↑ Behrens, Bertha . In: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon . 4th edition. Volume 2, Verlag des Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig / Vienna 1885–1892, p. 623.