Ludwig Cauer (pedagogue)

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Ludwig Cauer 1823 (painting by Eduard Magnus )

Jacob Ludwig Cauer (born March 22, 1792 in Dresden , † September 24, 1834 in Charlottenburg ) was a German reform pedagogue and founder of the "Cauersches Erziehungsanstalt", a private boarding school for the wealthy run according to the principles of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi The educated middle class in Berlin .

Origin and family

Ludwig Cauer's grandfather, the craftsman Johann Kauer from Bamberg, had entered Prussian service and married Elisabeth Billot from a Huguenot family. His son Carl Ludwig Cauer (1750-1813) became a general practitioner in Dresden. He took Aimée Eleonore Bassenge (1760-1824) - also a Huguenot - as his wife. Of their six children who reached adulthood, Ludwig Cauer (baptized as Jaques Louis Cauer) was the eldest son. When his father died in 1813, Ludwig Cauer took in his youngest brother Emil, who was still a minor, for a few years in Berlin. Emil Cauer later founded the Cauer family of sculptors .

Contemporary history

Ludwig Cauer's youth were overshadowed by the fighting during the Napoleonic Wars . Dresden, as the seat of the Saxon court, was the center of the French deployment area and was heavily contested for years. The residents of Dresden had to endure three changes of occupation troops between 1806 and 1809. Finally, Napoleon's Russian campaign in 1812 started here. The general uncertainty in Saxony, which had been allied with France since 1806, led the Cauer parents' house, which was influenced by Protestant Calvinism, to the decision to send their son to study at the new university in Berlin , which had been founded by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1810 .

Student in Berlin

Ludwig Cauer wanted to become a doctor like his father out of personal inclination. He enrolled in Berlin in 1812, albeit not for medicine but for philosophy. In the Prussian capital, which also suffered under French rule, Cauer had immediately come into contact with the patriotic movement and had changed his career goal as a result. He wanted to work on the model of Fichte and Pestalozzi's reforms and also contribute to a liberal national education.

Participation in the wars of liberation

The passionate speeches of the university teachers Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schleiermacher , who played an essential part in the founding of the Berlin University, and the calls from other patriots filled the student youth with a fighting spirit against French rule. Cauer and his fellow students were not only carried away by the idea of ​​spiritual renewal, but had also followed Friedrich Ludwig Jahn , who had made Berlin a center of physical training for the upcoming freedom struggle. The patriotic gymnastics developed by him and the first German gymnastics field in the Hasenheide in 1811 only served to educate people to defend themselves. The defeat of Napoleon in Russia led to a general mood of optimism in Prussia, which King Friedrich Wilhelm III. was increased with his speech to my people . Like many of his friends, Cauer volunteered in the Prussian Landwehr in 1813. After a mission near Dresden and the forced marches from Silesia to Dresden and back, he fell ill due to cold, wet weather, poor equipment and insufficient food. His hope for a speedy recovery was dashed. The worsening illness forced him to stay in Prague. He could not take part in the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig . In November 1813 he returned to his parents in the liberated Dresden - still ill. After his father's death shortly afterwards (Christmas Eve 1813), he went back to Berlin in January 1814.

Cauer Institute

Right at the beginning of his studies in Berlin in 1812, Cauer began to exchange ideas with like-minded people about the establishment of a reform-pedagogical educational institution. After returning from the war, he intensified his efforts and was finally able to inspire eleven men, mostly fellow students, with the project. Six of them, including his brother Jakob, who was two years his junior, traveled to Pestalozzi in Yverdon in 1816 at their own expense to get an education. Some of them stayed at the school there until mid-1817 and were later also teachers at the Berlin institute. The mathematician Jakob Steiner , who worked as an assistant teacher in Yverdon, taught at the Cauer Institute for some time after his arrival in Berlin in the winter of 1820/21.

After the hoped-for state support for the free-liberal school project did not materialize as a result of the restoration that was beginning in Prussia , Cauer founded the Cauer Institute as a boarding school on a private basis with the help of his followers in 1818 . The sum raised by the founding members was 40,000 thalers. The first location of the institutes under joint management was Münzstrasse 21 near Hackescher Markt in Berlin. Here Cauer was also active in local politics as chairman of a poor commission and as a city councilor. In 1826 it was relocated to Charlottenburg at Berliner Str. 1 (today Otto-Suhr-Allee). The collective principle ended when Cauer became sole owner and director in 1827 and the house flourished. In 1829 the house reached the highest occupancy with 65 pupils.

The difficulties began when the number of pupils fell, the school then accepted more day pupils and the problems arising from the competing educational concepts further reduced the number of pupils. As a result of the cholera epidemic that raged from 1831, the house only had six children in 1834. Cauer gave up his project and sold the troubled facility to the state for 36,000 thalers (Royal Cabinet Order of April 3, 1834). The restart under significantly changed conditions took place on September 29, 1834 without Cauer. He had died a few days earlier.

The further development led to the complete abandonment of the boarding school concept towards the establishment of state schools. The grammar school was founded in 1869 (from 1876 Kaiserin Augusta grammar school), the expanded school operations of which in 1899 made the representative building at Cauerstraße 36 - 37, which is still preserved today, necessary. After the war in 1945, a primary school was set up in the building complex, which from 1954 bears the name Ludwig Cauer ( Ludwig-Cauer-Grundschule ).

Well-known pupils of the Cauer institute

Ludwig Cauer family

Ludwig Cauer was married to Marianne Louise Itzig (1794–1869). Her two brothers, Benjamin (Benny) Itzig and Jakob Itzig, were among the co-founders of the Cauer Institute and were among the first teachers. The father was the banker and court building officer Isaak Daniel Itzig . Cauer's son, the Berlin school councilor Eduard Cauer, was his second marriage to the teacher Wilhelmine Schelle, who later became women's rights activist Minna Cauer . Cauer's daughter Bertha was married to the mathematician Ernst Eduard Kummer , rector of the Humboldt University in 1868/69. The daughter Aimée Louise Cauer married Wilhelm Mendelssohn, a cousin of the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy ; her son was the composer Arnold Mendelssohn .

Ludwig Cauer died at the age of 42 of a heart attack on September 24, 1834. He was buried in the Luisenkirchhof ( Luisenfriedhof I ). His grave is no longer preserved.

Honors

Bear the name Ludwig Cauer:

literature

  • Felix Eberty: Memories of the youth of an old Berliner , Verlag Wilhelm Hertz, Berlin 1878
  • Erich Fuchs: Fichte's influence on his students in Berlin at the beginning of the wars of liberation. In: Fichte studies 2. Cosmopolitanism and the national idea. Edition Rodopi BV, Amsterdam 1990, ISBN 90-5183-235-4
  • Rudolf Lassahn: Founding a school in the spirit of Fichte , in Zeitschrift für Pädagogik 15 (1969), pp. 173-185
  • Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Complete Letters, Critical Edition (Volume 14, Addendum). Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, p. 400
  • Ferdinand Schultz: Annual report of the Königliches Kaiserin-Augusta-Gymnasium in Charlottenburg 1895
  • Dorothea Zöbl: Ludwig Cauer. Stapp-Verlag, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-87776-058-9

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Propylaen world history, Propylaen publishing house, Berlin-Frankfurt-Vienna / Verlag Ullstein, 1960, vol. 8, p. 164
  2. ^ Wolfgang Schneider: Berlin. A cultural history in pictures and documents. Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, Leipzig and Weimar 1980, p. 220.
  3. ^ Meyers Konversations-Lexikon (Volume 9). Bibl. Institute Leipzig and Vienna, 1896, p. 463.
  4. ↑ Erich Fuchs: Fichte's influence on his students in Berlin at the beginning of the wars of liberation. In: Fichte Studies 2: Cosmopolitanism and the National Idea. Edition Rodopi BV, Amsterdam 1990, ISBN 90-5183-235-4 , p. 191.
  5. ^ Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. All letters. Critical Edition (Volume 14, Addendum). Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, p. 400.
  6. ^ Felix Eberty: Memories of the youth of an old Berliner. Based on the author's handwritten notes by J. von Bülow, the newly published edition of Jugenderinnerungen from 1878. Verlag für Kulturpolitik, Berlin 1925, p. 240
  7. ↑ Dorothea Zöbl: Ludwig Cauer , pp. 59 ff. And 66
personal data
SURNAME Cauer, Ludwig
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cauer, Jacob Ludwig (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German educator
DATE OF BIRTH March 22, 1792
PLACE OF BIRTH Dresden
DATE OF DEATH September 24, 1834
Place of death Charlottenburg