Ludwig Geiger

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Ludwig Moritz Philipp Geiger , actually: Lazarus Abraham Geiger (born June 5, 1848 in Breslau , Province of Silesia , † February 9, 1919 in Berlin ), was a German literary and cultural historian and a representative of Reform Judaism .

Life

Ludwig Geiger, son of the reform rabbi Abraham Geiger (1810–1874), studied philology and history in Heidelberg , Göttingen and Berlin. Since 1870 he was a lecturer at Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelm University held, habilitated himself in 1873 when Leopold von Ranke with Scripture judgments of Greek and Roman writers about Jews and Judaism , but did not come as a Jew on the status of Associate Professor addition (Appointed in 1880), however, in 1908 he was appointed a secret councilor.

As a young scholar, he developed a cultural-historical program according to which any study of history, culture and language, no matter how taught and important it may seem historically or philologically, has failed to make sense if it does not lead to tolerance, freedom of expression and humanity.

Geiger's literary and cultural history work is an expression of liberal Jewish life in Germany in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the following years he shifted his activities more to the field of Goethe philology (contribution by Goethe and the Jews ; Geiger's name as a whole stands for the special veneration of Goethe in Judaism). As the editor of the Goethe Yearbook he founded in 1880 (which for a long time formed the focus of Goethe research; 34 volumes), he had to resign in 1913 due to his Jewry. In his lectures in 1903 and 1904 at Berlin University, he was one of the first literary scholars to pose the question of the existence of German-Jewish literature . In 1910 he published these lectures under the title Die deutsche Literatur und die Juden .

In addition to his general cultural-historical work, Geiger has also written works on the history of the Jews in Germany. Above all, his two-volume history of the Jews in Berlin (1871; 2 volumes, commissioned by the Berlin Jewish Community) should be mentioned here, which, although unfinished and sketchy, has remained a standard work to this day because it was the first to utilize the archival sources. He also founded the magazine for the history of Jews in Germany = ZGJD , was its honorary editor from 1886 to 1892 (5 volumes) and was active in various Jewish committees. He was a member of the Berlin Representative Assembly for several years and was a member of the board of directors of the General Archives of German Jews, the Board of Trustees of the Zunz Foundation and the University for the Science of Judaism . From 1908 he was the successor to Gustav Karpeles editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums .

Geiger also worked as a translator and translated Ernest Renan's works “Paulus”, “Das Leben Jesu” and “Der Antichrist” into German in Paris, where he studied for a while .

He was already exposed to anti-Jewish attacks during his lifetime, after his death he was soon forgotten, also in Judaism, primarily due to his radical-liberal and decidedly anti-Zionist attitude. His private library with a focus on secondary literature on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was archived in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Library ( Berlin-Wilmersdorf City Library ). In recent times, interest in Geiger has reawakened somewhat, but so far it has mainly concentrated on his Goethe studies and his contribution to German-Jewish literature.

Ludwig Geiger died in Berlin in 1919 at the age of seventy. He was buried in a hereditary funeral in the Jewish cemetery at Schönhauser Allee . The grave is preserved.

Publications (selection)

  • Johann Reuchlin, his life and works . Berlin 1871.
  • Petrarch . Berlin 1874.
  • (Ed.): Jacob Burckhardt : The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy (first published in 1860; edited 1875–1919).
  • Renaissance and Humanism in Italy and Germany . Berlin 1882 (= general history in individual representations ).
  • From old Weimar . 1897.
  • Young Germany and the Prussian censorship. According to unprinted archival sources . Paetel, Berlin, 1900.
  • Goethe and his people . 1908.
  • Young Germany. Studies and communications . Schottlaender, Berlin, 1907.
  • Goethe's life and work . 1909.
  • as editor: Abraham Geiger , Leben und Lebenswerk . 1910.

literature

Lexicon article
Essays
  • Alfred Stern: Ludwig Geiger. A picture of life . Supplement to the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, 1919.
  • Fritz Homeyer: German Jews as Bibiophiles and Antiquaries , 2nd Edition, Tübingen: Mohr 1966, pp. 13-14.
  • Hans-Dieter Holzhausen: Ludwig Geiger (1848–1919) - a contribution about his life and work under the aspect of his library and other archive materials. In: Menorah . Vol. 2 (1991), pp. 245-269.
  • Christoph König: Cultural History as Enlightenment. Remarks on Ludwig Geiger's Experiences of Judaism, Philology and Goethe. In: Klaus L. Berghahn , Jost Hermand (Ed.): Goethe in German-Jewish Culture. Camden House, Columbia 2001, pp. 65-83.
  • Klaus Herrmann : Ludwig Geiger as the Redactor of Jacob Burckhardt's Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien. In: Jewish Studies Quarterly . Vol. 10 (2003), No. 4, pp. 377-400.

Web links

Wikisource: Ludwig Geiger  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Both the German naming and the traditionally Jewish one according to entries in the NDB , DNB , DBE and the Berlin State Library .
  2. ↑ Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums ( Memento of the original of July 22, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the Compact Memory digitization project . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.compactmemory.de
  3. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende : Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , p. 352.


personal data
SURNAME Geiger, Ludwig
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Violinist, Lazarus Abraham
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German literary and cultural historian
DATE OF BIRTH June 5, 1848
PLACE OF BIRTH Wroclaw , Lower Silesia
DATE OF DEATH February 9, 1919
Place of death Berlin