Ludwig Robert

Portrait from 1823 from the Varnhagen collection with the addition of KA Varnhagens: "Very similar!"

Ernst Friedrich Ludwig Robert (also Robert-Tornow ; born December 16, 1778 in Berlin as Liepmann Levin ; † July 5, 1832 in Baden-Baden ) was a German playwright , storyteller , poet , publicist and translator . He was Rahel Varnhagen's younger brother .

biography

Family, education

Ludwig Robert came from the Jewish Levin family. His father was the coin commissioner, jeweler and moneylender Levin Markus (also Loeb Cohen, 1723–1790), his mother Chaie (d. 1809) was the daughter of Moses Tobias. Like his siblings Rahel (1771–1833), Markus Theodor (Mordechai, 1772–1826), Rose (1781–1853) and Moritz (Meyer, 1785–1846), after the death of his father he also took the name of the extinct Robert family Tornow (first attested in 1796, officially in 1812). Robert learned French conversation at home and was presumably also trained musically, then attended the French grammar school in Berlin and reluctantly went to Breslau and Hamburg from 1794 to 1796 to complete a commercial training.

Inspired by the salon socializing his sister Rachel and as admirer of Goethe , whom he visited in 1804, and Johann Heinrich Voss began writing he joined the Berliner romance representing North Star League at and contributed to that of Varnhagen and Chamisso issued Musenalmanach at. Robert was also friends with Ludwig Tieck and Heinrich von Kleist , whom he supported in his work on the Käthchen von Heilbronn . After long stays in Amsterdam and Paris and a short study period during which he listened to the philosopher Fichte , whom he admired throughout his life , the natural philosopher Steffens and the philologist Friedrich August Wolff, he devoted himself primarily to the theater.

Successes and hostility

In 1804, his adaptation of the over- educated after Molière had its world premiere in the production of Iffland at the Berlin National Theater on Gendarmenmarkt . To the magical opera Die Sylphen with music by Friedrich Heinrich Himmel , performed in Berlin in 1806 , “the Berlin state and scholarly critics” reacted with anti-Jewish prejudices: “Since the author is a Jew, you can imagine that he has to accept everything there he still belongs to the top one of the poetic poets " , it says in a letter from Zelter to Goethe. Nonetheless, Robert addressed the outsider role of the Jews in the Christian majority society in several works , for example in The Power of Relationships and in his poem Jude und Christ (1816 ). In Kassius and Phantasus or the Bird of Paradise (1821), Robert also had people with a Yiddish sound appear.

Although Goethe was also not free from resentment and felt "no aversion, but disinclination" to Old Testament Jewish figures on stage , he brought the historical drama The Daughter of Jephta's to the Weimar court in 1811 and thus contributed to the stage author 's breakthrough. Robert wrote libretti for example for Anselm Weber , Carl Maria von Weber , Louis Spohr and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy . In the salons of Berlin, the partially improvised satirical poems were known and feared, which Robert composed as an acrostic with the names of participants in conviviality and which at the same time caricatured and aptly characterized. The acrostic court councilor Jette Herz became famous for the Salonière Henriette Herz : “Junonian giantess, / Egyptian marquisess, / practicing virtue, / faithful, as loving, / delighted with violence. / Hundreds of heartless, / Noble and painless, / Strong and cold, / Too young for so old. "

Journalism and Diplomacy

Robert wrote numerous feature articles and theater reviews for Cotta's morning paper for educated classes . From 1813 to 1814 he was attaché to the Russian legation at the Württemberg court. He stayed away from the wars of freedom against Napoleon because he “was forbidden to have courage as a Jew for 35 years” , but his patriotic poetry , which he published in 1817 under the title Fights of the Time and attributed to Fichte , met with great approval.

In 1815, his most successful tragedy appeared, Die Macht der Zeiten . It is about a young writer named Weiss, who recognizes the class privileges of the nobility and receives a slap in the face from a noble officer . He challenges the opponent in a duel because he believes that honor is above the stands. When he was not recognized by the officer corps as capable of satisfactory behavior, he shot the officer. While Weiß is imprisoned, the murdered officer's father, a minister, discovers that his son's murderer is also his (illegitimate) son and makes up with Weiß. He had wanted to die on the scaffold as a martyr of honor, now he asks the newly found father for poison and chooses suicide. The first part of the drama was written under the impression that Achim von Arnim had a dispute with the bookseller Moritz Itzig.

As a translator who was on friendly terms with Benjamin Constant and Victor Cousin and who translated authors such as Racine , Alexandre Duval and Pierre Baour de Lormian and edited German classics for the Parisian stages, Robert played an important mediating role between Germany and France .

Marriage to Friederike Primavesi born brown

In 1817 he met his sister Friederike at the bookseller Gottlieb Braun, who at the age of seventeen had been married to a traveling Italian jewelry dealer named Primavesi in Schwäbisch Hall . Primavesi is said to have shown the young woman because of her striking beauty at fairs and forced her into prostitution . Ludwig Robert helped her divorce in a sensational process and was baptized in the spring of 1819 so that she could be married with the consent of her family. The couple lived alternately in Dresden, Berlin and Paris; Friederike Robert was praised by authors such as Holtei , Tieck and above all by Heinrich Heine , who wrote her poems ( I love a flower and don't know which ), a wreath of sonnets and his work Ideen. The book is dedicated to LeGrand .

In southern Germany, where he had now settled, Ludwig Robert experienced the anti-Jewish so-called Hep-Hep riots in August 1819 and wrote an impressive eyewitness report for his sister Rahel : “But how depraved people are and how little sense they have of law and order "I don't want to say for philanthropy, you can see that from the fact that no indignation is expressed about any of these incidents, not once in the public papers." With this impression, Robert judged the uprisings accompanying the July Revolution of 1830 more skeptically than Heine , whom, despite some differences, he considered the greatest and even the only living poet .

The last few years

In 1827 Robert founded the Berlin stage poet association and edited Kleist's The Prince of Homburg for the Royal Theater. The success of his birthday speech on the Prussian Crown Prince was overshadowed in 1830 by a literary intrigue.

Robert spent the last years of his life withdrawn in Baden-Baden and shortly before his death he brought the festival " Zu Goethe's Todtenfeier" to the Karlsruhe court stage. After returning from a stay in Berlin, Ludwig Robert fell ill in 1832 with a nervous fever caused by typhus ; the widow probably suffered from the same illness and followed him into death a few weeks later.

The estate of Mr. and Mrs. Robert is found mostly in the Varnhagen collection and came in 1881 in the Royal Library in Berlin . The library Varnhagen contains books by Ludwig Robert in the holdings of the State Library in Berlin . Handwritten testimonials , newspaper clippings from articles by Ludwig Roberts and a few manuscripts , on the other hand, are currently in the Jagiellońska Library in Krakow due to the war relocations .

Works by Ludwig Robert

Stage plays

• The over-educated. Comedy after Molière. Bloch, Berlin 1826. First performance 1804.
• The bet. Singspiel, first performed in 1805
• The sylphs. Magic opera based on Gozzi. Werkmeister, Berlin 1906 First performance 1806 Digitized and full text in the German Text Archive
• Omasis or Joseph in Egypt. Historical drama based on Pierre Baour de Lormian. Hitzig, Berlin 1808. ( digitized version )
• The daughter of Jephthah. Tragedy. Cotta, Stuttgart and Tübingen 1820. First performance 1811. ( digitized version )
• The day of the battle or the border village. Singspiel, first performed in 1813
• The power of proportions. Tragedy, first performed in 1815, digitized
• Battles of time. Twelve poems. Cotta, Stuttgart and Tübingen 1817. ( digitized )
• Blind and lame. Comedy, first performed in 1819, printed in 1823.
• Kassius and Phantasus or the Bird of Paradise. An arch-romantic comedy with music, dance, fate and transformations, in 3 large and 3 small lifts. Along with a commendatory preface by the famous Aubry dog. Association bookstore, Berlin 1825. First performance 1821. ( digitized version )
• Festival for the celebration of the wedding of Prince Johann of Saxony to Princess Amalia of Bavaria. Meinhold, Dresden 1822.
• Omar and Leila. Opera, first performed in 1823. ( piano reduction for download )
• The first of April. Comedy, unprinted, 1823
• It is asked to the wedding or the void. Comedy, first performance in 1823, printed in 1825 in the yearbook of German stage plays , 4th year, 2nd year
• Staberl in higher spheres. Posse in three moves. Braun, Karlsruhe 1826. ( digitized version )
• New test rolls. Comedy. In: Yearbook of German stage plays 1828.
• To Goethe's death celebration. Festival, 1832
• The forest crime. Song play in two acts. Printed in 1835. ( digitized )
• The footfall. Dramatic joke. Bloch, Berlin 1837.
• A fateful day in Spain. In: Yearbook of German stage games 1839. ( digitized version )
• The dead guest. Comedy in 2 acts and a prelude to Zschokke . Bloch, Berlin 1850
• Das Geschik, or Thekla Müller. Comedy
• The Amazons . Opera
• Charles the Second. play
• Living wax figures in Krähwinkel. A Christmas exhibition. Berlin 1825.

prose

• Fathers fault. A story from the days of the Restoration. Kauffmann, Frankfurt a. M. printed 1849.
• The black box. Fairy tale. Association bookstore, Berlin 1850. ( digitized version )
• The pottery house. Short story, printed in 1850
• Divination. Short story, printed in 1850
• The invention of porcelain. narrative

Poems

• Ludwig Robert's poems . Edited by Karl August Varnhagen von Ense. 2 volumes. Hoff, Mannheim, 1838. ( digitized part 1 ), ( part 2 )

Letters

• Wilhelm Dorow: memoranda and letters. Vol. 2, 1838, pp. 76-84. ( Digitized version )
• Unpublished letters to his sister Rahel Varnhagen . Bulletin of the Leo Baeck Institute. NF (15) 1976, pp. 23-48
• Rahel Levin Varnhagen: Correspondence m. Ludwig Robert. Edited by Consolina Vigliero. CH Beck, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-406-48256-2 Partially digitized

Well-known epigram

difference

The dove said to the eagle:

Where thinking ends, there begins belief.

Right, said the other, with the difference, however,

Where you think I still think

Morning paper for educated stands . October 17, 1829 p. 995 in Google Book Search

literature

• Franz Brümmer :  Robert, Ludwig . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 28, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1889, pp. 720-722.
• Nikolaus Gatter:  Robert, Ludwig. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , p. 679 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Edouard de la Grange in: Revue des deux mondes 7 (1832), p. 643 f.
• Karl August Varnhagen von Ense: Selected writings . Vol. 18, F. A. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1875, pp. 162-179.
• Margarete Cohen: Ludwig Robert. His life and his works. Diss. Göttingen 1923
• Ernst Altendorff: Ludwig Robert. Diss. Leipzig 1932
• Miriam Sambursky: Ludwig Roberts life course. In: Bulletin of the Leo Baeck Institute. N.F. 15 (1976) pp. 3-21
• Jutta Rebmann: The beautiful Friederike. Roman, Stieglitz, Mühlacker, Irdning / Steiermark 1989, ISBN 3-7987-0284-5
• Heidi Thomann Tewarson: German-Jewish Identity in the Correspondence Between Rahel Levin Varnhagen and Her Brother, Ludwig Robert. In: Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 39 (1994), pp. 3-29
• Liliane Weissberg: Dramatic History. Reflections on a Biblical Play by Ludwig Robert. In: Literary Strategies. Jewish Texts and Contexts. Ed. Ezra Mendelsohn. New York, Oxford University Press 1996, pp. 3-20, ISBN 0-19-511203-2
• Thorsten Fitzon: Disrepair in Baden. Ludwig Roberts Posse Staberl in higher spheres. In Achim Aurnhammer, Wilhelm Kühlmann, Hansgeorg Schmidt-Bergmann (eds.): From the late Enlightenment to the Baden Revolution. Literary life in Baden between 1800 and 1850. Rombach, Freiburg i. Br., Berlin, Vienna 2010, pp. 509-534, ISBN 978-3-7930-9605-4

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Letter to Goethe, 21. – 25. April 1806, in: Correspondence between Goethe and Zelter , ed. L. Geiger. Reclam, Leipzig 1902, vol. 1, p. 165
2. ^ Letter to Zelter, May 19, 1812. Ibid. Vol. 1, p. 322
3. ↑ Quoted from letters from Chamisso, Haugwitz, W. von Humboldt… , ed. v. Ludmilla Assing , FA Brockhaus, Leipzig 1867, p. 20
4. ^ Letter to Rahel Varnhagen, April 18, 1815, Rahel Levin Varnhagen: Correspondence with Ludwig Robert . Beck: Munich 2001, p. 129
5. ^ Letter to Rahel Varnhagen, August 28, 1819, ibid, p. 242
6. ^ Library of Varnhagen
7. ^ Jagiellońska Library

Web links

• Literature by and about Ludwig Robert in the catalog of the German National Library
• Website of the Varnhagen Gesellschaft e. V.
• Library Varnhagen of the State Library in Berlin