Ludwig Wihl

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ludwig Wihl , also Louis Wihl (born October 24, 1807 in Wevelinghoven , Département de la Roer , French Empire ; † January 16, 1882 in Brussels ), was a German classical philologist , orientalist , writer and publicist .

Life

Ludwig Wihl was one of many children of the butcher, "Ellenwarenhändlers" and Jewish religious teacher Mosche ben Israel (from 1808 Moses Wihl) and his wife Tiltz Salomon (Walburga Levenstein). His older brother was David, born in 1800, who was trained as a "teacher at a Mosaic elementary school" in 1825. Another brother was Lazarus Wihl , who trained as a portrait and history painter at the Düsseldorf Art Academy from 1843 to 1848 .

Ludwig Wihl grew up in Wevelinghoven near Grevenbroich and attended the Evangelical High School in Cologne . Supported by the Archbishop of Cologne Ferdinand August von Spiegel , he was able to begin studying Classical Philology and Oriental Languages , which took him via the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich , where he published De in 1831 gravissimis aliquot Phoenicum inscriptionibus Commentatio philologico-critica to the Dr. phil. received his doctorate. In this book, which he dedicated to Eduard von Schenk , the Archbishop of Cologne von Spiegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling , he argued, among other things, that ancient Greek culture had undergone a significant change through immigration by Phoenicians and that the Phoenician language “ Hebrew "was.

After trying in vain to become a lecturer at a Prussian university while retaining his Mosaic denomination , he went to Frankfurt am Main . There he worked with Karl Gutzkow on his magazine Phoenix , later in Hamburg on his Telegraph for Germany . In the 1830s he also stayed in Paris , where he met Heinrich Heine in 1837 , and in London . Through Romantic Poems (1833) he appeared as a poet . After a collection of his poems (1836), after a stay in England, he published works by English-speaking poets that he had translated and published under the title Englischer Novellenkranz (1839). After Wihl fell out with Gutzkow, he went back to Frankfurt, where in 1840 he received funds from the merchant Marquard Georg Seufferheld (1781–1848) to establish an educational institute. This institute had to close after a year and a half because it was not allowed to accept students of Christian denomination.

After stays in Amsterdam and Utrecht - probably as a freelance writer or teacher - he was to be found during the German Revolution of 1848/1849 as editor of the Westfälische Zeitung in Paderborn , which was editorially managed by Franz Löher . As such, he took on the "cause of the people against the rotten older conditions". An article in this newspaper resulted in a trial and a sentence to imprisonment, which Wihl escaped by fleeing to France. After an initial stay in Paris, he soon took up a position as a literature teacher at a high school in Grenoble . When the Franco-Prussian War broke out , he had to leave France as a citizen of Prussia. He went to Brussels, where he lived on a small pension and died in 1882.

Wihl assessed his contemporary Heinrich Heine with certain criticism of his character ("Sucht nach Allerweltsautorität") and allegedly diminishing poetic power, as can be seen in his essay H. Heine in Paris , published in July 1838 in the Telegraph für Deutschland . Heine was furious about the content of this essay, but only admitted that he "laughed more than sighed at the end of his article". He was even more annoyed with Wihl's approach and style. He interpreted its article as an intrusive and presumptuous attempt to publicly portray himself as his friend. After Heine later found out that Wihl had come to his mother, Betty Heine's , in Hamburg and had presented himself to her "as an initiate in my most delicate affairs", the relationship with him was completely ruined. Heine mocked him - alluding to his “East Jewish” appearance and his Jewish melancholy in Palestine, which he expressed in the work West-Eastern Swallows - as “Monsieur Faiwisch”, as “mourning west-eastern swallow rabbi Wihl” and as “swallow father ", Which" thank God "he no longer see," just as my house is now very clean of east-west rabble ". He even wrote to the almanac editor Christian Schad in 1853: "I think you owe it to the olfactory nerves of your readers that you do not include any stink from this crawling bug in your almanac".

Work (selection)

  • Romantic seals . Groos, Heidelberg 1833
  • Poems . Von Zabern, Mainz 1836
  • as translator: English novella wreath . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1839
  • History of German national literature from its first beginnings to our day . 5 booklets, Aue, Altona / Dessau 1840
  • as editor and one of the authors: Yearbook for Art and Poetry . Langewiesche, Barmen 1843
  • Spring awakening. For a voice with accompaniment from the pianoforte . Hofmeister, Leipzig ~ 1844 (set to music by Wilhelm Lutz )
  • West-eastern swallows . Lang, Mannheim / Speyer 1847
  • Hirondelles Orientales . Mercier, Paris 1860
  • Le Mendiant pour la Pologne . Paris 1864
  • Le Pays Bleu . Paris 1865

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mosche ben Israel (Moses Wihl) , data sheet in the portal steinheim-institut.de ( Salomon Ludwig Steinheim-Institut )
  2. ^ Ludovici Wihl: De gravissimis aliquot Phoenicum inscriptionibus Commentatio philologico-critica, cui accedit oratio Germanice scripta, quam in societate Philomathia Monacensi . Karl Wolf, Munich 1831 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive )
  3. ^ Christian Daniel Beck (editor): General repertory of the latest domestic and foreign literature for 1831 . 13th year, Carl Cnobloch, Leipzig 1831, Volume 1, p. 445 ( Google Books )
  4. ^ Advertisement by the Paderborn publishing house W. Crüwell (edited by Wihl and Franz Löher ) in the supplement to No. 257 of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung , edition of March 28, 1849
  5. ^ Ludwig Wihl: H. Heine in Paris . In: Telegraph for Germany . Nos. 117-122, July 1838 ( digitized ).
  6. ↑ Heine's letter to Gustav Ferdinand Kühne , May 19, 1839 - cf. Rudolf Hirsch, Werner Vordtriede (ed.): Poets about their poems . Volume 8 / II: Norbert Altenhofer (Ed.): Heinrich Heine . Heimeran, Munich 1971, p. 387 ( archive.org )
  7. ↑ Michel Espagne: German Jews in Paris around 1850 . In: Thomas Koebner , Sigrid Weigel (Ed.): Nachmärz. The origin of aesthetic modernity in a post-revolutionary constellation . Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1996, ISBN 978-3-531-12413-1 , p. 188 ( Google Books )
  8. ↑ Heine's letter to Alfred Meißner , November 1, 1850 - cf. Rudolf Hirsch, Werner Vordtriede (ed.): Poets about their poems . Volume 8 / II: Norbert Altenhofer (Ed.): Heinrich Heine . Heimeran, Munich 1971, p. 363 ( Google Books )
  9. ↑ Heine's letter to Alfred Meißner, March 1, 1852 - cf. Heinrich Heine. Secular edition . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1971, p. 184 ( Google Books )
  10. ^ Ludwig Julius Fränkel:  Wihl, Ludwig . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 42, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1897, pp. 469-472.
personal data
SURNAME Wihl, Ludwig
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wihl, Louis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German classical philologist, orientalist, writer and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH October 24, 1807
PLACE OF BIRTH Wevelinghoven , Département de la Roer, French Empire
DATE OF DEATH January 16, 1882
Place of death Brussels