Michaelishaus (Göttingen)
The Michaelishaus (originally Londonschänke ) is a half-timbered house in the city center of Göttingen at Prinzenstrasse 21, originally Mühlenpfortenstrasse, opposite the Old University Library . The history of the building is closely linked to the University of Göttingen , as many important scholars lived or worked in the building.
Architectural style
The plastered baroque half-timbered building on a high natural stone basement plinth was built by the Hanoverian monastery master builder Joseph Schädeler (1692–1763), who was also responsible for the construction of the college and library building opposite and the university's riding stables . The two-storey building with a hipped roof , which was completed in the summer of 1737, has its representative main wing facing south towards Prinzenstraße , while a narrower side wing extends along the street Am Leinekanal . The main wing at Prinzenstrasse is 31.11 meters long and 14.78 meters deep. The secondary wing is arranged at an angle of 83 ° to the main wing and has a width of around 8 meters, the facade to the Leine Canal is 38 meters long.
The main facade, which is divided into a three-axis, slightly protruding central projectile 9.33 meters wide and two four-axis side wings each 10.83 and 10.95 meters wide, originally had a centrally arranged Baroque portal , segmented arched windows and a clear emphasis on the corners and the risalits by im Elaborated plaster, also color-contrasted corner blocks and also offset horizontal cornices between the floors. In the first quarter of the 19th century, the strong structure was changed to a simpler, classicist facade design with a cornice-shaped lintel and rectangular windows with accentuated sills. The central projection has three storeys and is crowned by a flat triangular gable, which is set off from the facade by a strongly pronounced cornice. The entrance can be reached via a symmetrical two-flight flight of stairs , inside there is a spacious three-flight wooden staircase with straight runs. Between the entrance and the stairwell there is a wide, but not very long foyer, the spatial impression of which is determined by two pillars on the sides and in front of each free-standing, simple fluted columns that support a girder. Many of the interior doors feature the segmental lintel, popular at the time of construction, and the room height is just under four meters. A second entrance with simple stairs is at the rear of the main wing. The side wing to the Leine Canal, which is shown on a drawing from 1816 with a side entrance near the corner of Prinzenstraße, which can be reached via a simple staircase, is rather simple today and only has an external access from the rear courtyard, which is mainly used as a parking lot.
The entire building has a cellar, which is designed as a cross vault made of natural stone.
A first extension was made in 1897–1898, following the side wing on the street Am Leinekanal . It was a single-storey structure with tall windows that was demolished in 2006, except for the street facade that was preserved as a free-standing wall. 1901–1902 a two-storey, almost square new building with a tent roof was erected on the Leine Canal (Am Leine Canal 3), the slightly indented staircase of which is directly adjacent to the extension built four years earlier.
history
Residential and lodging house
In the late Middle Ages, the city of Göttingen was temporarily a member of the Hanseatic League and residence of the Principality of Göttingen . In the later centuries their importance decreased sharply. The city was barely able to recover from the stress of the Thirty Years' War. When the university was founded in 1737, Göttingen made a poor and neglected impression as a city. In the years the university was founded, extensive construction work was necessary to bring the infrastructure to an acceptable level. The construction of the London tavern was part of these necessary infrastructure measures. As a university town, Göttingen needed a comfortable residential and lodging house in order to be attractive for the sons of the most distinguished families. The garden plot directly opposite the site of the first college and university building seemed well suited. The property belonged to the director of the Göttingen Latin School, Christoph August Heumann, who, after tough negotiations, sold it to the master builder Joseph Schädeler in November 1734 for 206 thalers . Schadeler had agreed to build a residential and lodging house for “notables” worth 7,000 thalers here, at the request of the sovereign Georg II , Elector of Hanover and King of Great Britain . To ensure the profitability of his investment, he was given the privilege of serving wine and setting up a pool table in the building at his request . The building was completed in time for the opening of the university and was named "Londonschänke" after a respected inn in Hanover.
On July 15, 1737, Johann Caspar Hampe took over the management. As early as September 1737, the house was used as a hotel during the university's official inauguration ceremony. In the basement, the Italian dealer Joseph Respettino presented Mediterranean delicatessen and haberdashery . Hampe only acted as the landlord for three years; Joseph Hümer, who stayed for two years, took his place. Even after that, the hosts changed in quick succession.
In 1746 Schädeler leased the house to Anton Christoph Cleve, who with his host Christian Wilhelm Saltzenburg brought new momentum to the business. The middle and upper floors were set up for overnight guests, while students were catered for on the lower floor, with three different qualities of the lunch table being offered: delicate, mediocre and simple. In the basement there was room for the student servants. The tavern flourished, sometimes more than desired, and there were reports of student excesses. The overnight business was generally poor, because the mail route from Hanover to Kassel passed Göttingen for a long time.
From around 1750 the house was included in the university operations. The theologian and church historian Johann Lorenz von Mosheim , chancellor of the university since 1747, gave his lectures in the great hall of the London tavern. Operations were interrupted by the Seven Years' War from 1756 to 1762, when Göttingen was occupied by French troops. The London tavern served as a military hospital and was in an uninhabitable condition after the French left.
Home of the Michaelis family
The respected professor
In 1764, the professor of oriental studies, Johann David Michaelis, bought the building from the heirs of Sculler for 4,300 thalers and turned it into a residential building for his family and students, where lectures could also take place. The spacious cellar was rented to the landlord of the Zur Krone inn on Weender Strasse as a wine store.
Michaelis came to Göttingen as a private lecturer in 1745 , became an associate professor in 1746 and a full professor in 1750. He belonged to the philosophical faculty and was very respected in Germany and many European countries. The academies in Paris and London appointed him as their member of the emperor granted him the title of Councilor .
His most famous admirer was Johann Wolfgang Goethe , who wrote in his memoirs about the choice of his place of study and his futile longing for Göttingen:
- With these attitudes I always had Göttingen in mind. My whole trust rested in men like Heyne , Michaelis and so many others; my dearest wish was to sit at their feet and listen to their teachings. But my father remained immobile.
- Goethe, Poetry and Truth , Part Two, Book Six
At his father's request, Goethe had to study in Leipzig and did not enjoy Michaelis' lectures, which Michaelis - as was common at the time - usually held in his house, in riding breeches, boots and spurred, with his sword at his side and the Bible the arm. One of his students wrote about him:
- In the most natural conversational tone, in fluent and captivating language, through an extraordinary tongue-tughness, a lively play of facial expressions and gestures, through an inexhaustible variety in expressions, images and modes of representation, of course also through all sorts of digressions, allusions, jokes and crude jokes, he knew his always numerous To stimulate, captivate and entertain the audience.
Michaelis was considered a professor who meticulously collected his audience fees, because at that time the students had to pay the professor individually for each lecture. Michaelis refused occasional discounts for poorer students. He was so prominent and his events so coveted that he only allowed fully paying listeners.
On August 25, 1787, a remarkable examination took place in Michaelis' study. Dorothea Schlözer , the seventeen-year-old daughter of the Göttingen professor August Ludwig Schlözer , was examined by a small group of distinguished Göttingen professors on the subjects of coinage, mineralogy, mathematics and art history and was awarded a doctorate from the Philosophical Faculty. This was the second doctorate ever for a woman in Germany (after the doctor Dorothea Erxleben ) and the first doctorate for a woman to become a Dr. phil.
Student life in the side wing
Michaelis rented the side wing on the Leine Canal , which had its own entrance, to students. He employed two students as “general entrepreneurs” who continued to operate the rooms on their own account. So a relatively unattended student life was in the wings emerge and one of the unpopular among university authorities student religious reasons. With these medals, duels were compulsory, which caused unpleasant incidents from time to time. The only Göttingen duel of the 18th century with a fatal outcome took place in one of the apartments on April 22nd, 1766 . The law student Johann Heinrich Techentin, son of a Lübeck confectioner, died of a stab in the heart. He was buried outside the cemetery walls of the Bartholomew cemetery . The perpetrator was able to flee and was initially sentenced to death in absentia by the university court due to the provisions in force in the Electorate of Hanover. This incident was of great importance for student fencing ( see also: Mensur ) in all of Central Europe, because because of this incident, the Göttingen students switched from shock fencing to less dangerous slash fencing . The " Göttinger Hieber " was created as a forerunner of the basket racket , which is still used today by the student associations in most university cities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
The student country teams also used the rooms of their members in the house of Professor Michaelis for meeting purposes during these decades. In the Göttingen city archive, for example, there are minutes of meetings of the Hanoverian Landsmannschaft from 1778, which are contained in the “Mr. Hofraths Michaelis home ”, but also “ at the Hardenberger Hofe ” .
Prominent visit
The Michaelis family not only offered accommodation for students, but also led a lively social life, which included numerous visits from famous personalities. In the summer of 1766, the royal British personal physician John Pringle and the American book printer and publisher, politician and diplomat, writer and scientist Benjamin Franklin came to Göttingen, where both were guests again and again in the house of the Michaelis family and there met the Göttingen scientists Physics and politics exchanged. On July 19, 1766, both of them attended a meeting of the Göttingen Society of Sciences (today: Academy of Sciences in Göttingen ) in Michaelis' house. Franklin was known as a physicist and researcher of electricity, he later worked on the American Constitution of 1787 and is still considered one of the founding fathers of the United States .
On August 2, 1766, the poet Gotthold Ephraim Lessing stopped in Göttingen and was Michaelis's guest. In 1783 Goethe stayed at the Gasthaus Krone and visited some Göttingen professors, including Michaelis in his house.
It was a great event for Göttingen when, on July 10th, 1786 three princes, the sons of the British king and Hanoverian elector Georg III. , enrolled at the university. This was about
- Ernst August , Duke of Cumberland and from 1837 King of Hanover (15 years old at the time of matriculation),
- August Friedrich, Duke of Sussex (then 13 years old), and
- Adolph Friedrich, Duke of Cambridge (then 12 years old).
They moved into what was later called the Prince's House, diagonally across from the Michaelis family home. The Michaelis daughter Luise wrote in her memoirs:
- In the winter of 86/87 one came into closer contact and social intercourse with the princes, ie the Michaelis house. They lived diagonally across from us so that you could see each other from our room and their dining rooms.
The princes regularly came to Professor Michaelis's house for tea or for board games. The street where they lived and where the Michaelishaus is located was later renamed from Mühlenpfortenstraße to Prinzenstraße .
After Michaelis' death
Michaelis died in Göttingen in August 1791. His grave site is no longer known today. A year later, his heirs sold the big house to the medicine professor and surgeon Justus Arnemann . From the death of his wife, who died in 1800 after the birth of their child, the latter was never able to recover. He went bankrupt in 1803, left Göttingen and committed suicide in Hamburg in 1806.
In the years 1795/96, the English medical student Thomas Young lived with Arnemann , who did his doctorate in Göttingen, later did research as an ophthalmologist in England in the field of optics and is considered the founder of the wave theory of light ( double slit experiment 1802). He also did important preparatory work for the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphs .
In 1809 the white binder Johann Georg Bergmann acquired the house from Arnemann's bankruptcy estate. In the time of the Kingdom of Westphalia , the building served as the seat of the prefecture of the Leine department until 1813 . King Jérôme occasionally used the building during his stays in Göttingen for meetings with officials and professors.
After Bergmann's death in 1816, his widow sold the property in 1820 to the court and chancellery Gottlieb Friedrich Christian von Werlhof . After his death in 1842, the government in Hanover purchased the building in order to set up university institutes there.
University building
The first institutes that moved into the building in 1842 dealt with the natural sciences. The Physiological-Zootomic Institute was housed in the side wing on the Leine Canal, where student apartments were set up under Michaelis. Rudolf Wagner took over the management , later Georg Meissner . Both discovered the Meissner corpuscles here in 1852 . The institute was relocated to Wilhelmsplatz in 1886.
The main part of the house with a view of Prinzenstrasse was taken up by the Physikalisches Kabinett (later “Institute”) from 1842 under the direction of Johann Benedict Listing . In the course of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, other physical and mathematical institutes followed. Many famous personalities worked in these institutes at this time, including Wilhelm Weber , Wilhelm Moritz Keferstein , Ludwig Prandtl , Felix Klein , Woldemar Voigt and Walther Hermann Nernst .
From 1928 to 1938 the building also housed the university's ethnographic collection . In March 1932, the theft of a feather helmet and a feather cape, which James Cook had brought to Europe from a trip to the South Seas, caused a stir .
From 1940, humanities / orientalist seminars moved into the building, such as the seminars for:
- Egyptology and Coptic Studies
- Arabic studies
- Cuneiform research
- Iranian Studies
- Near Eastern Archeology as well
- the Institute of Roman and Common Law
In 1935 the name Michaelishaus was proposed and established in 1946.
The most important scientists who worked in the building in the second half of the 20th century include the lawyer Franz Wieacker and the orientalists Eberhard Otto , Wolfgang Helck , Wolfhart Westendorf , Tilman Nagel , Rykle Borger , Friedrich Junge , Frank Kammerzell , Antonio Loprieno , Heike Sternberg-el Hotabi and Christian Leitz .
After the University of Göttingen was converted into a foundation university on January 1, 2003 , the Michaelishaus, which was in dire need of renovation, was sold in 2006 to the architect Jürgen Schenk, who renovated and rented it out. Today (as of 2007) the rooms are used by the Sparkasse Göttingen for private customer business. The humanities seminars moved to other university buildings.
Memorial plaques
In Göttingen it has been customary since 1874 to put marble plaques to commemorate the houses in which famous people lived or worked. On the street front of the Michaelishaus there are six of these Göttingen memorial plaques with the names of
- Michaelis and
- his daughter Caroline Schelling and from
- Thomas Young ,
- Benjamin Franklin ,
- Johann Lorenz von Mosheim and
- since 2008 also the legal historian Franz Wieacker and
- since 2014 the enlightener Adolph Freiherr Knigge .
A differently designed memorial plaque for Johann Benedict Listing is attached above the entrance to the side wing of the building on the courtyard side .
literature
- Marit Borcherding, Marion Wiebel, The Michaelishaus in Göttingen. History, scholars, present , Wallstein: Göttingen, 2007 ISBN 3-8353-0300-7
- Hartmut Boockmann, Göttingen. Past and present of a European university , Göttingen 1997, ISBN 3-525-36234-X , p. 33
- Helga-Maria Kühn: Student life in Göttingen in the 18th century according to contemporary reports, letters, travelogues and files from the city archive , in: Göttingen in the 18th century. A city changes its face. Texts and materials for the exhibition in the Städtisches Museum and the Göttingen City Archives April 26 - August 30, 1987 , Göttingen 1987, pp. 145–181
- Walter Nissen, Christina Prauss, Siegfried Schütz: Göttingen memorial plaques. A biographical guide. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, ISBN 3-525-39161-7
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Source for most of the information in this article is - unless otherwise stated: Marit Borcherding, Marion Wiebel, Das Michaelishaus in Göttingen. History, scholars, present , Wallstein: Göttingen, 2007 ISBN 3-8353-0300-7
- ↑ Ilse Röttgerodt-Riechmann: City of Göttingen . In: Christiane Segers-Glocke (Hrsg.): Monument topography Federal Republic of Germany. Architectural monuments in Lower Saxony . tape 5.1 . Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig 1982, ISBN 3-528-06203-7 , pp. 57 .
- ^ Alfred Oberdiek: Göttingen University Buildings . 2nd edition, Göttingen 2002. ISBN 3-924781-46-X , pp. 77 and 86
- ↑ Otto Deneke: A Göttingen student duel from 1766. Göttingen undated (1934)
- ↑ Art. 14 of the Duel Edict v. 18 July 1735
- ↑ Full texts printed by Otto Deneke: Alte Göttinger Landsmannschaften. Göttingen 1937, pp. 29–31
- ^ Walter Nissen, Christina Prauss, Siegfried Schütz: Göttinger memorial plaques. A biographical guide . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2002, p. 5
Coordinates: 51 ° 32 ′ 4.5 ″ N , 9 ° 55 ′ 57 ″ E