Otto Friedrich Butendach

Portrait of Friedrich Carl Gröger

Otto Friedrich Butendach (born November 7, 1730 in Königsberg in the Neumark , † January 14, 1798 in Lübeck ) was a German Evangelical Reformed theologian.

biography

Butendach was born the son of the salt inspector Friedrich Wilhelm Butendach and attended the school in his place of birth and from 1745 the Joachimsthaler Gymnasium in Berlin . He then studied theology from 1750 at the Brandenburg University of Frankfurt in Frankfurt an der Oder . He heard from Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten , Paul Ernst Jablonsky and Johann Gottlieb Töllner , among others , and passed the preaching examination in Berlin in 1755 before the Reformed Directory . First returned to his school and remained as an inspector at the Joachimsthaler Gymnasium until 1762. From there he was elected preacher of the Reformed Congregation in Lübeck in 1762 . He held this position until his death. Its significance for the history of the Reformed Church in the traditionally Lutheran Hanseatic city lay in the fact that Butendach succeeded in integrating the Reformed into the spiritual life of the city as a lifetime achievement, so that his even more popular successor Johannes Geibel found the way out of the traditional persecution situation succeeded. Butendach was one of the 25 founding members of the Society for the Promotion of Charitable Activities .

The Butendach library

As a bibliophile collector , Butendach founded a private library of around 6000 volumes that was outstanding for Northern Germany at the time and bequeathed it to the Reformed Congregation in Lübeck when he died. Around a third of the holdings in this library shared the fate of valuable holdings in the Lübeck City Library during World War II . These stocks were stored in mining tunnels in Central Germany and ended up as looted art in the Soviet Union after the war . So far, returns have only been made from a few former republics, something over 500 volumes from Georgia . The decimated but still outstanding library is still kept by the community today.

literature

• Alken Bruns: Butendach . In: Hans F. Rothert (Ed.): Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Volume 8. Wachholtz, Neumünster 1987, ISBN 3-529-02648-4 , pp. 51/52.
• Jörg Fligge , Rolf Schweitzer: Back from Georgia . In: Library Service . 31, 1997, ISSN  0006-1972 , pp. 1484–1500, ( PDF (438 kB) ( Memento of June 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive )).
• Barbara Tiemann: The Butendach library in the Reformed Church in Lübeck. The collector and his collection. In: Journal for Lübeck History and Archeology . 65, 1985, ISSN  0083-5609 , pp. 143-221 with additional references

Catalog

• Catalog of the Butendach library of the Ev [Angelic] -Reformierte municipality Lübeck . Created by Barbara Tiemann and Annelen Ottermann with the participation of others. With an introduction by Annelen Ottermann. 4 volumes, Hamburg: Joachim Jungius Society of Sciences 1984

Web links

• Butendach Library in the online version of the handbook of historical book collections