Samuel Grosser

Samuel Grosser

Samuel Grosser (born February 18, 1664 in Paschkerwitz in the Gmina Długołęka in Silesia ; † June 24, 1736 in Görlitz ) was a historian , educator and long-time director of the Görlitz high school .

Life

Samuel Grosser was born on February 18, 1664 in Paschkerwitz in the Silesian Duchy of Oels . His father of the same name was a Protestant pastor - most recently in Nimptsch . At the age of seven he moved to the Brieger Gymnasium, from where he soon moved to the Magdalenäum in Breslau and later to the Zittau Gymnasium . Here the rector Christian Weise took him into his care. He got Grosser a job as a tutor in a Zittau participatory budget and invited him to accompany him on a trip to Prague , where they stopped at Bohuslav Balbin, among others . In 1683 Grosser began studying at the University of Leipzig , which he completed with a doctorate with a Magister Artium .

Since 1688 Grosser held so-called Collegia privata in Leipzig on poetry, history and geography. In 1690 the Leipzig council appointed him vice-rector of the Nikolaischule , in 1691 he was appointed rector of the grammar school in Altenburg , Saxony . In 1695 he accepted the position of rector at the Görlitzer Gymnasium, which was of national importance at the time, and immediately began to reform its teaching in the spirit of the educational reform currents of the 17th century. Grosser placed the usefulness and practicability of the knowledge imparted more strongly in the curricular center of his school; he pushed the old languages back a little in favor of German. Grosser also placed great emphasis on conveying recent local and national history . According to his understanding, school lessons should more meet the requirements of bourgeois life and concentrate less on imparting “dead knowledge”. He also valued school theater, which he regarded as a practical instrument for imparting knowledge and developing personality: 61 theater plays should come from his own pen.

With his pedagogical endeavors, Grosser was completely in the tradition of his teacher Christian Weise, with whom he also maintained letters from Görlitz and whose first biographer he became after his death. In this sense, Grosser is on the one hand a representative of the German Early Enlightenment . But on the other hand, he is attested in research to be at least ambivalent to Pietism, which was also flourishing at the time . As Görlitz rector, Grosser shaped the development of one of the most important civil training institutions in the Silesian-Saxon region for almost four decades and accompanied thousands of students in their intellectual development. Grosser is credited with a significant share in the founding of the Familiar Görlitz Collegium Poeticum at the University of Leipzig (1697) by former students of the Görlitz High School. The college is considered to be the nucleus of the German societies later associated with the name Gottsched and spread over the entire old empire .

Grosser developed an extremely broad journalistic activity early on. During his time in Leipzig he repeatedly took part in disputations , the theses of which were often printed. As rector in Altenburg and Leipzig, he published various school programs with learned content. In keeping with the fashion of the time, Grosser also wrote a number of occasional publications in Latin and German. Grosser made a name for himself as a pedagogue in the spirit of his old teacher Christian Weise with a series of school and instructional publications: the first edition of his Thorough Instructions for Logica appeared in 1697, a school edition of Sallust two years later , and in 1702 the work Theologia thetica elementaris , 1703 an introduction to Latin lessons, and finally a Philosophia instrumentalis in 1732 . Grosser's main work today is his extensive history of Upper and Lower Lusatia , published in 1714 under the title Lausitzische Merckworthiness . With this work he had sparked a solid controversy, as opponents (especially from the ranks of the Lusatian nobility) accused him of politically unilaterally taking sides for the interests of the Upper Lusatian Six Cities. The historical work by Grosser contemporary and compatriot Johann Benedict Carpzov , published five years later, is in this sense a reaction and antithesis to Grosser's magnum opus.

Since 1712 he was a foreign member of the Royal Prussian Society of Sciences .

Works (selection)

• Thorough instruction on the Logica. Bautzen 1697; 10351299 in VD 18 .
• Sallustius cum observationibus et Chrestomathia Sallusttiana. Dresden and Leipzig 1699.
• Isagoge stili Romani. Goerlitz 1703.
• Vita Chr. Weissii. Leipzig 1710.
• Lusatian highlights […]. Leipzig and Bautzen 1714. ( digitized version of the BSB )
• Theologia thetica elementaris. Leipzig 1719.
• Philosophia instrumentalis. Leipzig and Görlitz 1732.

literature

• Heinrich Julius Kämmel :  Grosser, Samuel . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 9, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1879, p. 749 f.
• Gottlieb Friedrich Otto : Lexicon of the Upper Lusatian writers and artists who died and are still alive since the fifteen centuries, compiled as completely as possible from the most credible sources . Volume 1. Görlitz 1800, pp. 527-540.
• Richard Jecht : The Upper Lusatian historical research in and around Görlitz and Lauban, mainly from 1700-1780 . In: Neues Lausitzisches Magazin , 94, 1918, pp. 1–160.
• Christian Adolf Pescheck : Gallery of Upper Lusatian Historians . In: Neues Lausitzisches Magazin , 34, 1858, pp. 177–229.
• Detlef Döring : The history of the German society in Leipzig. From the founding to the first years of the Seniorat Johann Christoph Gottscheds . Tübingen 2002, pp. 27-44.

Web links

Commons : Samuel Grosser  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Wikisource: Samuel Grosser  - Sources and full texts

• Works by and about Samuel Grosser  in the German Digital Library
• Samuel Grosser . ( Memento from August 31, 2014 in the web archive archive.today ) In: Biographisches Lexikon der Oberlausitz .
• Publications by and about Samuel Grosser in VD 18 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Eduard Emil Koch: History of the hymn and hymn of the Christian, especially the German Protestant church: The poets and singers . 3. Edition. tape 5 . Chr.Belser, 1868, p. 442 ( digitized version in Google book search). Deviating from this, the place of birth is also written Paschkowitz in some sources .
2. ^ Members of the previous academies. Samuel Grosser. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , accessed on March 31, 2015 .