Victor Hehn

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Victor Hehn

Victor Hehn (born September 26 . Jul / 8. October  1813 greg. In Tartu , Estonia; † 21st March 1890 in Berlin ) was a Baltic German cultural historian .

Live and act

Hehn's grandfather, Johann Martin Hehn , was a pastor and Estonian linguist, his father, Gustav Heinrich Hehn, was a district court secretary and lawyer in Dorpat. He attended a private school and then high school and studied classical philology at the University of Dorpat . Through a position as a private tutor he earned the money for an extended trip to Italy, which he did not start until 1838 after continuing his studies in Berlin.

Because of his editorial work at the Dorpater Wochenschrift Das Inland , he was arrested and exiled to Tula . The exile was lifted by Tsar Alexander II . Hehn was able to return to Saint Petersburg and became a librarian there in 1855. After his retirement in 1873 he lived as a freelance author in Berlin, where he also died. He was a staunch supporter of Bismarck and a keen critic of the times: "If all German journalists could be exterminated, the nation's level of education would increase noticeably within a year," he wrote in a letter to Hermann Wichmann .

He wrote numerous travel reports and cultural-historical treatises. His correspondence with the composer and writer Wichmann, a student of Louis Spohr and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, is of particular historical interest . Hehn's letters to Wichmann were edited by the recipient himself in 1890 and published as a book; Wichmann's counter letters, over 400 letters and cards, are in the Berlin State Library , music department.

Hehn's letters were offered for sale by Wichmann's descendants in 2015 through an antiquarian bookshop. It became apparent that Wichmann left a not inconsiderable part of the letters unprinted at the time, which particularly affected Hehn's frequent anti-Semitic abuses.

In the sales catalog it says:

"Wichmann writes about the omissions in his foreword:" Only those passages whose publication did not seem to be in the spirit of the eternal have been deleted. " In the meantime, almost all of the deleted passages show an undisguised anti-Semitic tendency, for example in the following small selection of passages: "Since I've lived in Berlin, a whole theory of Judaism has accumulated in my head and heart, from which I have no secret I want to do when I will once again have the pleasure of being able to talk to you in private. For today only this much: It has come to the point that when a German makes a remark in a conversation about Jews, he involuntarily drops his voice muffles how someone used to do something bad about the king. The Jews are the rulers and don't let us get away with anything. If someone needs an expression in a letter from Rome to a friend in Berlin that a Jew does not like, take it This circumcised third party has decided to give the scribe a sermon and a kind of reprimand. We are that far. " (April 11, 1878) - "Incidentally, the Jewish struggle goes on cheerfully in Berlin and throughout Germany, but the oriental parasites that eat away at the marrow of Germanism do not allow themselves to be disturbed in their quiet work. Recently they were in Weimar held a so-called writers' day and among the more than a hundred present there was hardly a pure-blood German [.] I don't know what Schiller said about it, but Goethe will have been very reluctant, because as a native of Frankfurt he knew about this [.] most famous member but Paul Lindau, author of Countess Lea, the Shakespeare of the nineteenth century. " (3. X. 1880) - "Now to Stocker. He is the most hated, the most mortally hated among the public characters, namely hated by the liberal and the Jews (both are one and the same) [.] Stocker is a top-class public speaker , a little Luther who, like this one, had the courage to reach into the wasp's nest; he has caused considerable damage to the party that is to be fought [.] I am a stranger in these countries and do not even have the right to vote [. ] "(16. V. 1888)"

- Eberhard Köstler: Hymn to Life. Catalog for the Stuttgart Antiquarian Book Fair 2015.

Victor Hehn died in Berlin in 1890 at the age of 76 and was buried in the Old St. Matthew Cemetery in Schöneberg . The grave has not been preserved.

Works (selection)

  • Cultivated plants and domestic animals in their transition from Asia to Greece and Italy as well as the rest of Europe. Historical-linguistic sketches . Berlin 1870, 5th edition 1888, 9th edition 1963 = reprint of the 8th edition from 1911. Digitized
  • Goethe and the audience . A literary history in miniature. Nicolai, Berlin 1988
  • Italy and Italians . Pustet, Salzburg 1981
  • The salt. A cultural-historical study . Unchangeable reprogr. Reprint of. Edition Berlin, 1873. Wissenschaftliche Buchges., Darmstadt 1964
  • Karl Deichgraeber (Ed.): From Victor Hehn's estate. Akad. D. Knowledge ud lit., Mainz 1951
  • Goethe and the audience. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1949
  • Thoughts on Goethe. Reichl, Darmstadt 1921
  • About the physiognomy of the Italian landscape. Jonck & Poliewsky, Riga 1908
  • Letters from Victor Hehn, from 1876 until his death March 23, 1890 to his friend Hermann Wichmann , ed. by Herman Wichmann, Stuttgart: Cotta 1890

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Victor Hehn  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eberhard Köstler: Hymn to Life. Catalog for the Stuttgart Antiquarian Book Fair Tutzing 2015, offer No. 126.
  2. ↑ Eberhard Köstler: Hymn to Life. Catalog for the Stuttgart Antiquarian Book Fair. Tutzing 2015, offer no.126.
  3. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende: Lexicon of Berlin tombs . Haude & Spener, Berlin 2006. p. 303.
personal data
SURNAME Hehn, Victor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Baltic cultural historian
DATE OF BIRTH October 8, 1813
PLACE OF BIRTH Dorpat
DATE OF DEATH March 21, 1890
Place of death Berlin