Wilhelm Friedrich Hufnagel

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Wilhelm Friedrich Hufnagel (born June 15, 1754 in Schwäbisch Hall , † February 7, 1830 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a Protestant theologian and educator .

life and work

Wilhelm Friedrich Hufnagel

Hufnagel attended high school in his hometown. From 1773 to 1775 he studied theology at the University of Altdorf and from 1775 in Erlangen . After being promoted to master's degree and private lecturer, he became an associate professor in Erlangen in 1779 and a full professor in 1783 . In 1786 he was rector of the university, in 1788 he was appointed university preacher and senior of the seminary .

In 1791, Hufnagel was offered a call to Frankfurt am Main to succeed Gabriel Christoph Benjamin Mosche as a senior in the Ministry of Preachers . Together with the chairman of the Lutheran consistory responsible for school supervision , Friedrich Maximilian Freiherrn von Günderrode (1753 to 1824), he reformed the backward Frankfurt school system. Until then, apart from the municipal high school, which was founded in 1520, there had been no public schools, but only the district schools , in which private schoolmasters for a fee due to an urban concession that was usually inherited over generations, more badly than right, elementary lessons in reading, writing, catechism and, against special remuneration, also given in arithmetic. In 1803 Günderrode and Hufnagel founded the first Frankfurt Realschule ( model school ), from which the first girls' school later emerged ( Elisabethenschule ). Both schools still exist today as high schools in the Nordend district .

Hufnagel was a representative of theological rationalism and the Enlightenment . He overcame the orthodoxy that had prevailed until then in the Frankfurt Church and stood up for the emancipation of the Reformed and the Jews . In 1806, Grand Duke Carl Theodor von Dalberg decreed the religious neutrality of the state and equal rights for all denominations.

On September 18, 1791, while still in Erlangen, Hufnagel married Caroline Breyer (1775-1804), with whom he had two children: Sophie Wilhelmine Hufnagel (born 1792) and Eduard Hufnagel (1794-1825), professor of history at the municipal high school in Frankfurt.

Hufnagel took an active part in the political and intellectual life of the imperial city of Frankfurt. In July 1796 he was a member of the deputation that wanted to persuade the Austrian General Wartensleben to surrender in order to avoid a bombardment of the city by the French revolutionary army. After the conquest of Frankfurt in August 1796, General Kléber's troops, along with the patricians Günderrode, Georg Steitz and Adolph Carl von Humbracht, took him hostage and brought him to Paris to force the payment of a contribution of eight million francs.

At Hölderlin's suggestion , in 1797 he arranged for Georg Friedrich Hegel to be a court master in the house of the wine merchant Johann Noë Gogel.

In her letters to her son Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Catharina Elisabeth Goethe describes Hufnagel as a passionate and rousing, albeit somewhat “exaggerated” preacher. In 1797 she reports that he particularly valued Goethe's recently published poetry Hermann and Dorothea and that he liked to use the bridal sermon it contained as a copulation speech . "Hufnagel keeps everyone who does not have [the book] or does not carry it in a sack as a manual from the Hottentots".

Grave of Wilhelm Friedrich Hufnagel in the Frankfurt main cemetery

Wilhelm Friedrich Hufnagel was retired in 1823 because of a mental illness. The position of senior in the Ministry of Preachers, which he had held for over 32 years, remained vacant and was not reassigned until 1857. He died on February 7, 1830 in Frankfurt am Main and was buried in the Frankfurt main cemetery.

A street in the Gallus district of Frankfurt , then still Gallusviertel , is named after Hufnagel . The Hufnagel secondary school in Gallus, founded in 1912, was converted into an integrated comprehensive school in 1986 and has been named after Paul Hindemith ever since .

Works

Hufnagel wrote numerous theological and educational writings, including

  • Translations of the Book of Job (1781) and the Song of Songs (1784)
  • Writing on teaching according to the Ten Commandments (1784)
  • Old Testament writings edited according to their content and purpose (2 volumes, 1784 and 1798)
  • Liturgical sheets (12 notebooks, 1787–1802)
  • Drafts of sermons (13 years, 1792–1805)
  • On the merit of the accomplished song "Hermann und Dorothea", to spread religious citizenship and family spirit in general (1799)
  • The Need for Good Educational Institutions (1804)

His publisher was the Nuremberg bookseller Johann Philipp Palm .

literature

Web links

Commons : Wilhelm Friedrich Hufnagel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Frankfurt am Main: Chronicle of Gallus. Retrieved January 25, 2018 .
  2. ↑ http://www.paul-hindemith-schule.de/unsere%20schule.htm
predecessor Office successor
Gabriel Christoph Benjamin Mosche Senior of the Ministry of Preachers in Frankfurt am Main
1791–1823
personal data
SURNAME Hufnagel, Wilhelm Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Protestant theologian and school reformer
DATE OF BIRTH June 15, 1754
PLACE OF BIRTH Schwäbisch Hall
DATE OF DEATH February 7, 1830
Place of death Frankfurt am Main