Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl

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Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl

Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl , from 1883 von Riehl (born May 6, 1823 in Biebrich , † November 16, 1897 in Munich ) was a German journalist, novelist and cultural historian. In his works he emphasized social structures early on and thus gained influence on the development of folklore in the 19th century, the scientific founder of which he is considered to be.

Life

Birthplace of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl in the Schlosspark in Wiesbaden-Biebrich

Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl was born in Biebrich as the son of the ducal Nassau palace administrator Friedrich August Riehl (1789–1839) and his wife Elisabeth Riehl (1793–1856). His father committed suicide in 1839. First he attended the Latin school in Wiesbaden , then the grammar school in Weilburg , where he passed the school leaving examination in 1841 .

From 1841 to 1843 he studied theology in Marburg , Tübingen and Gießen . Motives for this study were his father's suicide and the poor financial situation. After passing his exams, he turned to philosophy , history and art history , which he u. a. studied in Bonn . There was one Ernst Moritz Arndt to his academic teachers. Under the influence of Arndt, Riehl, who after passing the theological candidate exam actually wanted to become a village pastor, decided to work as a freelance writer on cultural history and social politics .

Since 1841 he was already active as a writer and journalist. Topics such as economics , church politics and forestry and agriculture should also follow. Riehl wrote newspaper articles in Frankfurt am Main , Karlsruhe and Wiesbaden and published the Nassauische Allgemeine Zeitung from 1848 to 1851 , while at the same time he was entrusted with the musical direction of the court theater in Wiesbaden. The Allgemeine Zeitung was a daily newspaper launched on April 1, 1848 by the Nassau government to represent its positions. Riehl seems to have retired from active collaboration at the end of April 1850. His successor was Alois Boczek , who brought the paper on a course of political Catholicism. The ensuing dispute with the Nassau government led to the suspension of the Nassauische Allgemeine Zeitung on August 22, 1854.

From 1851 to 1854 Riehl worked in Augsburg as editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung based there .

Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, ca.1860

In 1854 Maximilian II brought him to the Munich court, where he was "chief editor for press affairs of the royal house and the outside" and received an honorary professorship at the political economy faculty, which was converted in 1859 to a full professorship for cultural history and statistics . His lectures were among the most popular at the university. In 1861 he became a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences .

In 1883 Riehl was raised to the nobility. In 1885 he was appointed director of the Bavarian National Museum and general curator of the art monuments and antiquities of Bavaria.

family

Riehl married Bertha von Knoll (1824-1894) from Stuttgart in Eppstein (Taunus) in 1846 , and before their wedding she was a successful singer at the Frankfurt City Theater . The couple had five sons, one of whom died prematurely, and four daughters, including:

  • Heinrich Karl (1852–1910), farmer in Oberföhring
  • Berthold (1858–1911), professor of art history at Munich University
  • Helene Christine (1848–1919), landscape painter ∞ Christian August Vogler (1841–1925), Dr. phil., professor at the Agricultural University in Berlin
  • Elisabeth Ida (1861–1937), teacher of language and music at the Neumayerisches Mädcheninstitut in Munich
  • Hedwig Antonie (1867–1947), violinist, music teacher in Erfurt.

After the death of his first wife, he married Antonie Eckardt († 1916) in Stuttgart in 1896 . Riehl died in Munich at the age of 74.

Personal beliefs

Kulturgeschichtliche Novellen , Stuttgart, 1864, third edition
Life riddle , Stuttgart, 1888, second edition
Musical character heads , seventh edition, Stuttgart 1899 (linen cover with Art Nouveau motifs)

Riehl's scientific interest was in the "morality" of the German people. Methodically, he was groundbreaking: the researcher should wander his field . He was one of the first to deal scientifically with social and cultural-historical topics. Among other things, he attempted to establish a “folklore as a science” or a “science of the people”.

His most famous work is The Natural History of the People as the Basis of a German Social Policy (4 volumes, 1851–1869), in which geographical factors, social conditions and German culture and way of life are emphasized. In the first volume Land und Menschen (1854), Riehl put the national character of the European peoples in direct relation to the environment around them: The tamed park and the cleared field are characteristic landscapes of the English and French, the counterpart of which he is in the wilderness of the German forest saw. In the third volume, Die Familie (1855), he analyzed the family as the basis of all social developments and as the nucleus of society. The basic approach was his dichotomous gender image: The difference “between woman and man” results, like a law, “naturally necessary” in the “unequal structure of civil and political society”. Riehl was not only critical of urbanization in a time of industrialization , he even claimed that it was destroying families. Furthermore, the urban space should not displace “forest, pasture and water”, thereby attacking the influences on the state of the landscape that went hand in hand with the development of a civilized society that was remote from nature. Riehl also saw urban areas as the “breeding ground for the socialist spirit of equalization ” as a result of the isolation of desperate individuals, which in turn was due to the destruction of families. This is where his tendency towards subjective generalizations and his conservatism become evident.

However, Riehl did not oppose any developments in the cities. He stated that “indolence” in the social conservatism of the peasant population and “movement” in the progressive attitude of the city dwellers are equally fundamental to society.

meaning

Due to the subject of his investigation, Riehl is considered to be a thought leader or founder u. a. folklore, cultural history and sociology. Despite some subjective generalizations, his theories have been important for the development of the cultural and social history of Germany. His descriptions of numerous, even remote milieus (e.g. traveling theater , rascals ) are still of value . However, his rejection of analytical procedures and “book learning” (of the 19th century!) In favor of wandered experiences and literary expression has made less school; but Girtler and Honer, among others, use this method in contemporary German-language cultural sociology .

Riehl is also considered to be one of the pioneers of nature conservation in the sense of wilderness - and not (only) cultural landscape protection. So in 1857 he called for the “right of the wilderness” alongside the “right of the field”: “For centuries it was a matter of progress to unilaterally defend the right of the field; Now, on the other hand, it is also a matter of progress to defend the right of the wilderness alongside the right of the arable land. And even if the Volkswirth is so reluctant and indignant against this fact, the people researching social politician must nevertheless persevere and fight for the right of the wilderness. ”The successful development of a“ people's organism ”not only requires the development of cultural individuality (cf. . Herder ), but also the preservation of wilderness, on the one hand as a reservoir of original, alienated power that protects against the negative consequences of industrialization, urbanization, etc., and on the other hand as a place of absence of social constraints and thus personal freedom in which people can can become aware of his natural individuality, natural morality and individual self-responsibility.

However, Riehl is also considered to be one of the main pioneers of the legend of the patriarchal-idyllic extended family as a typical way of life of the pre-industrial era, which was only destroyed by the beginning of industrialization, but which, according to today's knowledge, did not exist in this form and spread. In the work Die Familie , Riehl first appeared in public in 1855 with his family-sociological program, thus establishing the legend of the pre-industrial extended family in the "whole house", projecting wishful ideas backwards into the past and then making them the basis of his 'findings' .

Honors

Riehl received the Maximilian Order (1871), was appointed to the Privy Council (1889) and was bearer of the Bavarian Order of Merit (1897). In 1958, in honor of Riehl , an institution for the second educational path , the Wilhelm-Heinrich-Riehl-Kolleg , established as a foundation by the Düsseldorf Chamber of Crafts , was named after him.

Fonts

  • The story of Eisele and Beisele . Roman, 1848
  • The natural history of the people as the basis of a German social policy , 1851–1869 [including numerous new editions]
    • 1. Country and people , 1854
    • 2. Civil society , 1851
    • 3. The family , 1855
    • 4. Wanderbuch , 1869
  • Musical character heads , 1853
  • Hausmusik, fifty songs by German poets set to music by WHRiehl , 1855. [2. Ed. 1860]
  • Civil history novellas , 1856
  • The Palatinate. A Rhenish folk picture , 1857
  • Cultural Studies from Three Centuries , 1859
  • German Labor , 1861
  • Ancient Stories , 1863–1864
  • On the concept of civil society , lecture, 1864
  • New book of short stories , 1867
  • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing as a university friend , 1873
  • Free lectures , 1871 a. 1885
  • From the corner. 7 new novellas , 1874
  • Neideck Castle , novella, 1875
  • At the end of the day. 6 new novellas , 1880
  • Life riddle. 5 novellas , 1888
  • Cultural and historical characters , 1891
  • Religious Studies of a World Child , 1894
  • A Whole Man , Roman, 1897
  • Jörg Muckenbuber . In: German Novellenschatz . Edited by Paul Heyse and Hermann Kurz. Vol. 8. 2nd ed. Berlin, [1910], pp. 67-94. In: Weitin, Thomas (Ed.): Fully digitized corpus. The German Novellenschatz . Darmstadt / Konstanz, 2016. ( digitized and full text in the German text archive )

literature

  • Jasper von Altenbockum : Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl 1823–1897. Social science between cultural history and ethnography. Cologne u. a .: Böhlau 1994 (= Münstersche Historische Forschungen , 6), ISBN 3-412-09293-2
  • Arndt Brendecke:  Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , pp. 588-590 ( digitized version ).
  • Viktor von Geramb : Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl. Life and Work (1823–1897), Salzburg: Müller 1954.
  • Hannes Ginzel: The spatial concept in folklore taking into account Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl. Würzburg: Univ. Diss. 1970.
  • Volker Hartmann: The German cultural history from its beginnings to Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl. Marburg: Univ. Diss. 1971.
  • Wolf Lepenies : craftsman and poet on this: WH Riehl , in: Ders .: The three cultures. Sociology between literature and science , Munich / Vienna: Hanser 1985, pp. 239–243.
  • Friedhelm Lövenich: Nationalized morality. The conservative construction of the lifeworld in Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl's "Natural History of the People". Opladen: Leske u. Budrich 1992, ISBN 3-8100-1022-7 .
  • Dennis MacCort: Perspectives on music in German fiction. The music-fiction of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl. Bern u. a .: Lang 1974 (= German studies in America , 14), ISBN 3-261-00853-9 .
  • Robert Müller-Sternberg: WH Riehl's folk teaching. Your intellectual-historical foundations and contemporary historical limits. Leipzig: Eichblatt 1939 (= Form und Geist , 41).
  • Siegfried A. Peter: Work and profession with Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl. A psychological-sociological contribution to the development of the professional concept in the 19th century. Erlangen-Nuremberg: Univ. Diss. 1964.
  • Anna Schrott: WH Riehl's novellas in the service of public education. Halle: Akademischer Verlag 1944 (= pedagogy in history, theory and practice , 8).
  • Karl Ruprecht : Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl's "Kulturgeschichtliche Novellen" with consideration of their relation to the source , Königsberg: Univ. Diss. 1936.
  • Florian Simhart: Civil Society and Revolution. An ideology-critical investigation of political and social consciousness in the middle of the 19th century; presented using the example of a group of the educated middle class of Munich. Munich: Commission for Bavarian State History 1978 (= Studies on Bavarian Constitutional and Social History , 9), ISBN 3-7696-9921-1 .
  • B. Stein: The history of the Wiesbaden newspaper industry from its beginnings to the present. Typescript [without place and year, probably Wiesbaden 1943], found in March 2002 in the Wiesbadener Tagblatt archive (as a carbon copy). PDF download .
  • Peter Steinbach : Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl , in: Hans-Ulrich Wehler : German historians. Volume VI, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht 1980, ISBN 3-525-33443-5 , pp. 37-54.
  • Wolf-Heino Struck : Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl and the plan for an “album for Nassau's great sons”, in: Nassauische Annalen 95 (1984), pp. 275–280.
  • Peter Thiergen: Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl in Russia (1856–1886). Studies in Russian journalism and intellectual history in the 2nd half of the 19th century. Gießen: Schmitz 1978 (= building blocks for the history of literature among the Slavs , 11).
  • Klara Trenz: Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl's "Science of the People". With particular reference to his portrayal of the people of the Saar-Palatinate. Berlin: Junker and Dünnhaupt 1937 (= New German Research , 160; Modern History , 5).
  • Kirsten Wiese: Hiked cultural landscapes. The mediation of cultural history in Theodor Fontane's "Walks through the Mark Brandenburg" and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl's "Wandering Book". Munich: Herbert Utz Verlag 2007, ISBN 3-8316-0664-1 .
  • Andrea Zinnecker: romance, rock and camisole. Folklore on the way to the Third Reich. The Riehl reception. Münster u. a .: Waxmann 1996 (= Internationale Hochschulschriften , 192), ISBN 3-89325-393-9 .

Web links

Wikisource: Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl  - Sources and full texts
Commons : Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted from Ute Frevert: Man and woman, and woman and man. Gender differences in modern times. Munich 1995, p. 61.
  2. ^ Riehl: The German work . 1861: here p. 73.
  3. ^ Thomas Kirchhoff & Ludwig Trepl : Landscape, Wilderness, Ecosystem: On the cultural ambiguity of aesthetic, moral and theoretical conceptions of nature. Introductory overview . In this. (Ed.): Ambiguous nature. Landscape, wilderness and ecosystem as cultural-historical phenomena . transcript, Bielefeld: pp. 13–66, here 50. Cf. Vera Vicenzotti: Stadt und Wildnis. The meaning of the wilderness in Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl's conservative city criticism . Diploma thesis at the Chair of Landscape Ecology, TU Munich, Freising 2005. 117 S. https://web.archive.org/web/20120201074207/http://www.wzw.tum.de/loek/mitarbeiter/vicenzotti/dipl_vicenzotti.pdf (March 4, 2012). On the origin of the idea of ​​nature as a power reservoir in Schopenhauer see Charles Taylor: Quellen des Selbst. The emergence of modern identity . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1996: p. 772.
  4. ^ Peter Laslett: The world we have lost - further explored. Fischer TB Frankfurt am Main 1991
  5. ↑ Martin Burkhardt: Household structures in the 18th century in the German southwest and the legend of the pre-industrial extended family. In: Florilegium Suevicum: Contributions to Southwest German regional studies; Festschrift for Franz Quarthal on his 65th birthday / ed. by Gerhard Fritz and Daniel Kirn 2008, pp. 111–138.
personal data
SURNAME Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist, novelist and cultural historian
DATE OF BIRTH May 6, 1823
PLACE OF BIRTH Wiesbaden-Biebrich
DATE OF DEATH November 16, 1897
Place of death Munich