250th birthday of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Germany / Federal Republic of Germany 1992 - 100 Pfennig

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was born on July 1, 1742 in Ober-Ramstadt near Darmstadt as the seventeenth and youngest child of the Protestant pastor Johann Konrad Lichtenberg, who taught him early the love of astronomy. After attending the Latin School in Darmstadt, where his father had become a superintendent, Lichtenberg went to the University of Göttingen in 1763 and studied mathematics, astronomy and natural history. In 1770 he was appointed associate professor and in 1775 full professor of philosophy. From 1772 to 1773, on behalf of the English king, he conducted journeys to the astronomical location of Hanover, Osnabrück and Stade, measurements whose exactness was first surpassed by Gauss; in 1770 Lichtenberg visited England for the first time; This visit was followed by a longer stay in London from 1774 to 1775, which decisively and critically shaped Lichtenberg's Weltanschauung and judgment on contemporary German literature, education, and science. Since returning from England Lichtenberg, apart from a Pentecost trip to Hamburg, no longer traveled; henceforth his life takes place in Göttingen, the observer behind the window becomes the silhouette of the most important German aphorist and first German experimental physicist of European reputation. The history of the natural sciences calls him now only because of the electrical figures discovered by him and named after him. Researchers have recently discovered how phenomenal this discovery was, and that Lichtenberg anticipated the invention of xerocopy. It is unjustly forgotten that Lichtenberg, as a scientist always thinking of making useful inventions, was one of the first in Germany to set up lightning rods and propagated a kind of "Faraday cage" as ideal lightning protection. that with his articles he is the "father of the seaside resorts" on the North and Baltic Seas, and he spoke the nude bathing in the high mountains at a time when bathing and naked body culture were frowned upon; that he had almost forestalled the Montgolfier brothers in the development of the gas-filled balloon, so that a witty Frenchman thought it would be a pretty idea if this balloon had been called after him "Lichtenbergère." Only now do scientists and philosophers discover more and more that Lichtenberg's real meaning lies in his scientific method of experimenting with ideas. It is therefore no coincidence that Lichtenberg is conjured up in connection with the "chaos" theory, praised by philosophers such as Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein; It is not by chance that Sigmund Freud invokes Lichtenberg's ingenious mental thrust into the unconscious of the dream. Albert Einstein praised him as "an original with genius ingenuity condensed into immortal thought-splinters." Lichtenberg was known to his contemporaries, who were not scientists, as a satirist, as a long-time publisher and author of the "Göttinger Pocket Calendar," which even an Immanuel Kant enjoyed reading, and as a commentator on the "Hogarth engravings." It was not until after his death that what immortalized him became known: his "Sudelbücher," notebooks from his student days to death in which he indiscriminately submitted thoughts, ideas, jokes, things he had learned, private things, a moneybox of ideas for future use. The benefits of it have and have its spiritual descendants. Goethe was already surprised to discover that "where he is having fun there is a problem hidden". The enjoyment of reading, the surprise is over time the generations of writers who have deepened in Lichtenberg, for example, Jean Paul, ETA Hoffmann, Mörike in the 19th century, Thomas Mann, Tucholsky, Elias Canetti, Paul-Celan in the 20th century Not less, but even more thoughtful, so that Helmut Heißenbüttel could not without reason call him the "first author of the twentieth century" because of his "modern" style of writing and thinking. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who was ailing from birth, died on 24 February 1799 from pneumonia. (Text: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Promies, Institute of Linguistics and Literature, Darmstadt University of Technology)