250th birthday of Johannes Gottfried Herder - Germany / Federal Republic of Germany 1994 - 80 Pfennig

Johann Gottfried Herder is one of those authors who founded Germany's reputation as a nation of poets and thinkers in the second half of the 18th century. His life and work took place at the interface between enlightenment and romanticism. Herder's multifaceted literary legacy was edited at the beginning of this century and includes essays on topics such as literature, history, aesthetics and art, rhetoric, theology, philosophy, education, psychology, medicine and folklore. Herder was born on 25 August 1744 in the East Prussian town of Mohrungen (now Poland). There he grew up in modest circumstances and was educated in the spirit of Pietism. The pastor of the place taught the talented boy and made the acquaintance of a Russian military doctor, the Herder a study at the University of Königsberg enabled. In Johann Georg Hamann (theologian) and Immanuel Kant he found there two teachers who could hardly be more contrasting and whose ideas he rubbed his life throughout his life. In Riga, Latvia, in 1765, he took up his first job in a profession he recognized as his calling: Herder became a teacher and preacher at the municipal cathedral school. The former Hanseatic city first appeared to him as a refuge of enlightened bourgeoisie, but a literary dispute and the insight that the city offered him too little spiritual food, caused him in 1769 to leave Rash. In the following years Herder led a restless travel life, during which he visited some of the most important thinkers of his time. So he met in Paris with Rousseau and with the encyclopedists Diderot and d'Alembert. In Hamburg he spent some time with Lessing. As a companion of the Prince of Holstein-Gottorp he traveled to Germany and the Netherlands, but took his leave in Strasbourg in 1770, to treat there an eye disease that tormented him since his childhood. Here he met the five years younger Goethe. An active collaboration began, culminating in the essay collection "Von deutscher Art und Kunst," a kind of program of the "Sturm und Drang" movement. 1771 Herder took a job as Consistorialrat of the Count of Schaumburg -Lippe in Bückeburg. Although his modest, but regular income enabled him in 1773 finally the marriage with Caroline Flachsland. Meanwhile, in the numerous publications of those years, the central ideas of his world of thought crystallized. Herder was particularly interested in the development of human culture and the history of the Slavic and Nordic peoples. His treatises and the first folk song collection created the intellectual climate for the reception of German popular literature by the Romantics and can thus be regarded as a forerunner of the works of Arnim, Brentano, but also the Grimm fairy tale collection and the German dictionary. 1776 represents an incision in Herder's life. Through the mediation of Goethe, he was appointed general superintendent in Weimar. Although at that time he often had to complain about the multitude of his official duties, he reached the zenith of his career here. Weimar became his home, which he left only until his death to travel occasionally. In his cultural-historical considerations, which regarded folk songs and fairy tales as original testimonies of human culture, he now also included the Bible. The focus of his interests shifted to theology. In addition, the confrontation with his former teacher Kant came to a head. His polemic, once well-dosed rhetorical means of his writings, met in the nineties increasingly the friends Goethe and Schiller, retired angrily. In addition, as his health rapidly deteriorated, Herder began to isolate himself more and more. That at the same time the fame of his former friends overshadowed his, made him bitter. As a result of several strokes Herder died alone on December 18, 1803 in Weimar. (Text: Sabine Herder, Cologne)