Commemorative stamp series - Germany / German Democratic Republic 1974 - 25 Pfennig

Important Personalities, Edition 1974 The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications of the German Democratic Republic publishes five special postage stamps with illustrations of important personalities. No special first day cover envelope Important personalities 25 Pfennig value Johann Gottlieb Herder Johann Gottlieb Herder, on 25 August 1744 in reminders Ostpr. (today Marag) born the son of a village school teacher and cantor, belonged to the large German writers and thinkers. He was the spiritual center of the Sturm und Drang movement around 1770 and was one of the pioneers of German classical music. The most important dates, stations and achievements of his life can only be hinted at in a brief exposition: From 1762 to 1764 he was able to study medicine, philosophy and theology in Königsberg (today Kaliningrad) with the help of a Russian military doctor. From 1764 to 1769 he worked as a cathedral preacher and high school teacher in Riga. Here Herder became known through his first literary studies. After a short stay in France in 1769, he met in 1770 in Strasbourg the young Goethe, who judged this meeting as the "most significant event" for him. Herder revealed to Goethe the connections between the development of society and art, whereby every true art has to take a stand on the social questions of its time. Important works of Herder in this period, in which he explained his views on popular poetry, were his writing "of German Art and Art", "Shakespeare" u.a. In the "Essays on the Origin of Language", a paper submitted to and awarded by the Berlin Academy of Sciences, he justified his theory that language - contrary to theological conceptions - had developed historically. After a Herder unsatisfactory activity as a court preacher in Bückeburg from 1771 to 1776, he was appointed to Beethes efforts as General Superintendent to Weimar. In Weimar Herder created his most important works, which include above all the work "ideas on the philosophy of human history". In addition to Lessing's "Education of the Human Race" and Kant's "Idea for a Universal History in Cosmopolitan Intention," this work is one of the historico-historical works of this period, announcing the idea of ​​a necessary historical progress and thus finally the frozen princely conventions of thought and ecclesiastical orthodoxy broke through, which served the feudal rule as the most important ideological means of control. Herder's historical ideas are based on the idea of ​​international peace, the equal rights of nations and the propagation of the alliance of all those oppressed by feudal absolutism. Franz Mehring rightly wrote about Johann Gottlieb Herder that this deserves a place of honor "in the line of ancestors of men who have opened up to us the understanding of historical life and have thus enabled to lift all the treasures of that humanity that they once envisioned as a shining ideal. " Johann Gottlieb Herder, who was elected on July 27, 1787 foreign member of the Berlin Academy, the present Academy of Sciences of the GDR, died on December 18, 1803 in Weimar.