Berliner Mittwochsgesellschaft

(Secret ) Berlin Wednesday Society. Already in 1783 there was a the ideas of the late Enlightenment committed "Berlin Wednesday Society" ( with Johann Erich Biester, who acted as secretary ), which called itself the Society of Friends of the Enlightenment. It was founded by Wilhelm Abraham Teller ( with ). Members were, inter alia, the Prussian Finance Minister Carl August von Struense, who Oberfinanzrat Johann Heinrich Wlomer (1726-1797), the poet Leopold Friedrich Günther von Goeckingk, Christian Konrad Wilhelm von Dohm, the theater director and writer Johann Jacob Engel, the Kammergerichtsrat Friedrich Wilhelm Benecke (1752-1793), Friedrich Gedike, Karl Franz von Irwing, the jurist Ernst Ferdinand Klein, Franz Michael Leuchsenring, the physicians Johann Carl Wilhelm Moehsen and Christian Gottlieb Selle, the preacher Johann Joachim Spalding and Johann Friedrich Zöllner, Karl Gottlieb Suarez, Wilhelm Abraham Teller; Honorary Member was Moses Mendelssohn.

Only by this erudite (secret ) society of the same and long-standing Monday Club itself - who had more social character - took off, the Berlin Enlightenment, whose opinion forum Berlinische monthly magazine was the Wednesday Club spread, in which almost every member to spoke up and, according to Werner Krauss, the most important forum of the late Enlightenment. With the short-lived Berlin newspapers and the New Berlinischen monthly acted beasts in the sense of a now displaced by the idealism of the Enlightenment to 1811 on, but never reached the monthly level of previous years, as Immanuel Kant with many articles enriched the Berlinische monthly - to beasts, the chief librarian of the " Chest " and the last of the Berlin Enlightenment, died in 1816. Already in 1798 was the Wednesday Club of Frederick William III. been resolved because they allegedly threatened domestic security.