Ferdinand Kürnberger

Ferdinand Kürnberger ( born July 3, 1821 in Vienna, † October 14, 1879 in Munich) was an Austrian writer.

Life

Ferdinand Kürnberger was born in Vienna on July 3, 1821 the Laimgrube, Upper Gestättengasse 140. He came from a working class household: the father worked as a lamplighter, the mother was stand activist at the Naschmarkt.

Early on, he distanced himself, the young Kürnberger of Austria; for him, Germany is the great progressive model. He himself felt the domestic situation as almost " Asian, retarded, lazy, stupid and reprehensible ". The Austrian officialdom he described as " großäthiopisch ".

He earned his living by writing for several newspapers in Vienna. His participation in the Vienna October insurrection in 1848 as a member of the Academic Legion forced him to flee to Germany, where he settled in Dresden. Because of the assumed participation in the May uprising in Dresden in 1849 - were in fact only his cap and his long hair the arrest reason - he was imprisoned; he had to spend in prison ten months. The Dresden writer Auguste disk organized his escape. 1854, while Kürnberger in Germany was, his father died.

In 1856 Kürnberger returned to Vienna and in 1857 published his "Selected Short Stories ". 1858 his mother died. As Secretary General of the German Schiller Foundation ( 1867-1870 ), he worked in the branch club in Vienna, which was the headquarters of the Foundation from 1865 to 1869. Journalistic he worked among other things as an employee of the German newspaper in the years 1873-75 and in 1879. Having repeatedly tried unsuccessfully to come to the Burgtheater, he retired from his hometown disappointed to Graz back. Shortly before his death he compared himself with the Wandering Jew; they had considered both life and death with a sharp sense of humor. Kürnberger died on October 14, 1879 as a result of pneumonia in Munich during a visit to the home of his friend, the painter Wilhelm von Kaulbach.

In 1894 in Vienna, Rudolf -Fuenfhaus ( 15th district ) was named the Kürnbergergasse after him.

Work

In his articles Kürnberger denounced in a humorous way again and again the situation in his home town ( for example, " Believed and forget ", 1866) and to his country. He became a chronicler of the "Austrian " and especially the " Viennese soul." Karl Kraus counted him alongside Daniel Spitzer and Ludwig Speidel to the language most powerful writers and to his models in the historic Viennese Feuilleton of the liberal daily press.

The work of The Americas Tired plays on Nikolaus Lenau to America trip. Although Kürnberger was never in the United States, he wrote a sarcastic and bitter towards the end almost commissioned work on this topic. His publications brought Kürnberger also a two philosophical references. Ludwig Wittgenstein took the motto, which he his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus prefaced, the book " Literary heart things, reflections and criticism " (1877, p 340), Theodor W. Adorno, the motto of his " Minima Moralia " Kiirnberger novel "The America tired. " Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism defended in his famous work, the image of America Kiirnberger " spirit and poison sprayed " The America - Tired in some points. So Weber quotes from Benjamin Franklin are identical to Kiirnberger. Weber wrote:

Works

• Believed and Lost (1836 )
• The America - Tired, American Culture Picture (1855 ) ( digitized and full text in German Text Archive; Images from Google Books)
• Selected Short Stories (1858 )
• Literary heart stuff. Reflections and reviews (1877 )
• The castle of outrage (1903 )