Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

__NOTOC__ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg is an 18th-century German scientist, satirist and anglophile, most famous for his notebooks published posthumously (which he himself called "waste books", using the English bookkeeping term).

Life

Born into a poor pastor family, Lichtenberg became a hunchback due to a malformation of the spine before his adulthood. Aided by a local patron, in 1763 he entered Göttingen University, where in 1769 he became extraordinary professor of physics, and six years later ordinary professor. He held this post till his death.

One of the first scientists to introduce experiments with apparatus in their lectures, Lichtenberg was a most popular and respected figure in the European intellectual circle of his time. He maintained good relations with most great figures of that era, including Goethe and Kant. In 1784 Alessandro Volta visited Göttingen especially to see the man and his experiments. In 1793 he was elected a member of the Royal Society.

As a physicist, today he is remembered for his investigations in electricity, for the so-called Lichtenberg figures. He also proposed the standardized paper size system used all over the world today (except in the US and Canada), known as ISO 216, which has A4 as the most commonly used size (in one of his letters dated October 25, 1786 to Johann Beckmann).

Invited by his students, he visited England twice, from Easter to early summer 1770 and from August 1774 to Christmas 1775, where he was received cordially by George III and Queen Charlotte. Great Britain impressed him, and he became a well-known anglophile after the visits.

He had many romances. Most of the girls were from poor families. In 1777 he met Maria Stechard, then aged 13, who lived with the professor permanently after 1780. She died in 1782. The relation between the man and his "little daughter" was made into a novel by Gert Hofmann (which has been translated by his son Michael Hofmann into English, with the title Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl). In the following year he met the 22-year-old Margarethe Kellner. He married her in 1789, in order to give her a pension, as he thought he was to die soon. She gave him six children, and outlived him by 49 years.

Lichtenberg was prone to procrastination. He failed to launch the first ever hydrogen balloon, and although he always dreamed of writing a novel à la Fielding's Tom Jones, he never finished more than a few pages. He died at the age of 56, after a short illness.

Waste books

The "waste books" (Lichtenberg rendered it roughly as Sudelbuch in German) are the notebooks he kept from his student days until the end of his life. Each volume was accorded a letter of the alphabet from A, which begun in 1765, to L, which broke off at Lichtenberg's death in 1799.

These notebooks first became known to the world after the man's death, when the first and second editions of Lichtenbergs Vermischte Schriften (1800-06 and 1844-53) were published by his sons and brothers. Since the initial publications, however, notebooks G and H, and most of notebook K, were destroyed or disappeared. Those missing parts are believed to contain sensitive materials. The manuscripts of the remaining notebooks are now preserved in Göttingen University.

The notebooks contain quotations that struck Lichtenberg, titles of books to read, autobiographical sketches, and short or long reflections. It is those reflections that help Lichtenberg earn his posthumous fame. Today he is regarded as one of the best aphorists in the Western intellectual history. Some scholars have attempted to distil a system of thought out of Lichtenberg's scattered musings. However, Lichtenberg was not a professional philosopher, and had no need to present, or to have, any consistent philosophy.

Admirers of Lichtenberg's waste books include Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud and Wittgenstein. The latter three have been inspired considerably by Lichtenberg. Lichtenberg is not read by many outside Germany. A notable exception is the Chinese scholar and wit Qian Zhongshu, who quotes the Waste books in his works many times. Leo Tolstoy also held Lichtenberg's writings in high esteem. A crater on the Moon, Crater Lichtenberg, has been named in his honour.

Other works

As a satirist, Lichtenberg takes high rank among the German writers of the 18th century. His biting wit involved him in many controversies with well-known contemporaries, such as the Swiss physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater whose science of physiognomy he ridiculed, and Johann Heinrich Voss, whose views on Greek pronunciation called forth a powerful satire, Über die Pronunciation der Schöpse des alten Griechenlandes.

Based on his visits to England, his Briefe aus England, with admirable descriptions of Garrick's acting, are the most attractive of his writings published during his lifetime. He contributed to the Göttinger Taschen Calendar from 1778 onwards, and to the Göttingisches Magazin der Wissenschaften und Litteratur, which he edited for three years (1780-1782) with J. G. A. Forster. He also published in 1794-1799 an Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche in which he described the satirical details in William Hogarth's prints.

Selected bibliography

Works published during his lifetime

Briefe aus England, 1776-78
Über Physiognomik, wider die Physiognomen, 1778
Göttingisches Magazin der Wissenschaften und Litteratur, 1780-85 (ed. by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Georg Forster)
Über die Pronunciation der Schöpse des alten Griechenlandes, 1782
Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche, 1794-1799

Complete works in German

Schriften und Briefe, 1968-72 (4 vols., ed. by Wolfgang Promies)

English translations

The Lichtenberg Reader, 1959 (trans. and ed. by Franz H. Mautner and Henry Hatfield)
The World of Hogarth. Lichtenberg's Commentaries on Hogarth's Engravings, 1966 (trans. by Innes and Gustav Herdan)
Hogarth on High Life. The Marriage à la Mode Series, from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Commentaries, 1970 (trans. and ed. by Arthur S. Wensinger and W. B. Coley)
Aphorisms, 1990 (trans. with an introduction and notes by R. J. Hollingdale), reprinted as The Waste Books, 2000

External links

1742 births | 1799 deaths | German physicists | German writers | satirists

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Life

Waste books

Other works

Selected bibliography

External links