Schleiermacher’s activities in scholarship, church and politics.

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834) is one of the most significant figures in German intellectual life of the neoclassical period around 1800. His work has had an impact on a range of disciplines and throughout the world that continues to the present day. After Prussia’s defeat in 1806 and the closure of the University of Halle, where he had been Professor of Theology and Philosophy since 1804 and held the position of University Preacher, Schleiermacher moved to Berlin at the end of 1807. At first he gave lectures in a private capacity but soon found his final intellectual home as pastor of the Dreifaltigkeitskirche (from 1809), Professor of Theology at the newly founded University of Berlin and Member of the Academy (both from 1810).
 

This Academy Project, which is planned to take 14 years, will study Schleiermacher’s activities in scholarship, church and politics in the period when the foundation of the University of Berlin was in preparation, and will set them in the context of his biography.

Within the framework of the ‘Kritische Schleiermacher-Gesamtausgabe’ (Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Schleiermacher, KGA) an edition will be produced of his surviving correspondence and his lectures on Philosophical Ethics and Practical Theology, which laid the essential groundwork for his theological and philosophical positions. In addition, Schleiermacher’s calendar of appointments, which is an especially rich source for his biography and networks in Berlin, will be made available in a database edition.

With funding from the ‘Stiftung der Evangelischen Kirche der Union’ (Düsseldorf), volumes of commentary will be produced in parallel to the editorial work on the texts of the letters.

This Academy Project is part of the Research Centre Prussia – Berlin of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

The Academy research project “Schleiermacher in Berlin, 1808–1834. Correspondence, Calendar, Lectures” is part of the Academies' Programme , a research funding programme co-financed by the German federal government and individual federal states. Coordinated by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities , the Programme intends to retrieve and explore our cultural heritage, to make it accessible and highlight its relevance to the present, as well as to preserve it for the future.