Edelmann and the Silent Reimams

Edelmann and the Silent ReimarusMLKJIHGFEDCBA W A L T E R G R O S S M A N N utsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Ed elmann is not a forgotten figure in German intellectual life of the eight­ eenth century. Of his Moses mit aufgedeckten Angesichte, published in 1740, Emanuel Hirsch observes, “Never before had a book been published in the German language that, like the Moses, entirely denied biblical faith and Chris­ tian dogma.”1 The literary historian Hermann Hettner sees in him a “coura­ geous thinker ... far too far ahead of his time”2 to be understood and appreciated; and Paul Hazard sketches his life as that of a theologian who, departing from Lutheran orthodoxy, reached the heights of enlightened and independent religious thinking.3 Ernst Barnikol has demonstrated Edelmann’s influence on the left—on the Hegelian Bruno Bauer;4 and Ernst Benz has linked Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas of Christianity and Christ to those of Bauer and Edelmann.5 It has been especially encouraging recently, for one who is spending some time on this much abused and still little read maverick, to find Hans Kohn, in “The Multidimensional Enlightenment,” calling attention to Edelmann;6 and it is encouraging as well to find Franco Venturi in the newly published Europe des Lumieres admonishing his readers “11 faudrait reetudier Edelmann . The question I want to raise in this paper is, why was Edelmann not fully acknowledged by the leaders of German enlightenment as their courageous 195 196 / vutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA WALTER GROSSMANNutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA precursor? Or to put it differently, why did Lessing, who was familiar with Edelmann’s works, publish fragments from Reimarus’ Apologie oder Schutzschrift fur die vemunftigen Verehrer Gottes* but not call attention to Edelmann , who at least thirty years earlier had taken a similar position on the Bible, the apostles, the divinity of Jesus, and the economy of salvation? An attempt to answer this question will bring out differences as well as simi­ larities between these two almost precise contemporaries—Edelmann (16981767 ) and Reimarus (1694-1768). I hope such an attempt will also contribute to the characterization of the intellectual and political scene of Germany in the four decades after 1740, a period whose first year saw the publication of Edelmann’s Moses, and which includes the beginning of the reign of Frederick II. Paul Tillich, in A History of Christian Thought says, “The great movement of historical Bible criticism began around 1750. Lessing, who was the greatest personality of the German Enlightenment, was the leader against a stupid orthodoxy which stuck to traditional terms.”9 In linking Lessing’s contribu­ tion specifically to historical Bible criticism. Tillich refers to Lessing’s having published, between 1774 and 1778, fragments from a manuscript of Hermann Samuel Reimarus entrusted to him by the Hamburg scholar’s children. Less­ ing concealed the authorship of the fragments by claiming that they were found in the Wolfenbiittel library and that the writer was unknown, thus keeping his promise to Reimarus’ children, who feared for the reputation of their father. David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874), a great admirer of Reimarus, wrote that he “was not frank with his contemporaries; he preferred to transmit his thoughts to posterity only through unpublished manu­ scripts.”1 0 In his brilliant sketch of earlier research, with which he introduces his own Das Leben Jesu (1835), Strauss gives Reimarus the credit for intro­ ducing to a German audience the “Deistic attacks on the Bible and on its divine authority.”11 Strauss learned of Edelmann’s writings only later, as he makes clear in his Die Christliche Glaubenslehre, (1840-41), which includes the following footnote: “The writings of this frail and restless personality from the midst of the last century have been called to my attention by the pamphlet of W. Elster, dean of the gymnasium at Clausthal: Erinnerung an Johann Christian Edelmann. Its purpose is to discredit me as the Edelmann redivivus. I am indebted to that publication for an interesting acquain­ tance—not perhaps with the dean, but with this alleged precursor, who has been abused much more than he has been studied.”12 In 1906 Albert Schweitzer, following the Strauss of Das Leben Jesu, pro­ grammatically called his history of...