Karl Friedrich Köppen der Intimste Berliner Freund Marxens

Abstract

Karl Friedrich Köppen was born on the 28th of April, 1808, at Niedergörne, the son of a clergyman. After having attended the Latin School (“Gymnasium”) at Stendal and the Latin Convent school (“Klostergymnasium”) of Magdeburg, he took up the study of divinity in Berlin in the year 1827, but eventually became a teacher. In 1833 he was appointed at a Berlin school. Four years later he wrote a “Literary Introduction into Nordic Mythology” which has retained its value to the present day and the anti-clerical tendency of which revealed him as one of those radical diciples of Hegel who grouped themelves around A Ruge's “Hallische Jahrbücher” Their aim was: “Away from the Christian state and from State-Christendom'” In the “Doktorklub”, the Berlin center of these Young-Hegelians, Köppen mixed with Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx. Under the influence of Marx, the pen of this most prolific of contributors, to the “Jahrbücher” quickly increaed in sharpness. A jubilant publication of 1840, dedicated to his “friend K. H. Marx of Trier”, entitled “Frederick the Great and his adversaries”, proved a publicistic masterpiece which supplied Marx with suggestionss and gained Köppen the recognition of Engels. This publication focussed its secret hopes in the ascent to the throne by Frederick William IV; the Reaction, however, which set in soon after the change of government, crushed the buds of Young-Hegelian idealism.