1809–1882
○ Natural causes
Young Hegelian leader who read Hegel as revolutionary atheism; the young Marx’s teacher and the target of The Holy Family
Born in 1809 at Eisenberg in Saxe-Altenburg, he studied theology at Berlin. Lecturing there from 1834 to 1839 he was a Right Hegelian who led the attack on Strauss, but by 1839 he had turned left and led the Young Hegelian Doctors' Club, where the young Marx was his devoted disciple. At Bonn his gospel criticism and The Trumpet of the Last Judgement over Hegel (1841), which read Hegel as revolutionary atheism, cost him his post in 1842. His Jewish Question (1843) brought the break with Marx, and Marx and Engels attacked his philosophy wholesale in The Holy Family and The German Ideology. After 1848 he turned to conservative and later antisemitic causes, and he died at Rixdorf in 1882.
Activities and affiliations
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1834–1842
Germany state institutionsLecturer in theology at Berlin and Bonn
Scholarship and theory -
1842–1882
Scholarship and theory
Career Timeline
- 1834–1839Lecturer in theology at Berlin; editor of the Journal for Speculative Theology
- 1839Moved to Bonn; turned to the Young Hegelians
- 1841The Trumpet of the Last Judgement over Hegel, published anonymously
- 1842Dismissed from his teaching post at Bonn
- 1843The Jewish Question
- 1845Target of Marx and Engels’s The Holy Family