Georg Simmel at the Lectern: The Lecture as Embodiment of Text

As Privatdozent and later, außerordentlicher Professor at the University of Berlin hoping to be appointed to a permanent position, Georg Simmel’s task was to prove himself by attracting students to his courses. By all accounts, he was rather successful in this; the majority of the articles on Simmel contained in Buch des Dankes an Georg Simmel (Gassen and Landmann, 1958), a collection put together on the 100th anniversary of Simmel’s birth, are written by his former students, many of whom focus on his talents as a lecturer. Simmel’s correspondence with Heinrich Rickert, published in the same collection, also documents the increasing popularity of Simmel’s lecture courses at the turn of the century.1 In a letter dated 27 January 1900, Simmel wrote: ‘For my part, I have occasion to be satisfied with both work and my students, at least quantitatively speaking. I have around 315 students in my three courses’ (Gassen and Landmann, 1958: 99). Moreover, Simmel did not only employ his talents as a speaker in the university sector, but extended his speaking activities in two main directions. First, as documented in the recollections of his son, Simmel often accepted invitations to speak in public, both in Berlin and in other cities throughout Europe: ‘he [Simmel] greatly loved this activity of a “wandering priest”. He found it exciting; on the return journey he sometimes already worked on his next lecture’ (Hans Simmel, 1976: 258).2 Second, during the First World War, Simmel became known for his addresses to the German troops, and later related the tale of the soldiers who left his lecture on ‘Goethe and Love’3 disappointed to have heard a philosophical discussion of love rather than a graphic description of Goethe’s amorous conquests (Gassen and Landmann, 1958: 277).