Gustav Woldemar Freiherr von Biedermann (5 March 1817,

Marienberg Marienberg is a town in Germany. It was the district capital of the Mittlerer Erzgebirgskreis (Central Ore Mountains district) in the southern part of Saxony, and since August 2008 it has been part of the new district of Erzgebirgskreis. As of ...

– 6 February 1903,

Dresden Dresden (, ; Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; wen, label=Upper Sorbian, Drježdźany) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city, after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth larg ...

) was a jurist, literary historian, and

Goethe Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as treat ...

researcher.

Life and work

The son of the jurist and politician Gustav Heinrich Freiherr von Biederman, Woldemar von Biedermann studied

legal science Legal science is one of the main components in civil law tradition (after Roman law, canon law, commercial law, and the legacy of the revolutionary period). Legal science is primarily the creation of German legal scholars of the middle and late ...

in Leipzig and Heidelberg from 1836 to 1839. After a period as a

solicitor A solicitor is a legal practitioner who traditionally deals with most of the legal matters in some jurisdictions. A person must have legally-defined qualifications, which vary from one jurisdiction to another, to be described as a solicitor and ...

, he entered the

Saxon The Saxons ( la, Saxones, german: Sachsen, ang, Seaxan, osx, Sahson, nds, Sassen, nl, Saksen) were a group of Germanic * * * * peoples whose name was given in the early Middle Ages to a large country (Old Saxony, la, Saxonia) near the Nor ...

civil service in 1845. In 1849 he found employment in the railway industry first as the government commissioner to the Executive board of the

Chemnitz Chemnitz (; from 1953 to 1990: Karl-Marx-Stadt , ) is the third-largest city in the German state of Saxony after Leipzig and Dresden. It is the 28th largest city of Germany as well as the fourth largest city in the area of former East Germany a ...

Riesa Riesa is a town in the district of Meißen in Saxony, Germany. It is located on the river Elbe, approximately northwest of Dresden. History The name ''Riesa'' is derived from Slavic ''Riezowe''. This name, romanised as "Rezoa", appears first i ...

railway company (german: Chemnitz-Riseaer Eisenbahngesellschaft), as railway director in Chemnitz in 1851, in Leipzig in 1858, and in 1869 as Finance and Deputy Director-General of the Royal Saxon State Railways–a cabinet post. His son, Flodoard von Biedermann, urged him to publish his assemblage of recorded conversations of Goethe. This collected work was published between 1889 and 1896 in 10 volumes. Other published writings include more than 180 critical and technical contributions to the Goethe literature. He edited several volumes of the Weimar (Sophie) Edition of Goethe's works, an effort for which he received an honorary doctorate from the philosophy department at the University of Leipzig. Biedermann died in Dresden in 1903 and was buried in the ''Alte Annenfriedhof''.

Works

'' German Wikipedia entry">:de:Woldemar von Biedermann">German Wikipedia entry' * ''Goethe and Leipzig'' (Leipzig 1865, 2 Volumes); * ''Concerning Goethe's Poetry'' (Leipzig 1870); * ''Goethe and Dresden'' (Leipzig 1875); * ''Goethe and the Saxon Ore Mountains'' (Stuttgart 1877); * ''Goethe Studies''. 3 volumes. Leipzig: Biedermann 1879-1889; * ''Goethe's Conversations''. Complete edition. Authenticated by Woldemar Freiherr von Biedermann. New edition by Flodoard von Biedermann in collaboration with Max Morris, Hans Gerhard Gräf and Leonhard Leopold Mackall. Second revised and greatly expanded edition; * ''Goethe's letters to Eichstädt''. Berlin: Hempel 1872; * ''Goethes correspondence with

Friedrich Rochlitz Johann Friedrich Rochlitz (12 February 1769 – 16 December 1842) was a German playwright, musicologist and art and music critic. His most notable work is his autobiographical account ''Tage der Gefahr'' (''Days of Danger'') about the Battle of ...

''. Leipzig: Biedermann, 1887.

References

* Julius Petersen, Ernst Volkmann, Wolfgang Goetz: ''Flodoard Woldemar Freiherrn von Biedermann zum Gedächtnis''. Berlin: Zieger & Steinkopf 1935 * * Karlheinz Schulz: ''Biedermann, (Gustav) Woldemar Frhr. von.'' In

Walther Killy Walther Killy (26 August 191728 December 1995) was a German literary scholar who specialised in poetry, especially that of Friedrich Hölderlin and Georg Trakl. He taught at the Free University of Berlin, the Georg-August-Universität Göttinge ...

(Ed.): ''Literaturlexikon'' Vol. 1, .

External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Biedermann, Woldemar von 1817 births 1903 deaths People from Marienberg People from the Kingdom of Saxony 19th-century German historians German male non-fiction writers