A Brill Calendar: May 4

The "Konversations Lexicon"

Few aspects of 'the human condition' are as indispensable as a sense of continuity.

This is a cultural condition not often mentioned or even discerned when it comes to interpretation of events; regardless of their news-value or social importance. Articulating activity in projects with final objectives and an unequivocal start – including regular intermediate reporting on progress made – makes for an obscuring of the value of continuity. There is no such thing as a clear-cut beginning ‘from scratch’, like there is no absolute end: ‘The song is ended, but the melody lingers on’.

Great works of reference – for scholars or the general public – emerging after the typographical revolution of the 15th century, demonstrate this phenomenon as well as any other large-scale human endeavour. The mission in life of Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus (Dortmund, Rhineland May 4 1772 – Leipzig, Saxony August 20 1823) is no exception.

In 1808 Brockhaus bought the copyright of a bankrupt encyclopaedia, the ‘Konversations-Lexikon’. Brockhaus believed firmly in the value of short intelligible articles on complex subjects, as well as in the power of the best illustrations money can buy; helping learning and bolstering civilized ‘Bildung’ among adolescents and adults alike.

Three years later, in 1811, the first ‘Brockhaus’ edition of the ‘Konversations-Lexikon’ appeared. It became an almost universal role-model for similar works everywhere. It is seldom that a publication and the name of its main ‘auctor intellectualis’ were kept separated for so long a time: the 15th edition of the work (1928 – 1935; 20 Vols + Supplement) is the first carrying his name on the title-page, henceforth called ‘Der Grosse Brockhaus’, a century after the none too long life of Friedrich Arnold himself. The progeny of Google Inc. and Wikipedia is rooted in a soil coeval with Western intellectual traditions.