Unbekannte Briefe von und an Ferdinand Christian Baur Mit einer Einleitung von Friedrich Wilhelm Graf

Abstract

Ursula Streckert, a mother of five and a succesfull teacher, started to write a doctoral thesis after her retirement. It dealt with Ferdinand Christian Baur and German politics in the years before the bourgeois revolution of 1848, with a special focus on Wurttemberg. At her plea, I agreed to be her Doktorvater, all the more as I was highly impressed by her strong interest and drive to discover new sources. Indeed, thanks to her intensive research in many German and British archives, she succeeded in finding hitherto unknown letters of F. C. Baur, among them letters to his brother, academic scholars and academic colleagues of various German theological faculties. She investigated Baur’s activities in favour of the Philhellenic movement and his support for Polish revolutionaries fighting against Russian Czarism. Tragically, shortly before completing her doctoral thesis, Ursula Streckert succumbed to her fatal illness. The letters she discovered shed new light on Baur’s self understanding as a citical and, in the broadest sense, liberal theologian and on his commitment as a self-confident „Bürger“.