Forefathers
In German, Kolben means both a club or truncheon and a chemist's flask, and both of these denotations bear ironies in the case of Hermann Kolbe. The surname Kolb or Kolbe is not uncommon in central Germany; it is said that the etymology of the family name is related to the sort of person who is inclined to take up cudgels for appropriate use. Kolbe must have had this implication in mind when he designed his signet emblem in 1851: two brawny arms brandishing clubs are depicted, the one crowning the device apparently poised to strike a crushing blow on his opponent.
Kolbe's grandfather, (Johann) Georg Wilhelm Kolbe (ca. 1760-ca. 1825), was described as a preacher or minister and schoolmaster in the hamlet of Gross-Schneen, eight miles south of Göttingen, at the time of his (eldest?) son's birth—Hermann's father, Carl—in 1790. By 1808 he was schoolmaster in Grone, a settlement just outside the city ramparts. Around 1815 he became property inspector and clerk of courts in Adelebsen, a position he still held in November 1821, after which we know nothing more. It was common at this time and later for ministers to combine pastoral duties with teaching and other civil service.[6] G. W. Kolbe probably had a university education, but there is no Göttingen matriculation record, and it is not known whether he formally qualified for the pastorate.[7]
Carl Friedrich Ludwig Kolbe (18 December 1790-4 October 1870) attended the Göttingen Gymnasium, preparatory to the study of theology at the university, matriculating during the French occupation in April 1808. After completing the three-year course, Kolbe taught Latin and Greek at the monastery school in Ilfeld, near Nordhausen in Saxony. In September 1815 he received a call to lead the Lutheran congregation in Elliehausen, three miles west of Göttingen. It was there that he established his family, marrying (Dorette Caroline) Auguste Hempel (10 August 1800-10 April 1856), less than a month after her sixteenth birthday. The first of their fifteen children was (Adolph Wilhelm) Hermann Kolbe, born 27 September 1818.[8]
Auguste's father, Adolph Friedrich Hempel (1767-1834), was professor of anatomy at Göttingen. Her mother was the former Marie Catherine Louise Grabenstein, the daughter of a physician who was also for a time Bürgermeister of Göttingen. She had died by the time of her grandson Hermann's birth. Professor Hempel, as we will see, had daily contact with his adolescent grandson Hermann during the last three years of his life. Born in Neustrelitz (Mecklenburg), Hempel received his M.D. degree from Göttingen in 1789 and taught there the
rest of his life. The author of a popular anatomy textbook, he was described as a straightforward rationalist in his approach toward his science, consistent with the general intellectual tone at the University of Göttingen.[9] There was still a strong current of Enlightenment rationalism in Göttingen in the nineteenth century; such speculative and metaphysical movements as Naturphilosophie, homeopathy, and phrenology never made headway there.
By all reports, Carl Kolbe was a man of energy, strong opinions, great self-confidence, and forthright manner. The words used by Hermann's biographers to describe his father's character—gerade, unerschrocken, bestimmt, fest in sich geschlossen, ausserordentlich energisch, von festem Willen —could as easily be applied to Hermann as well.[10] His life motto "Tue recht, scheue niemand " ("Do the right thing, fear no one") was carefully inculcated in his children.
The income of Lutheran pastors in nineteenth-century Germany was derived from the agricultural production of local church lands leased to tenant farmers, a sort of prebendal arrangement. The endowments of various church districts differed markedly, and so it was common for pastors to seek more lucrative positions as their careers progressed. As it happens, Elliehausen was a relatively well-endowed position, possessing not only fertile prebendal lands but also agricultural assets at the parsonage itself. In fact, the ground floor of the building provided stalls for cows and horses, part of the second story was used as a granary, and a pigpen directly adjoined the house. The pastors were expected to be farmers in their spare time; indeed, the Elliehausen pastoral farm continued in operation until 1926.
Unfortunately, a serious problem emerged soon after Carl Kolbe's arrival. The church there was barely ten years old, but it had been poorly built, indeed fraudulently, with inferior materials and without a proper foundation, and by the time of Hermann's birth, it was already dangerously and irreparably dilapidated. Failing in his attempt to raise the money needed for a new church, in December 1826 Kolbe accepted a call to the prosperous Kirchspiel of Stöckheim, in the Leine valley twenty miles north of Göttingen. The money for tearing down and rebuilding the Elliehausen church was raised only after Carl's brother Georg was called to be pastor there.[11]
Stöckheim was and still is a small village—there were 410 residents in 1826 and about the same number today—but the church district comprised more than 1800 people; Kolbe now presided over a handsome (and sturdy) sixty-five year old church and an ample parsonage. He needed the room. By the time of his transfer he had four young children, and his family continued to grow rapidly during the next few years. Unfortunately, to Kolbe's great distress and against his vehe-
ment objections, in the late 1830s the tenant farmers working the church lands were able to obtain the money and consistorial approval to acquire their property outright. This development suddenly and dramatically reduced his income. He began to look for yet another congregation.[12]
In September 1840 he accepted a call to the village of Lutterhausen, just outside the town of Hardegsen ten miles south of Stöckheim. Lutterhausen was even smaller than Stöckheim, but the district was prosperous, and it was here that Carl Kolbe remained for the rest of his career and the rest of his life. Weakness of old age forced him to retire in 1869, and he died in 1870. The lovely church and the spacious half-timbered parsonage, which still stand, attest to the comfortable nature of Carl Kolbe's last position. Still, Hermann's biographers—with perhaps some exaggeration—emphasize the modest character of the family's lifestyle, portraying Carl as living the life of a "simple country pastor."[13]
It is possible to say something about Carl Kolbe's religious outlook, for he published a catechetical handbook for the religious and moral instruction of children, at just about the time he needed to begin instructing Hermann and his other children. His book begins with the thesis that "we learn of the existence of God through a rational consideration of the heavens and the earth." Only after thoroughly exploring the rational basis of religious belief does he ask children to understand that "we acquire more detailed knowledge of God through the Bible." These and other passages demonstrate that Pastor Kolbe's religious opinions exhibited the moderate rationalism so characteristic of Lutheran theologians during the German Enlightenment, and especially of the anglophilic Hanoverians. One would seek in vain here for precursors of Hermann Kolbe's future fire-and-brimstone "sermons" to his fellow chemists. Pastor Kolbe's instructions are uniformly modest, gentle, and tolerant, and are informed by a positive and liberal view of God and of mankind.[14]
Determining Hermann Kolbe's religious views is not straightforward. Apparently, Kolbe intended to accede to his father's desire for him to enter the ministry, until at the age of eighteen he discovered chemistry.[15] Conversely, Edward Frankland, a good friend who spent much time with Kolbe from 1845 to 1850, described him much later as an "agnostic."[16] However, if we consider that Frankland was a "born-again" Christian during much of this period (before he began to fall into agnosticism himself), that the term agnostic did not even exist at that time, and that there are many demonstrable inaccuracies in Frank-land's memoirs (including incorrectly labeling others as agnostic),[17] this evidence must be viewed with caution. Frankland said that he and
Kolbe had argued over religion. It could be that Frankland's early impressions were never modified by later data; from his fundamentalist perspective, sincere religious feeling tempered by rationalist moderation may have seemed agnostic.
An autograph memorandum in Kolbe's personnel file at Marburg states his religious confession to be "reformirt." This memo is dated 31 January 1854, which is shortly after his marriage, and it is a reasonable supposition that he converted from Lutheranism after becoming engaged. This conjecture is strengthened by the report that he initially experienced opposition from his prospective father-in-law, but that all tensions were fully resolved shortly before the wedding.[18]
Despite this (probably thoroughly formalist) conversion from the faith of his family, most evidence supports the view that Hermann remained a sincere Christian and that his religious philosophy was similar to that of his father. As professor in Leipzig, he placed the Biblical quotation "God has arranged all things by measure and number and weight" (Wisdom of Solomon 11:20) in large letters above the chart of the chemical elements at the front of his lecture theater. When Kolbe's successor Johannes Wislicenus first saw the placard, he said to his guide, "Das muss verschwinden!" When relating this story, Georg Lockemann compared the two chemists by remarking that Wislicenus, too, was the son of a minister, but a man of very different (i.e., free-thinking) religious convictions—indicating that Lockemann regarded Kolbe as a traditional religionist.[19]
In an 1872 work, Kolbe argued that students of theology should be required to study chemistry and the other sciences in order to combat the atheistic and materialistic image of scientists and of science. This sentiment is reinforced in Kolbe's obituary of Liebig (who, Kolbe asserted, shared his views on theology and religion). The proper attitude, he felt, is not blind orthodoxy that teaches miracles and a literal interpretation of the Bible, but rather a rationalistic and science-based religious conviction that has overtones of natural theology. He wrote
The study and recognition of the wonders of nature and of the laws by which the Creator has revealed himself to mankind in so palpable a fashion leads not, as those stupefiers of mankind would want us to believe, to atheism, but in just the opposite direction: it permits the physical as also the spiritual eye to discern the caring and cherishing hand of the Creator in thousands of features.[20]
Many passages from Kolbe's correspondence with publishers Eduard and Heinrich Vieweg also suggest a moderate rationalist Protestantism, similar to that of his father. In 1853 he recommended for publi-
cation by Vieweg a history of the early Christian church by Eduard Zeller (1814-1908), a prominent member of the Tübingen school of higher criticism and a follower of David Strauss. Zeller had recently been called to Marburg, but had been forced from the theological into the philosophical faculty by persistent charges of atheism. Kolbe explained to Vieweg what the higher criticism meant, said he agreed with Zeller's views, and commented that no one is less inclined toward atheism than Zeller, despite his record of defending conclusions that "make the hair of pious theologians stand on end."[21]
All of this suggests that Kolbe never lost the faith given to him by his father. Nonetheless, considering his upbringing as the son of a pastor and the large number of surviving personal letters that provide a window into his private life, the paucity of evidence for the character of Kolbe's religious convictions is striking. All of his biographers emphasize that chemistry was his whole life, and one can only assume that his science, simultaneously his vocation and avocation, overshadowed even his sincere religious beliefs.