Alexander Tille

File:Alexander Tille.jpg

Alexander Tille

Franz Alexander Tille (30 April 1866 – 16 December 1912 in Saarbrücken) was a German philosopher, Germanist and functionary of trade associations. Influenced by Nietzscheism and Social Darwinism, Tille strongly supported eugenics. He claimed Christian ethics, democracy, equality, humanism and socialism were only the delusions held by the weak. Tille felt slums were good, since they could help purge society of the "unfit". He also thought disabled and mentally ill people should be left to starve, with food only given to the "fit".

Biography

Alexander Tille was born in Lauenstein. He came from a Protestant pastor's family. His younger brother was the archivist, librarian and historian Armin Tille. After attending the Princes' School in Grimma, Alexander Tille studied German and English philology as well as philosophy at Leipzig University from 1886 to 1890. In 1890, he received his doctorate with a dissertation on "The German Folk Songs of Doctor Faust." From 1890, he was a lecturer in German studies at the University of Glasgow. Due to ideological disputes with British students in connection with the Boer War, he gave up his lectureship in 1900. He subsequently represented the interests of large-scale industry in Berlin as deputy managing director of the Centralverband Deutscher Industrieller (Central Association of German Industrialists). In 1901 he began to publish the political speeches of Carl Ferdinand von Stumm-Halberg, a major industrialist and politician from the Saarland. From 1903 until his death, he was syndic of the Saarbrücken Chamber of Commerce and managing director of several industrial associations.

Writings

During his Glasgow period, he published books in German on Social Darwinism, as well as newspaper articles on the same subject and on contemporary British economics and society. In 1896, he published the first English translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and in the following years he wrote introductions to other English translations of Nietzsche's works, in which he portrayed him in particular as a Social Darwinist.

In his main philosophical works, the book Volksdienst (People's Service), initially published anonymously ("by a social aristocrat") in 1893, as well as the treatise on Darwin und Nietzsche ("A Book of Developmental Ethics") published two years later, Tille largely rejected the humane ethical principles established in the course of the cultural development of mankind with reference to their "unnaturalness" or their allegedly progress-limiting or progress-preventing effect. He also criticized philosophers such as Ernst Haeckel or Herbert Spencer, who postulated the compatibility of progress and humanity on the basis of developmental biology. Tille, on the other hand, negated this compatibility and considered progress to be absolutely preferable.

Alexander Tille not only wrote his dissertation on the Faust material, but also produced numerous other scholarly works on the subject. He also compiled a book collection of about 700 works, which is now kept as part of the Faust collection of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar. It first went to the Goethe and Schiller Archive in 1913, then, together with Gerhard Stumme's Faust collection, to the Central Library of German Classics.

Works

• "Die Bode'sche Faustbücherei." In: Allgemeine Zeitung München No. 197 (1892), pp. 4–7.
• Die deutschen Volkslieder vom Doktor Faust (1890).
• "Zur Faustsage". In: Vierteljahrschrift für Litteraturgeschichte No. 5 (1892), pp. 137–40.
• Die Faustsplitter in der Literatur des sechzehnten bis achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (1900).
• "Goethes Faust in der französischen Kunst. Mit einem Einschaltbild und 13 Textillustrationen". In: Velhagen & Klasings Monatshefte, No. 14 (1899/1900), pp. 581–94.
• "Neue Faustsplitter aus dem XVI., XVII. und XVIII. Jahrhundert". In: Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturgeschichte, No. 9 (1895), pp. 49–80.
• "Neue Faustsplitter aus dem XVI., XVII. und XVIII. Jahrhundert". In: Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturgeschichte, No. 9 (1896), pp. 61–72.
• Die Geschichte der deutschen Weihnacht (1893).

References

• Fritz Hellwig, "Alexander Tille." In: Peter Neumann, ed., Saarländische Lebensbilder. Vol. 4. (1989), ISBN 3-925036-20-2.
• Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860-1914. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (1981).
• Wilfried Schungel, Alexander Tille (1866–1912). Leben und Ideen eines Sozialdarwinisten (= Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften 40). Husum: Matthiesen (1980).

External links

• Works written by or about Alexander Tille at Wikisource
• Works by Alexander Tille at German National Library