Andreas, Friedrich Carl

ORIENTALIST (GERMANY)
BORN 14 Apr 1846, Batavia (now: Jakarta) - DIED 3 Oct 1930, Göttingen, Niedersachsen
CAUSE OF DEATH cancer
GRAVE LOCATION Göttingen, Niedersachsen: Stadtfriedhof, Kasseler Landstrasse (Abteilung 68, 4)

Carl Friedrich Andreas was a son of a former member of the Armenian royal family Bagratuni who had changed his name to Andreas. His father as a military physician in Batavia, where he married the daughter of a German physician. With their son they moved to Hamburg where Friedrich received a private education. He attended a gymnasium in Geneva and in his youth he already knew German, English, Dutch, French, Latin and Greek. He studied orientalism in Halle, Erlangen, Göttingen and Leipzig. In 1868 he was promoted in Erlangen.

After his promotion he lived in Kopenhagen where he learned Nordic languages. He joined the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 as a volunteer and survived the Battle of Le Mans. He worked as a language teacher for a while before he embarked on years of field study in Persia and India. In 1882 he accompanied a persian Prince to Germany and in Berlin he suddenly started suffering from an eye disease. This forced him to give up on his research activities. This forced him to take up his work as a language teacher again.

In 1886 he met the socialite Lou Salome and he proposed marriage to her although he hardly knew her and had no money. After she refused him he planted a knife in his chest before her eyes. She called a physician, he survived and the next day they were engaged. But Lou Salome had only agreed to marriage on the condition that it would never be consumed sexually. After he obtained a professorship in Berlin they were married on 20 June 1887. But after he spend to much time on his own research he was fired in 1891 and lost his title. He was now dependent on his wife's income as an author. At the time he lived separate from Lou at Berlin-Schmargendorf because he couldn't stand his wife's affairs.

In 1903 he was appointed professor of Iranian philology at the University of Göttingen. He moved to Göttingen together with Lou, where he lived downstairs with their housekeeper and Lou lived upstairs. He and worked in Göttingen for the rest of his life and died in Göttingen in 1930.

Family
• Wife: Andreas-Salomé, Lou (1887-1930)

Images

The grave of Friedrich Carl Andreas and Lou Andreas-Salomé at the Stadtfriedhof, Göttingen.
Picture by Androom (25 Aug 2017)

 

Sources
Friedrich Carl Andreas – Wikipedia


Andreas-Salomé, Lou

Published: 23 Jun 2019
Last update: 02 Aug 2020