Krause

The word behind the name is Middle High German krus, curly, and it did nothing more than point at a man's hair. Krause is the 39th commonest surname in Germany today, the eastern form of a by-name the south keeps as the bare Kraus. Kraus, Krauß and Kruse all belong to it, and so do the two compounds that spell the observation out in full: Kraushaar, curly hair, and Krauskopf, curly head.

The earliest bearers the record fixes with dates are already townsmen holding something. Peter Krause was burgomaster of Berlin in 1524 and 1525. Jakob Krause, born in 1531 or 1532 and dead in 1585, was a bookbinder. Nothing connects the two, and nothing needs to: a by-name this obvious was coined separately in a hundred towns, for a hundred men with curls.

The best-documented Krause line begins at Naumburg with a physician who also ran the town. Peter Krause was born in Magdeburg on 26 March 1575 and died in Naumburg on 27 June 1657, serving the place as its Stadtarzt and its chief burgomaster. On 20 November 1604 he married Barbara Braun, daughter of the Magister Sixtus Braun; she died in Naumburg on 3 August 1616.

Their son, Rudolph Wilhelm Krause, was born in Naumburg on 8 April 1612 and entered the town school there in 1623, under Johannes Sixt. A house that began with a burgomaster closed the century with a chancellor and a professor of medicine.

Krause went up to Jena in 1629 to read philosophy, then moved to Wittenberg in 1632 for the law, where the faculty then held Jeremias Reusner, Konrad Carpzov, Johann Strauch and Henning Große. He defended under Große on wardship, theft and robbery, pledges and mortgages, the ordinary furniture of a civil lawyer's training, then returned to Jena in 1635 and took his doctorate there on 15 November 1638.

What followed moved a step at a time and never went backwards. He practised as an advocate in Naumburg, became syndic of Merseburg in 1640, took a post at the Hofgericht in Jena in 1641, and on 4 August 1643 was made professor of law at Jena. In 1646 he left the lecture room for the court, going to Weimar as Hof- und Justizrat, and in 1658 he became chancellor of Saxe-Weimar, president of the consistory and privy councillor, holding all three until 1672.

In 1659 the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft admitted him under the society name der Bescheidene, the modest one. He was ennobled and became hereditary lord of Mellingen, and he died at Weimar on 10 January 1689.

Rudolph Wilhelm Krause the younger was born at Naumburg on 22 October 1642, the chancellor's son, and was matriculated at Jena as an honorary entrant on 22 April 1659. He turned from philosophy to medicine under Gottfried Möbius, defended work under Werner Rolfinck and Johann Theodor Schenck, then set out on a long study journey.

It ran through Erfurt, Leipzig and Wittenberg, then Frankfurt am Main, Mainz, Hamburg and Emden into the Netherlands, where he attended Groningen, Utrecht and Leiden and heard Franciscus Sylvius. After a short stay in London he crossed to Italy. At Padua he took a master's degree in philosophy and, on 6 August 1667, his doctorate in medicine under Antonio Molinetti. He was nearly poisoned at Milan before he got home.

Jena took him back and kept him. He was made extraordinary professor of medicine on 28 June 1671, moved into the second ordinary chair of theoretical medicine in 1672 when Schenck died, and became first professor of practical medicine and chemistry in 1673 when Rolfinck died. The Leopoldina elected him on 25 September 1676 under the academy name Typhus, and he was rector four times over.

Almost every year from 1671 he put out an inaugural dissertation, and the titles read as a catalogue of what troubled and killed people around him: scurvy, gout, dysentery, quartan fever, palpitation of the heart, vertigo, toothache, diabetes, consumption, and in 1696 memory itself. The last, in 1714, drew on the recent plague at Hamburg. He died at Jena on 26 December 1718.

Michael Heinrich Krause was born at Torgau on 11 July 1651, son of Johann Krause of that town, who held the manor court at Gut Gräfendorf near Klitzschen. He spent a year at Jena from the summer of 1672, matriculated at Wittenberg on 19 August 1673 and took his master's degree there in 1674.

In October 1683 he took his licentiate in theology and was called to Schalkau as parish adjunct, succeeding Theodor Treuner; his doctorate followed at Wittenberg that December. He stayed. When the Schalkau parish was raised to a superintendency in 1714 Krause became its first superintendent, and he was still in post when he died there on 17 December 1729, after forty-six years.

The marriage he could only afford once Schalkau was his says the rest: in 1684 he married Catharina Elisabeth Deutschmann, daughter of Johann Deutschmann, who had been his own professor at Wittenberg. They had ten children in the parish. Two sons went into the ministry, and the daughters married the men a superintendency threw up: a pastor at Heßberg, a Schalkau official who rose to be a Hofrat at Hildburghausen.

Johann Gottlieb Kraus, who also signed himself Krause, was born at Hünern in the principality of Wohlau on 13 March 1684, son of the schoolmaster and theologian Johann Georg Kraus. Taught at Lauban and Großwörbitz and by private tutors, he went on to the Gymnasium at Breslau and matriculated at Leipzig in 1705, where he heard Christian Wolff and found his gift: writing the lives of scholars.

Out of that came the thing he is remembered for. In 1715, after setbacks that had left him short of money, he started the Neue Zeitungen von Gelehrten Sachen, the first scholarly newspaper written in German, and edited it himself until 1733. Leipzig offered him a chair of rhetoric in 1723; he wanted history, and took one in literary history at Wittenberg in 1727 instead. An electoral decree of 16 May 1732 made him professor of history there.

That world also explains why the surname will not sit still on a title page. The chancellor at Weimar appears as Crause and as Krauss, his son as Crause, Krauss and Crausius, and Kraus and Krause were the same man at Leipzig. Latin was the language of the faculty and the name was dressed to fit it: Crusius on a spine is a curly-haired ancestor's by-name in academic clothes. The shorter form kept its own weight, and the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus, scourge of the press and the language of his age, is among the sharpest bearers it has produced.

Johann Gottfried Krause was born at Greußen on 29 June 1685, son of the town's schoolmaster. He went at seventeen to the Augusteum at Weißenfels, to Leipzig in 1704 and to Jena three years later, and from 1717 served as deacon at Weißenfels. In 1721 he was called to Dahme in the Mark as superintendent and first pastor. A call to Lübben reached him in 1746; he died of a stroke on 25 September, before he could take it up.

What outlived him was sung. He brought out a hymnbook at Langensalza in 1716, and seven of his hymns stand in the third edition of the Langensalza book of 1719. He was still working on a hymnbook at Dahme when he died, and it was finished only just before the end; a second edition, published at Wittenberg in 1764, carried his songs into later congregational books.

Christian Gottfried Krause, born at Winzig, now Wińsko in Poland, on 17 April 1717, came from a musical house: his father was a Stadtpfeifer who taught him flute, violin, keyboard and timpani. He read law at Frankfurt an der Oder, where Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's ideas on aesthetics marked him for good, and in 1746 he settled in Berlin. His treatise Von der musikalischen Poesie is taken as the start of the first Berlin school of Lieder, and he wrote for it as well as about it: the cantatas Gelobet sey der Herr and Der Tod Jesu in 1758, and the four volumes of Lieder der Deutschen mit Melodien in 1767 and 1768. He died in Berlin on 4 May 1770.