MÖSER, JUSTUS. — Publicist and historian, born in Osnabrück on 14 December 1720, died there on 8 January 1794. A lawyer, he took part in the public life of his native city: in 1742 he became secretary, and later mayor, of the Ritterschaft, and in 1747 advocatus patriae.
A scholar of Germanic antiquity, he defended the originality of the national character against French influence (cf.
Versuch einiger Gemälde der Sitten unserer Zeit [Hannover 1747] and the drama Arminius of 1749), exalting, against the rationalistic poetics that imitated classical canons, the artist’s creative imagination and, against aesthetic moralism, the value of the passions. In Arlequin oder Verteidigung des Grotesk-Komischen (1761) he was a painter of popular customs; at the same time he studied the historical origins of Germanic society, identifying landed property as the source of freedom and the foundation of the nation. Following this line, in the unfinished Osnabrückische Geschichte (1768–1824), he traced a constitutional and social history of his homeland, in which he showed himself hostile to enlightened despotism and a supporter of the self-government of peasant communities; these themes were taken up again in the Patriotische Phantasien (Berlin 1774–78). A Protestant, he showed open understanding for Catholicism. After a youthful contempt for Christian virtues, inspired by libertine motifs from the seventeenth century, he in fact recognized, in the Schreiben an den Herrn Vicar in Savoyen (1765), the value of positive religions against deism; he attributed to them, above all to the Catholic religion, a political value as a defense of freedom. He likewise gave a predominantly political character to the antithesis between Catholicism and Lutheranism in the Schreiben... über die künftige Vereinigung der Evangelischen u. Katholischen Kirche (Frankfurt and Leipzig 1780).