MÖSER, JUSTUS. - Publicist and historian, b. in Osnabrück on 14 Dec. 1720, d. there on 8 Jan. 1794. A lawyer, he took part in the public life of his native city: in 1742 he became secretary, and later syndic, of the Ritterschaft, in 1747 advocatus patriae.
A scholar of Germanic antiquities, 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 a rationalistic poetics that imitated classical canons, the creative imagination of the artist, 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 in landed property the source of freedom and the basis of the nation. Along these lines he traces, in the incomplete Osnabrückische Geschichte (1768-1824), a constitutional and social history of his homeland, in which he shows himself hostile to enlightened despotism and an advocate of the self-government of peasant communities; themes 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 seventeenth-century libertine motifs, he recognizes in fact, in the Schreiben an den Herrn Vicar in Savoyen (1765), the value of positive religions against deism; he attributes to them, and supremely to the Catholic one, a political value of defense of freedom. He likewise gives a predominantly political character to the antithesis Catholicism-Lutheranism in the Schreiben... über die künftige Vereinigung der Evangelischen u. Katholischen Kirche (Frankfurt and Leipzig 1780).
Bibliography5 works
Sergio Cotta