The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in this house on August 27, 1770. The house now contains a small museum about his life and work.
The quotation on the banner in my photo reads: Alles was ist, ist vernünftig, which could be translated ‘Everything that is, is reasonable’. I have never understood this sentence, but I have read long explanations (some by Hegel himself) trying to explain it. He differentiates between Existenz (existence) and Wirklichkeit (reality), and maintains that unreasonable things only ‘exist’ but are not ‘real’, in his sense. (Have I got that right?)
The Hegel House is one of the few places in Stuttgart which was not closed down in March 2020 to combat the coronavirus — but only because it was closed already to permit a thorough re-vamping of the permanent exhibitions, in honor of Hegel’s 250th birthday.
The previous exhibition began on the ground floor with exhibits on Stuttgart during Hegel’s Lifetime 1770-1831.
Museum displays in the Hegel House
On the first and second floors of the Hegel House there was an exhibition showing the various stations in Hegel’s life, from his birth and childhood in Stuttgart to his professorship in Berlin, by way of Bern and Jena. As a young man he even spent a few years in Frankfurt am Main, where he worked as the house teacher for the children of a wealthy family. (This was how young intellectuals often earned their living in those days, as I have mentioned in a post about Hegel’s friend and former roommate, the poet Friedrich Hölderlin.)
Enlargements of Hegel’s handwritten pages
This wall of the museum showed enlarged replicas of Hegel’s handwritten pages.
Oak beams
Here they have left a part of the ceiling free to show how the house was constructed using oak timbers. While doing restoration work, they uncovered several different color combinations of paint that had been used on the walls in various centuries.
Hegel-Haus, Eberhardstraße 53, 70173 Stuttgart
My photos in this post are from 2007. I revised the text in 2020.
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I love these little history lessons you share with us, so interesting!
Thanks. Glad you like them.
I would interpret it as “everything that exists in the world, has a reason for its existence. It’s reasonable.” But I have no idea if it’s the intended meaning.
Thanks for all the entertaining and inspirational posts.
That sounds like a ‘reasonable’ explanation, but I also don’t know if that’s what Hegel intended. Some of the interpretations seem to be based on notes taken by Hegel’s students during his lectures at the university in Berlin.