Background

Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787 – 1864) is considered as the first Serbian linguist and the founder of the Serbo-Croatian language. He came to Vienna in 1813, fleeing the Ottomans after the First Serbian Uprising had been defeated. There, he became acquainted with the Slavicist Jernej Kopitar, who inspired him to dedicate his life to collecting Serbian popular literature, reforming the Cyrillic script and establishing the popular language as a language of literature.

Vuk's philological activities were regarded with great favour in the romantically spirited German cultural area. From March 1823 to January 1824, Vuk finally travelled to Germany, where he met Jacob Grimm, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and many other intellectual giants of his time. Vuk visited lectures of medicine and philosophy in Halle and Leipzig, published several volumes of his “Narodne srpske pjesme” (Leipzig edition) in 1823 and 1824 and was awarded a honorary doctorate by the University of Jena.

A broad reception of south-Slavic popular literature started with the translation of the "Small Serbian grammar book" by Jacob Grimm in 1824 and of the "Serbian folk songs" by Therese Albertine Louise von Jakob (anagram Talvj) in 1825. In the course of the 1830s, this development opened out into a romantic euphoria for the Slavic language as “the singular language of popular poetry so to speak” (Magazin für die Literatur des Auslandes [journal for foreign literature], volume of 1832).

On the cabinet presentation

The cabinet presentation shows a selection of 15 boards from the exhibition “Vuk and the Germans”, particularly shedding a light on Vuk’s stay in Germany and its meaning for the German-Serbian cultural contact.

The complete exhibition can be viewed in digital form.
Digital exhibition “Vuk and the Germans”  (PDF, 26 MB)

Information overview