Flugel, Johann Gottfried b. November 22, 1788; Barby, Saxony d.June 24, 1855; Leipzig, Saxony
German American merchant, philologist, and lexicographer.
After a mercantile apprenticeship in Magdeburg, Johann Gottfried Flugel worked for several German trading companies and sailed to the United States in 1810, continuing his business activities on the banks of the Mississippi River.
He obtained U.S. citizenship in New Orleans in 1819. Returning to Germany in the same year, Flugel settled in Leipzig, where he became lecturer (Lectorpublicus) in English at the University of Leipzig (1824-1837) and received his doctor’s degree (DPhil) in 1830. He was a laborious student of English, publishing a Grammar of the English Language (2 vols., 1824-1826), pamphlets, and critical essays that remain a noteworthy record of the earlier period of English philology in Germany. His Complete Dictionary of the English and German Languages (1830, 3rd ed., 1847), enlarged, updated, and newly edited by his son Felix,also contained a great number of Americanisms and became a standard work (15th ed., 1891).
In January 1839, U.S. president Martin Van Buren appointed Flugel U.S. consul in Leipzig, thus succeeding the famous economist and Tubinger professor Friedrich List in that office. The U.S. consulate at Leipzig, founded in 1826, was of great importance for the commercial and intellectual interests of the United States in nineteenth-century Europe, since this city represented a commercial place of the first magnitude and harbored a first-rate university with a good number of American students. Its international fairs, regularly visited by American traders from New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans, had become a real bridgehead of east-west trade. Flugel was unremitting in his efforts to render service to American travelers, and by his untiring industry and zeal, he intensified Saxon-American business activities as well as transatlantic scholarly contacts.
In 1846, only one year after its foundation, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., made Flugel agent of its international exchange service for central Europe. The regents of this famous institution of learning held their German agent in high esteem for his contribution to establishing its renown throughout northern and central Europe. After his death, his son, Vice-Consul Dr. Felix Flugel (1820—1904), was put in charge of exchange matters between Germany and the United States. Subsequently, exchanges between the United States and Austria- Hungary and also Switzerland were conducted through the Leipzig agency.
Eberhard Bruning
See also American Students at German Universities; List, Friedrich; New Orleans
References and Further Reading
Bruning, Eberhard. Das Konsulat der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika zu Leipzig. Unter besonderer Berucksichtigung des Konsuls Dr. J. G. Flugel (1839—1855). Sitzungsberichte der Sachsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. Phil.-hist. Klasse. Vol. 134, no. 1. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994.