Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer

Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer (1766–1848) was a scholarship holder in Tübingen, habilitated in Jena in 1792, and later became a Bavarian school councilor.

He is the most important patron in Hegel’s career. In 1807 he secured for him the editorship of the Bamberger Zeitung, and in 1808 the rectorship of the Nuremberg Gymnasium — the positions that sustained Hegel after the collapse of his existence in Jena.

At the same time, he took Hegel’s illegitimate son Ludwig into his household. The correspondence between the two men is the most important source for Hegel’s years between Jena and Heidelberg.