On March 10, 1906, the Deutsche Gasglühlicht-Anstalt registered the Osram trademark for electric incandescent and arc-light lamps with the Imperial Patent Office in Berlin;

on April 17, 1906 it was registered under number 86 924 in the Register of Trademarks.

The name Osram is an artificial word, formed from the names of the two metals used for filaments because of their high melting point, osmium and tungsten.

Patrick Bahners

Feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and responsible for "Humanities".

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Adolf Deißmann, Professor of the New Testament at Berlin University since 1908, gave his inaugural speech on October 15, 1930 as Rector of the academic year 1930/31.

In the course of a critical overview of the situation in his field, he said: "But the outlines of the early Christian reality become completely unrecognizable when this Western doctrinarism is still combined with a mode of expression that takes the place of the popular, plastically sincere word images created by the early community itself always only a small conspiracy of tongues speakers understandable school language of the respective fashion philosophy.

Under the Osram lamps of these academic authorities, the New Testament shivers in exile.”

As Friedrich Wilhelm Graf now explains in a review article ("Only little light from East Berlin. About Adolf Deißmann and scientific theology, using the example of an anthology", Theologische Rundschau, Vol. 87, Issue 2, 2022 / Mohr Siebeck). meant with the fashion philosophy of Martin Heidegger, who inspired Deißmann's Marburg colleague Rudolf Bultmann.

According to Deißmann, the effect of Bultmann's method appears as a pseudo-Pentecostal miracle to be disenchanted in terms of conspiracy theory. Graf takes offense at the fact that none of the authors of the book he reviewed, published by the Berlin theology professors Cilliers Breytenbach and Christoph Markschies in 2019, are the contributions to a Berlin conference 2013 collected volume "the disgust" of the "rationality-critical,

Graf dedicates a critical essay of no less than 77 pages with 354 footnotes to the conference proceedings, which usually have 320 pages.

Criticism here becomes performance art in the manner of Marina Abramović or Frank Castorf: through exhaustive, thorough interpretations, the Munich theologian demonstrates what most of the authors of the volume failed to do according to his devastating verdict.

Like the preachers of the early church

Graf could have added the reference to the brand name as his own poisonous ingredient to his interpretation of the lightbulb image.

The nameless lightbulb would have sounded too homey;

only the completely modern proper name, invented without tradition and inescapably familiar from advertising, allows the mood of the office idyll to tip over into the uncanny.

Literary historians may note that the sewing in of a brand label, such as that used by the pop literati at the turn of the millennium to mark their aesthetics of coolness, served seventy years earlier to denounce a reading theory of the cold.

Conceived at Osramlicht: Deißmann characterized the exegesis of the Bultmann school as a product in the form of commodities.

How could he scold academic authorities in the robe of the highest university dignity?

He thought,

that even in formal speech he spoke as popularly and honestly as he imagined the preachers of the early church;

he dismissed the fundamental ideas of his competitor Bultmann, which were critical of tradition, as a trademark of professorial self-idolatry.

"Hasn't Deißmann owned a desk lamp and only therefore raved about the mystical semi-darkness of intuitively perceived exegetical insight?

Did desk candles light him up?” Graf's sarcastic rhetorical questions take Deißmann's folklore, or to put it in modern terms: everyday history approach at its word.

There was disagreement between him and Bultmann as to whether one could understand Paul by putting oneself into the circumstances of his life by looking at it later.

In his 1926 review of Deißmann's Paulus book, Bultmann scoffed at what the "Orientfahrer" said about his "travel impressions".

If in doubt, the author would have seen more at his desk;

"Confusion" is "the consequence of contempt for conceptual work".

When Graf finishes off the book of Deißmann expositors in Bultmann's style,

The title of Graf's essay, which alludes to Deißmann's best-known book, can be translated into the message: Berlin is not yet fully electrified, too many candles are still being lit between the cathedral and the academy.

To ensure rationality, Graf plays the TÜV examiner: In the absence of "any quality control by external experts", the volume for which Breytenbach and Markschies are responsible "was able to undermine the established academic DIN standards" - a case for "the Federal Office for Academic Consumer Protection and Reading Material Safety".