Youth and education Born in
Kirchnüchel, he was the second son of pastor Johann Heinrich Hirschfeld (1700–1754) and his wife Margarethe Sibylle (nee Reinboth, 1711–1759), a pastor's wife. He was taught by his father until the latter's death, upon which he was educated in Halle, attending the
Franckesche Stiftungen from 1756 to 1760 and then studying theology, philosophy and the "fine sciences" (i.e. art history and aesthetics) until 1763.
Frederick August, prince-bishop of Lübeck, took Hirschfeld on in 1765 as tutor to Wilhelm August (1759–1774) and
Peter Friedrich Ludwig (1755–1829), the orphaned sons of
Georg Ludwig von Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf, both of whom were wards of Frederick August and
Catherine the Great. In 1767, after a two-year stay in
Bern, Hirschfeld was dismissed due to a dispute with
Carl Friedrich von Staal, who had overall charge of the princes' education, though Hirschfeld's first book
Landleben was also published in Switzerland that year. He stayed in
Leipzig in 1768 and
Hamburg in 1769.
Academic and writer His first marriage was in 1771 to Charlotte Amalie (von) Hausmann (or Husmann) (1740–1777), a Danish naval officer's daughter, with whom he had his only child Henrietta Georgina Amalia in 1772, who died aged two months. In 1778, the year after Charlotte Amalie's death, he married Charlotte Elisabeth Rieck (nee von Hein, 1748–1789), daughter of an infantry major. Hirschfeld himself died in
Kiel and was buried in what would later be known as the St.-Jürgen cemetery in that city. After his death his fruit-tree nursery was taken over by
Johann Jacob Paul Moldenhawer. His house there was replaced by a new one in 1796 and from 1822 onwards the nearby viewpoint over the Kiel fjord was known as 'Bellevue'. Moldenhawer died in 1827 and two years later the nursery was privatised, with a new restaurant with a viewing pavilion built in 1846 and the house demolished in 1869, to be replaced by a house with overnight accommodation. Bit by bit the former nursery lands were parcelled up and sold off, with the last remaining one becoming the site of an eight-storey hotel in 1972.
Memorials Christina von Brühl placed a memorial to Hirschfeld in her garden at
Schloss Seifersdorf during his lifetime. Shortly after his death the plant genus 'Hirschfeldia' was named after him, formed of only one species, '
H. incana', first published by
Conrad Moench in 1794. On the two-hundredth anniversary of the date of Hirschfeld's death, Kiel renamed a small green area on the edge of his former tree nursery 'Hirschfeld-Blick' (Hirschfeld Square), in which a small memorial plaque to him was placed in 1997. The
Kieler Bürgerstiftung has been awarded to public gardens every two years since 2007. == Analysis ==