Carl Kuenzel

Carl Kuenzel

Carl Künzel (born April 24, 1808 in Heilbronn ; † February 3, 1877 there ; also Karl Künzel ) was a German autograph collector .

Life

Carl Künzel was the first son of the city council Bernhard Künzel and his wife Marie Magdalene. Bernhard Künzel owned a house on Metzgergasse, which at the time was number 305. After leaving school, he let his son begin an apprenticeship in the newly founded paper factory of the Rauch brothers - Carl Künzel was to spend 55 years as a professional in this factory. As a young man, Carl Künzel realized that there were major gaps in his schooling and began to do further training himself. For this he used the early morning hours from 4 a.m. in particular. After his apprenticeship he was permanently employed in the factory; his job was to visit the customers. He used these trips and contacts to expand his autograph collection. From around the 1860s he was mainly employed in Heilbronn, but used his vacations to travel to France and Italy. In his last years he suffered from knee inflammation and died of dropsy of the heart at the age of 68 .

Wilhelmstrasse 9, Heilbronn

Künzel lived in his hometown from the 1840s in front of Sülmertor 963 and from around 1850 in a corner building on Cäcilienstrasse and Wilhelmstrasse. The house at Wilhelmstrasse 9 had large rooms for social events and was furnished with old furniture, including two cupboards from the early 17th century that had been dismantled to protect against the effects of the Thirty Years' War . One of the cupboard doors, covered with clay, had been used in Aries as the gate of a pigsty before the furniture collector Künzel rediscovered it and moved it to his apartment.

Künzel was a member of the Heilbronn Gräßle Society , which had emerged from the Fredes circle around the doctor Philipp Safe and in which the dignitaries met. In the 1840s, the baker and landlord Christoph David Gräßle ran a wine tavern on Fleiner Straße, opposite the choir of the Kilianskirche , from whose regulars ' table on May 1, 1845, the Gräßle Society, also called Herbulanum , emerged. Members of this community included David Friedrich Strauss , who lived in Heilbronn at Götzenturmstraße 8 until 1848 and from 1860 to 1864 in the Bläß'schen Palais at Paulinenstraße 2, Adolf Goppel , Gustav Rümelin , Heinrich Titot , Adolf and Alfred Schliz , Eduard Zeller , Kuno Fischer , Christian Märklin , Friedrich Theodor von Vischer , Karl Reinhold Köstlin and Justinus Kerner . In the 1890s, Gräßle's house was demolished and the company moved to the Gasthof Traube at Wilhelmstrasse 3; But from the 1880s onwards she also used the Harmonie and later the Liederkranzhaus .

In this circle, Künzel was honored and teased with epithets such as "the all-administrator" and used in particular as a travel marshal. In a poem by a Herbulanum member, his restless zeal was discussed:

Carl Künzel (third person seated from the right) with members of the Gräßle Society

The fiery Künzel, chancellor and conductor,
ancient rune connoisseur and friend,
full of roaring zeal, a loyal guardian,
the good one and the bad enemy.
Fearlessly he paves all paths
where the covenant takes its way;
Mercilessly but without mercy
he makes the calculation until it is correct.
It is true that he is fair and grants everyone his own without envy.
Restlessly contemplated for the serenity,
But when it comes to making things clean,
Bottomless always ready to move in.

collection

The Rauch paper factory (left)

Carl Künzel, who later became an agent and finally authorized signatory of the Heilbronn paper factory of the Rauch brothers, came by chance as an apprentice to his passion for handwritten testimonials from well-known people: After discovering a letter to Friedrich Schiller in the rag room of the factory , he began, systematically collect autographs.

Among other things, he was able to obtain the so-called Schilleriana, letters from various people to Schiller, as well as poems by Holderlin in the author's handwriting. Known by his friends as "Papirius Cursor", Künzel always carried a log book with him on business trips in which he collected entries from prominent personalities. Among other things, Eduard Mörike wrote the poem The world would be a swamp in 1853 in this register. It is possible that Mörike, who was in correspondence with Künzel, had known it since his time in Cleversulzbach , as he had contacts in Heilbronn through his friend Karl Friedrich Schnitzer. A former student of Mörike at the Katharinenstift in Stuttgart , Maria Charlotte Karoline Schliz, married Künzel's son Albert Karl Theodor Künzel, who was born in 1840.

The trunk album consisted of a gold-pressed cardboard box, in which Künzel apparently collected sheets from 1827 on that seemed to him particularly valuable. The focus of this collecting activity was in the 1830s, but the autographs in the main album were further added until 1868. An anonymous scribe, possibly Freiligrath , reported how Künzel came into possession of one or more sheets by Goethe in 1829 in the London Athenaeum : Künzel had entered Goethe's house on a trip to Weimar and asked the servant to hide him in the hallway, so that he could take a look at the poet. However, Goethe was informed of this request by his servant and thereupon asked the inquisitive Swabian into his premises, had a friendly conversation with him about Schiller's sister, with whom Künzel was friends, and finally gave him something handwritten. The article was printed in the Süddeutsche Buchhandler-Zeitung No. 43, Volume 8, 1855 and provided with a comment in which the extent and quality of the Künzel collection was pointed out: It is one of the most important on the continent. With a few deviations, the phoenix had already reported in its numbers 242 and 244 in 1836 of Künzel's visit to Goethe. In addition to a sheet of paper with inscriptions in French and dated to Goethe's birthday in 1829, Künzel's collection also contained another script by Goethe - a German-language quatrain - from 1827. In addition to these two sheets, Künzel owned other memorabilia from Goethe , like his garden hat, a breakfast cup and a feather. According to a certificate of authenticity that the servant Friedrich Krause issued to him in 1834, there was also a second head covering by Goethe in Künzel's possession, the fate of which, however, is unclear. The contents of Künzel's album were auctioned on October 9, 1936; Only a few autographs remained in the family's possession.

Carl Künzel had a nephew named Wilhelm Künzel, who also collected autographs. Wilhelm Künzel, who moved to Leipzig in 1859 , died on June 28, 1896. His collection has also not been preserved in its entirety; 15,223 autographs from it were auctioned off in seven departments from November 1896. "These two collectors, uncle and nephew, are of particular importance for the history of autographing, because today's collector and antiquarian still encounters the trace of their days on earth at every turn," says Günther Mecklenburg's work Vom Autographensammeln with reference to the annotations in fine pencil which uncle and nephew left on their collection items.

Schiller's comic works

Self-caricature in Schiller's Avantures

In Emil Kneschke's assessment, the two collectors owned "one of the most valuable collections of autographs", including a manuscript for a comedy from the hand of Friedrich Schiller, which they either - according to Kneschke - bought from Christian Gottfried Körner's adoptive son after the death of Christian Gottfried Körner in 1831, or that Carl Künzel, as he himself explained, had received from Körner's widow in 1837. However, the condition was attached to the transfer not to publish the work, in which it was about Körner's household, due to inconsequential passages or to destroy these passages. Nevertheless, Alfred von Wolhaben insisted several times to get a publication through: “Schiller's person and every one of his writings is and should be the common property of the nation, and it is said to sanctify the nation if one of his products, even if it is relatively worthless, is withheld from it. “In the end, Künzel felt quite rudely pushed and published the comedy I let myself be shaved in 1862 himself. Likewise, in 1862 he published the Avanturen des neue Telemach or Leben und Exsertionen Koerners des decenten, consequenten, piquanten etc. , a handwritten and illustrated book that was published by Schiller, who had taken the pseudonym Hogarth , and Ludwig for the 30th birthday of Körner Ferdinand Huber , who called himself Winkelmann, was created. The alleged place of origin of this playful work was Rome . Schiller had created the colored pen drawings, Huber the text for them.

Künzel as a literary figure

Carl Künzel himself appears as a literary figure under his real name in David Friedrich Strauss' novella The Paper Traveler . He is shown there in conversation with Eduard Zeller , who is haunted by a mysterious stranger. This stranger claims of himself to be indispensable to the style of the writer and turns out to be the personified semicolon . Strauss sent this literary joke to Zeller after Zeller had published his translation of Plato's symposium .

Family and offspring

On August 4, 1839, Carl Künzel married the 18-year-old pharmacist's daughter Amalie Braun from Knittlingen . The honeymoon took the couple through several cities, the sights of which Künzel had previously noted on long, narrow strips of paper and crossed out each time after the visit. The first son, Albert Karl Theodor, was born on July 5, 1840; his godmother was Maria Körner. Two years later the son Theodor followed. The children were brought up strictly; Theodor Künzel fled his parents' home at the age of twenty and was recruited in America to fight the southern states. The parents received the first sign of life in 1863. Theodor Künzel made a considerable fortune in America, which his brother's children inherited after 1900. In the end, he himself was considered missing and apparently has no direct descendants. Albert Karl Theodor Künzel married Maria Schliz, the eldest daughter of Adolf Schliz. This marriage had three children: Anna Künzel married the lawyer August Köstlin, Carl Künzel became an agricultural councilor and Eugenie Künzel married Emil Michelmann , who published Carl Künzel's biography in 1938.

Carl Künzel's nephew Wilhelm had an adopted daughter named Sofie who married the Stuttgart piano manufacturer Adolf Schiedmayer .

literature

• Emil Michelmann, Carl Künzel. A collector's genius from Swabia , Stuttgart 1938
• Carl Künzel's “Schilleriana”. Letters to Schiller and Schiller's family members based on the copies in the possession of the Vienna Goethe Association (= Austrian Academy of Sciences. Philosophical-Historical Class. Meeting reports, 229th volume, 3rd treatise)

Web links

Commons : Carl Künzel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ^ Place of death after entry of Karl Künzel in the personal database of the Baden-Württemberg State Bibliography
2. ^ Emil Michelmann, Carl Künzel. A collector's genius from Swabia , Stuttgart 1938, p. 78
3. ↑ ^{a b} Emil Michelmann, Carl Künzel. A collector's genius from Swabia , Stuttgart 1938, pp. 8–11
4. ^ Emil Michelmann, Carl Künzel. A collector's genius from Swabia , Stuttgart 1938, p. 64 f.
5. ^ Württembergischer Geschichts- und Altertumsverein, Zeitschrift für Württembergische Landesgeschichte 3/4, 1939, p. 550
6. ↑ This collection of letters was first published by Ludwig Speidel and Hugo Wittmann after Künzel had sold it to the Neue Freie Presse . See Emil Michelmann, Carl Künzel. A collector's genius from Swabia , Stuttgart 1938, p. 53 f.
7. ^ Eduard Mörike, Works and Letters. Volume 16: Letters 1851-1856 , ed. v. Bernhard Thurn, Klett-Cotta 2001, ISBN 978-3-608-33160-8, p. 470
8. ↑ Eduard Mörike, Works and Letters, Vol. 19.1. Letters 1868–1875 ed. by Bernhard Thurn, Klett-Cotta (not yet published), ISBN 978-3608331912, p. 561
9. ^ Emil Michelmann, Carl Künzel. A collector's genius from Swabia , Stuttgart 1838, pp. 13–15
10. ^ Emil Michelmann, Carl Künzel. A collector's genius from Swabia , Stuttgart 1938, pp. 20–22
11. ^ Emil Michelmann, Carl Künzel. A collector's genius from Swabia , Stuttgart 1938, p. 81
12. ^ Emil Michelmann, Carl Künzel. A collector's genius from Swabia , Stuttgart 1938, p. 13
13. ^ Günther Mecklenburg, On collecting autographs. Attempt to portray his nature and history in the German-speaking area , JA Stargardt 1963, p. 54
14. ^ Emil Kneschke, The German comedy in the past and present , Leipzig 1861, p. 47
15. ^ Emil Kneschke, The German comedy in the past and present , Leipzig 1861, p. 48 f.
16. ↑ Carl Künzel (ed.), Friedrich Schiller, I let myself be shaved , Leipzig 1862
17. ↑ The Avantures of the New Telemach on the Goethezeitportal
18. ^ David Friedrich Strauss, The Paper Traveler