Christoph Leonhard Wolbach

Portrait medallion of Wolbach on his tomb in Ulm

Christoph Leonhard Wolbach , later Knight of Wolbach , (born March 28, 1783 in Ulm ; † December 7, 1872 ibid) was the first mayor of the city of Ulm, freely elected by the population , who was appointed Lord Mayor by Wilhelm I in 1822 . Wolbach remained in office for a quarter of a century (1819-1844) and was active as a journalist both during his tenure and after his resignation.

Life

The Wolbach family was initially based in Essingen , before grandfather Leonhard Wolbach came to Ulm in 1733, initially working as a tailor and then serving the mayor Adolf Friedrich Schad von Mittelbiberach. Because of his advocacy, Leonhard Wolbach received Ulm citizenship in 1745. Of his children, only Andreas Wolbach, who worked as a tax adjunct and treasurer, survived. However, he died shortly after the birth of his son Christoph Leonhard in 1783. After Christoph Leonhard's mother also died in 1791 and he became an orphan, the city of Ulm supported him. From 1800 to 1806 he attended the Ulm grammar school and then began studying law in Landshut . After completing his studies, he first became a lawyer at the Upper Tribunal in Tübingen in 1811 . Wolbach was able to return to Ulm in 1812 and initially took care of the administration of justice for the military stationed in Ulm as an auditorium administrator . He later moved to the Higher Court of Justice for the Danube District as a senior judicial officer .

During the famine years of 1816/17 , Wolbach campaigned for the social concerns of its fellow citizens. When food prices rose significantly due to poor harvests, Wolbach called for a buyers' strike in the intelligence paper in order to force dealers to offer discounts. During this time, the mayor and the magistrate were not freely elected, but appointed by the crown for life because of the exercise of sovereign duties. As a counterbalance, citizens' committees were created in Württemberg, which were initially called community deputies. In Ulm, the citizens' committee had 18 members who were each elected for two years and met under the chairmanship of a chairman. Wolbach ran successfully in the first election in 1817 and was subsequently elected chairman. The citizens' committee then developed into a supervisory body for the magistrate, which was increasingly in opposition to it. The dispute was carried to Stuttgart, where the demand for free elections by the magistrate was not heard and the already limited powers of the citizens' committee were further curtailed.

In 1819 the office of mayor was introduced in Württemberg. Unlike before, there should be free elections, whereby it was reserved for the king to choose one of the three candidates with the highest percentage of votes for the office and appoint one for life. Only with a two-thirds majority for one of the candidates did the king no longer have freedom of choice. In the election that took place in 1819, Wolbach, among others, the mayor Christoph Karl Leopold von Wölkern, who was still appointed by Friedrich I and still in office, and Franz von Schad, who also belonged to the patriciate of Ulm, ran. Wolbach clearly won the election with 956 votes, followed by von Wölkern with 425 and von Schad with 419 votes. Although Wilhelm I could have appointed the previous incumbent von Wölkern mayor, he decided on the election winner, possibly also because he wanted to curtail the power of the Ulm patriciate.

Wolbach's term of office was rather calm. During his tenure, the customs barrier on the Danube bridge fell away, the Herdbrucker-, Frauen- and Glöcklertor were demolished, the new Herdbrücke was built, the foundation stone for the federal fortress of Ulm was laid and the expansion work on the cathedral began. When he tried to get his son approved for a fifth pharmacy in Ulm, there was a bitter argument with the pharmacist Carl Reichard. In the end, Wolbach was able to prevail with the establishment of the new pharmacy (the deer pharmacy), which, however, was not managed by his son as he had hoped, but was left to the provisional of the royal court pharmacy in Stuttgart. Wolbach resigned in 1844. The resignation is associated with the anger over this dispute, but he himself named a hearing problem as the reason in a letter to the editor of the Ulmer Schnellpost in 1861.

In 1826 his son Johann Philipp Gustav Wolbach was born.

Wolbach then received a lifelong pension of 1,200 guilders annually from the city and continued to work as a journalist. In 1846 and 1847 he tried unsuccessfully to be elected to the local council. It is possible that the population resented his early resignation.

Works

Wolbach mainly dealt with the social interests of Ulm and its citizens in his works and took a position on current legal issues, in particular his writings on civil rights and freedom of trade in Württemberg and the overview of the Ulm foundations.

In Wolbach's time, the population of Ulm was divided into citizens, assessors and foreigners. Only citizens had the right to vote and the right to "civil uses". And only citizens and assessors could run a trade. Citizenship and assessor rights were usually acquired through birth. At the beginning, the Württemberg constitution, which was passed in 1819, stipulated that the communities had complete freedom to accept community citizens and assessors. This freedom was used to accept only those who had sufficient financial resources and, in particular, did not increase the competitive pressure among the already resident craftsmen. A law passed in 1828 and revised in 1833 sought to improve freedom of trade by giving every citizen of the country the right to be a citizen or a member of a community. This change effectively led to the abolition of the previous right of the municipalities to decide for themselves about new citizens and assessors. This met with bitter resistance from the municipalities, at the head of which Wolbach initially sat in Württemberg with a petition written to the state parliament in 1828 and later with his book Die Umiedlungs- und Gewerbe-Freiheit . In it, Wolbach presented the previous legal basis, which went back to 1567, and then gave a detailed compilation of the disadvantages and weaknesses of the new legislation, with particular emphasis on the social consequences. The book was extremely welcomed in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung published in Jena :

“This teaching, which is very important in a well-ordered state, so that no adscriptio glebae can push the poorer citizens to the community of birth, is treated in this book in a spiritually, humane manner and with a great deal of expertise. [..] Honor the city chief who knows how to introduce such useful principles into life! "

During his retirement he worked on the publication of the work Urkundliche Nachrichten of the Ulm private foundations . In his time there were hundreds of Ulm foundations for the care of widows, the poor and the sick and for the education of young Ulm people, some of which had existed for several centuries and represented an important part of the common property of the people of Ulm. It was Wolbach's concern to provide the public with an overview of the available offers of help so that all offers are equally accessible to all those in need. Wolbach not only listed the foundations, but also highlighted the social problems of his time in his remarks. He noted that poverty was due to the declining competitiveness of handicraft products, so that industrially manufactured products from abroad were bought more than local products. He criticized the fact that there was too little state funding for new industries, that the tariff barriers would hinder growth too much, and that the impoverished craftsmen and farmers would only take up employment as wage laborers in factories in extreme need.

Wolbach's works include a. the following publications:

• Presentation of the city council and citizens' committee of Ulm to the assembly of estates against Articles 21, 22 and 23 of the draft law on community citizenship and participation rights . Ulm 1828.
• The freedom to move and trade initially in Württemberg . Wohlersche Buchhandlung, Ulm 1831 ( digitized version http: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3D~GB%3D~IA%3D~MDZ%3D%0A10553019~SZ%3D~ double-sided%3D~LT%3D~PUR%3D).
• About the abolition of the district posts in Württemberg . Wohlersche Buchhandlung, Ulm 1832.
• About the law of the domestic settlement in Württemberg . Ebner, Ulm 1832.
• About the legal status in tax and administrative matters, especially in Württemberg . Ebner, Ulm 1833.
• Ulm states . Ernst Nübling, Ulm 1846.
• Documentary messages from the Ulm private foundations . Ernst Nübling, Ulm 1847 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
• The abolition and replacement of the land taxes of the feudal or landlord. Slope cannot be reversed . Nübling Brothers, Ulm 1850.
• Entry to the Royal Removal Commission in Stuttgart, the applicability of the Removal Act of April 14, 1848 to the replacement of the validity of an estate that was sold to the inventory in 1813 and then re-sold piece by piece in 1818 . As an addendum and illuminating the text: About the abolition and replacement of the basic taxes (the fief and landlord gradient). Nübling Brothers, Ulm 1850, urn : nbn: de: bvb: 12-bsb10623401-9 .
• The agreement of the Royal. Württemberg. State government with the papal Curie on the conditions of the Catholic Church in Württemberg from 1857 . Nübling Brothers, Ulm 1860.

Award

Wolbach was accepted as a knight of the Order of the Württemberg Crown in the personal, non-heritable nobility , which entitled him to bear the name "Knight of Wolbach".

literature

• Hans Eugen Specker: Ulm's first mayor and man of the pen . In: Schwäbische Zeitung . No. 73 , March 28, 1972.
• Hans Eugen Specker (ed.): Ulm in the 19th century . Aspects from the life of the city. Ulm City Archives, Ulm 1990, ISBN 3-17-011198-1 . From this volume:
  • Uwe Schmidt: Sketches for social history . S. 255-278 .
  • Raimund Waibel: City and administration: The image of the Ulm community in the 19th century . S. 279-354 .
• Frank Raberg : Biographical Lexicon for Ulm and Neu-Ulm 1802-2009 . Süddeutsche Verlagsgesellschaft im Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Ostfildern 2010, ISBN 978-3-7995-8040-3 , p. 480 .

Web links

Commons : Christoph Leonhard Wolbach  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Wikisource: Christoph Leonhard Wolbach  - Sources and full texts

• Brief portraits of the Lord Mayors of Ulm

Remarks

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Raberg
2. ↑ Waibel, pp. 321–322.
3. ↑ Waibel, p. 321; Stadtarchiv Ulm, G2 old "Wolbach, Chr. Leonhard von", documents on the ancestry of the Wolbach family
4. ↑ ^{a b c d} Waibel, p. 322.
5. ^ Schmidt, p. 260.
6. ↑ Waibel, pp. 308-309.
7. ↑ Waibel, p. 309.
8. ↑ Waibel, p. 316.
9. ↑ Waibel, p. 321.
10. ↑ ^{a b c d} Specker 1972 in the Schwäbische Zeitung
11. ↑ ^{a b} Christoph Leonhard Wolbach: Sent in . In: Ulmer Schnellpost . 1861, p. 1139 .
12. ↑ Waibel, p. 283.
13. ↑ Waibel, pp. 284–285.
14. ↑ The Uebersiedlungs- and commercial freedom first in Württemberg / Christoph Leonhard Wolbach, upper Bürgerm. d. St. Ulm . In: Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung . 28th year, no. 72 , col. 187–190 ( uni-jena.de ).
15. ↑ p. 4: Insofar as our foundations are made for students, for widows, for the poor and the sick, etc., they actually present themselves as a common good; The way to higher education is open to everyone, every wife can become a widow, every individual can become poor and sick; but what concerns all should also be known by all; it belongs under public protection.
16. ↑ pp. 30 and 31; see also Schmidt, pp. 256-257.
17. ↑ The title can be found on his tombstone at the old cemetery in Ulm.