Johann Rudolf Meyer (manufacturer, 1739)

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Johann Rudolf Meyer, Portrait of Joseph Reinhart (around 1790)

Johann Rudolf Meyer father (born February 25, 1739 in Aarau , † September 11, 1813 in Aarau) was a Swiss silk ribbon manufacturer, philanthropist , patron and revolutionary. In Aarau he is known as father Meyer. His life is shrouded in legends : he was not born in his alleged birthplace on the Halde, nor was he involved in the construction of the Meyer's tunnels , nor did he found the canton school . Other things were swept under the rug, such as the transfer of the factory and assets to Bavaria , the tensions with the sons from his first marriage and the debts he left behind.

Life

youth

Meyer's father, who was also called Johann Rudolf, was a white tanner and councilor. He got into financial distress due to guarantees . The mother Ursula Müller came from Zofingen . A wealthy relative financed Meyer's education. In 1752/53 he learned French in Lausanne . He then worked in a silk ribbon factory in Aarau. Finally he went into business for himself. After a year of wandering that took him to the Alps, Hamburg, Berlin and the Baltic Sea coast , in 1766 he married the doctor's daughter Elisabeth Hagnauer (1741–1781). This marriage resulted in seven children, five of whom reached adulthood: Susanna Dorothea called Suzette married Hunziker (1767–1838), Johann Rudolf (1768–1825), Hieronymus called Jérôme (1769–1844), Johann Heinrich called Henri (1774 –1809) and Johann Gottlieb (1779–1803).

Silk ribbon manufacturer

Communications arbor built in 1784 between the residential building and the former monastery church, which was converted into a tape storage facility.
Former monastery converted into a silk ribbon factory in 1787.

In 1771 Meyer was able to take over the company in which he had completed his apprenticeship (Rothpletz & Brutel). Entrepreneurial performance and favorable circumstances helped him to make high profits for a quarter of a century. In 1777 he bought the house at 35 Milchgasse. As a widower, he married Marianne Renner (1747–1823) von Nidau ​​for the second time in 1783 . In the same year he acquired Aarau's former monastery and hospital (now the Golatti nursing home). In 1784 he converted the monastery church into a tape magazine, in 1787 the monastery building into a factory.

The silk was sourced from northern Italy and spun in central Switzerland . Meyer had the yarn dyed in Aarau. The weaving was done by homeworkers in the Basel area . The finished strips were then finished (reworked) in Aarau . Meyer employed peddlers like the father of the shoe manufacturer Bally . But he sold most of them at the trade fairs in Zurzach and Frankfurt am Main . He had a branch in the latter place. Meyer was not involved in the construction of the Meyer tunnels and the Meyerhaus by the son of the same name.

At the age of 45, his second wife gave birth to a son named Samuel Friedrich Fritz (1793–1881). The writer Sophie von La Roche , who was a guest at Meyer at the time, wrote about the “simple meritorious man” who feeds over a thousand people through his factory: “Never, certainly never, do I forget the few hours I spent in this house spent. (...) this is the true patriot. Heaven give all countries such men! ” Karl Viktor von Bonstetten had previously called Meyer a“ manufacturer of genius and true philosopher ”.

The golden years of the company ended when the Revolutionary Wars spread to southern Germany (1796). In 1798 Johann Rudolf junior took over the management. The foreign trading centers with which she corresponded most frequently from 1802–1804 were Milan, Paris and Augsburg.

Philanthropist, patron, revolutionary

Detail from the atlas suisse by Johann Heinrich Weiss (1796–1802).
Schlössli rebuilt in 1790.

Meyer was deeply religious, but as a Deist he did not believe in the holiness of the Bible and the divinity of Jesus. He is said to have been the model for the cotton Meyer in the third part of Pestalozzi's novel Lienhard and Gertrud , published in 1785 . He showed interest when Jeremias L'Orsa tried in 1785/86 to found an Unteraargau offshoot of the Society for the Promotion of the Good . The Zurich- domiciled organization was close to the Swiss Illuminati movement , the main initiator of which was Pestalozzi. Meyer also took over the debts of the writer Johann Kaspar Riesbeck when the author of the letters of a French traveler died in Aarau in 1786.

One of Meyer's charitable undertakings was that he had Johann Heinrich Weiss from Strasbourg take up the Swiss Alps with the help of Joachim Eugen Müller from Engelberg . A relief - lost in Paris - and the atlas suisse (1796–1802) were created on the basis of these photographs . On Meyer's order, the Lucerne painter Joseph Reinhart created realistic portraits of 140 Swiss couples in their traditional costumes. In 1790 Meyer acquired and renovated Aarau's oldest monument, the Schlössli . When he was president of the Helvetic Society in 1792 , he initiated the construction of the Linth Canal .

Until then, a loyal subject of Bern , Meyer regarded the defensive success of the French revolutionary army in the cannonade of Valmy (1792) as a judgment of God. The fact that the Helvetic Society, which was critical of the regime, met in Aarau from 1795 onwards is probably due to his influence. A smear campaign by the Economic Society of Bern against Atlas suisse embittered him. In 1798 the Meyer family took part in the Helvetic Revolution and made a significant contribution to the creation of the independent canton of Aargau from the Bernese Unteraargau . Meyer represented this until 1800 in the Senate of the Helvetic Republic. He belonged to the radically democratic party of the Patriots . When Switzerland became the battlefield of the great powers in 1799, he supported the victims of the fighting. So he took the later founder of the instrument building company Kern into his house as an orphan. He presided over the Senate in the critical time for the Helvetic Republic after the victory of the Austrians in the First Battle of Zurich and in the last session after the dissolution of the legislative councils by the coup republicans .

The oldest canton school in Switzerland (1801/02) was founded by Meyer's son Johann Rudolf and his friend, mountain director Johann Samuel Gruner . The tutor of Meyer's grandchildren, the Bavarian Pestalozzi student Andreas Moser (1766–1806), was also involved. Meyer made the highest contribution to operating costs and gave the opening speech.

From Aarau to Bavaria

For the Swiss, who Meyer settled in abolished Bavarian monasteries, he founded a Protestant community.

In 1802 Aarau's highest pastor, Johann Jakob Pfleger, organized a smear campaign against Moser, who had openly professed deism in a work published in 1800 . The Moser trade and the subsequent counter-revolution against the Helvetic Republic ( Stecklik War ) prompted Meyer to transfer the factory and assets to Bavaria. Relatives of his second wife, the Barons von Schwachheim, had made a career there. The first location of the Meyer's factory colony was Rohrbach an der Ilm Castle ( Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm district ), which belonged to a friend of the Schwachheim family. In 1803 the nearby monasteries Geisenfeld and Wolnzach were bought . In 1804 these were exchanged for those from Polling , Rottenbuch and Steingaden ( Weilheim-Schongau district ).

The colony consisted of around 300 Swiss people. The first emigrants were Aargau and Basel bidder. In their place took place in 1804 participants in the uprising against the rule of the city of Zurich over the rest of the canton ( buck war ). Meyer's sons Hieronymus and Johann Rudolf took turns managing the Bavarian estates. Meyer himself stayed in Rottenbuch for some time in 1805.

Tensions with the sons from the first marriage

The factory in Bavaria did not thrive because the Basel silk ribbon cartel poached the ribbon weavers from it. As the losses increased, Meyer withdrew the administration of the Bavarian property from his son Johann Rudolf in 1807. He had to sell the Schlössli in 1808. After Johann Rudolf had built a new factory in Aarau with the support of Hieronymus, his father sold him the remaining assets of the company in 1811 . At the same time he enfeoffed Johann Rudolf's Rottenbuch and Steingaden inheritance over its value. In 1812 he exchanged his former factory and house for the more representative old-age residence at Pelzgasse 15. In the same year he ceded Polling to Hieronymus, who now definitely emigrated and was raised to the nobility in 1814 for his services to Bavarian agriculture.

Meyer died in 1813. His youngest child Fritz came off best in the division of the estate. Johann Rudolf, on the other hand, had to pay his father's high debts for the sake of family honor. As a result, he got into a financial emergency, which finally let him end up as a counterfeiter in a prison in Baden . The family company was taken over by his associate Friedrich Heinrich Feer when Meyer's grandson Gottlieb died in 1829. This son of the Bruges revolutionary leader Jakob Emanuel Feer brought it to a new bloom.

Beautified biography

Memorial stone on Hungerberg (1866).

In 1815 a biography of Meyers appeared in which the German national school rector Ernst August Evers stylized the deceased as a virtuous hero. He left out what did not correspond to the ideal of the restoration period . He didn't mention Meyer's children at all. On the other hand, on the memorial stone erected in 1866 on Hungerberg near Aarau (see illustration), a deistically colored quote can be read. The Hasler brothers embellished the portrait published in 1871 compared to the original by Reinhart. The 1996 comic by Gloor and Kirchhofer about Meyer and his elders ends in the imaginary. When the true fate of Johann Rudolf Meyer Sohn became known in 2011, it turned out to be just as spectacular as the one invented by the authors - even without the appearance of a monster ...

literature

Web link

Commons : Johann Rudolf Meyer (manufacturer, 1739)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ernst Zschokke: The "Meyer House" on the Halde. In: Aarauer Neujahrsblätter, 1934, pp. 54–56.
  2. ^ Ernst Jörin: The Aargau 1798–1803. From the Bernese subject country to the sovereign large canton. ( Argovia, 42.) Aarau 1929, p. 157.
  3. ^ Sister of Johann Anton Renner , owner of Bad Schinznach and member of the administrative chamber of the canton Aargau , and half sister of the kk general Sigmund Freiherr von Renner .
  4. ^ Memories from my third trip to Switzerland (...) from Sophie, widow of la Roche. Offenbach 1793, pp. 489-491.
  5. ↑ Historical-critical edition of the letters of Karl Viktor von Bonstetten and his circle 1753-1832. Volume 5, Göttingen 2005, p. 612 (to Johannes von Müller, approx. May 6, 1786). The followers of the Enlightenment were called philosophers.
  6. ^ Feyerliche opening of the canton school in Aarau. Promoted to print by the new literary society in Aarau. (Aarau) 1802, pp. 5-8.
  7. ↑ Andreas Moser: Common sense about the art of making people happy (...) printed in the land of freedom for the year of the present and the time of the future. (Johann Jakob Hausknecht, St. Gallen 1800.)
  8. ^ Peter Genner: The hosts of the Helvetic Society. The Schwachheim-Renner family as the owners of Bad Schinznach and their emigration to Bavaria. In: Argovia, 2012, pp. 126-179.
  9. ↑ Compare Paul Ammann-Feer: Two letters about father JR Meyer's death. In: Aarauer Neujahrsblätter, 1950, pp. 65–76.
  10. ↑ Alfred Hartmann (text): Gallery of famous Swiss of the modern age, in pictures by Fr (iedrich) and H (ans) Hasler. 2nd volume, Baden 1871, no.67.
  11. ^ Reto Gloor, Markus Kirchhofer: meyer & meyer. Zurich 1996, new edition 2015.
  12. ↑ Peter Genner: The Aarau Jungfrau first climber forged money. In: Aargauer Zeitung , August 3, 2011, p. 29.
personal data
SURNAME Meyer, Johann Rudolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Meyer, Johann Rudolph; Father Meyer
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss silk ribbon manufacturer, philanthropist, patron and revolutionary
DATE OF BIRTH February 25, 1739
PLACE OF BIRTH Aarau
DATE OF DEATH September 11, 1813
Place of death Aarau