Albert Wilkens
Albert Wilkens (born July 8, 1790 in Dörpen , † June 1, 1828 in Nottuln ) was a chaplain in Nottuln and a Westphalian local researcher who used imaginative inventions and forgeries .
Life
Albert Wilkens studied theology in Münster from 1810 , and was ordained a priest on January 17, 1815 . Immediately after the consecration he got a job as a parish co-operator at the collegiate church in Nottuln, after the death of the local chaplain in 1817 he was his successor. He stayed in this position until he died of consumption in 1828 .
The congregation in Nottuln was of a manageable size and was looked after by two other pastors in addition to Wilkens, so that Wilkens had plenty of time to follow his literary inclinations. Here Wilkens planned from the beginning, the archive of the repealed ladies pin Nottuln to use and the parish, since 1816, he began with a pamphlet How to Read all living and dead languages, together with a guide to read the writings of the Middle Ages and understand that to should be intended for its own use, but a torso remained. In 1817 he published a life story of Saint Bishop Martin , followed in 1819 with Brief Life History of Saint Liudger, the first of numerous works on local history. Up until his death, a large number of other writings followed, which were characterized by the fact that Wilkens had introduced little or no known source material into research. Wilkens dealt particularly intensively with the history of Nottuln Abbey.
Wilkens was already controversial in his day. Critics accused him of sloppiness, so the first proven abbess of Nottuln, Heriburg , was suddenly called Gerburgis in one of his writings. Wilkens got into an argument early on, especially with Joseph Niesert , a pastor from Velen who was 24 years his senior and also a historical researcher. Niesert ignored Wilken's work in the literature review on Münster's history in the introduction to his Münsterland document book, Wilkens reciprocated by using Niesert's work in his writing on the historical sources of Westphalia without naming the author.
The contemporary criticism of Wilkens was more than justified. Recent research has shown Wilkens to be forgeries as well as extremely imaginative interpretations of real documents.
The founding deed of Nottuln Abbey
In his attempt at a general history of the city of Münster , Albert Wilkens published the first document from Nottuln Abbey in 1823, which had previously been completely unknown to researchers. The content of the document was that Gerfried , the second bishop of Münster, donated two farms called "Buchuldi" and "Oildinhus" to the founding of Liudger in Nottuln in 834 in exchange for valuable relics that he brought from Nottuln to the chapel of St. Mary "prope amnem" in "Mimigardeforde" had transferred. According to Wilken, he had discovered the document in a copy of the Nottulner Stift that had been lost since 1811 .
The diplomat Joseph Prinz exposed the document in 1962 as a cheeky and clumsy forgery, with which one had to ask oneself whether one had to wonder more about the audacity of the forger or about the gullibility with which the research of the forgery was devoured. Prinz pointed out numerous errors in form and content to Wilkens. The fact that Wilkens did not know the copy about Liudger, which had supposedly disappeared since 1811, but was able to quote from it in 1823, should have raised suspicion. In Wilkens estate there was a copy dated 1819, which Wilkens wanted to have copied from another copy, written by the notary Ketteler, who after the secularization had made an inventory of the property of the Nottulner Stift for the new Prussian lords. This supposedly oldest copy still exists, on the back of this copy there was a record of the Nottuln fire in 1748. Ketteler had actually dealt with the organization of archives several times; the report to the Prussian War and Domain Chamber about Nottuln also contained an overview of the Nottuln monastery history from his pen. What was not mentioned in this report was the document that Ketteler was supposed to have copied, or even just the copy. As early as 1903, an archivist at the Münster State Archive had found that Wilkens' copy had been written with a disfigured handwriting. This archivist also noticed inconsistent abbreviations in the document text, but the remarks he made on the envelope in which the copy is kept were ignored by the research.
In terms of text, too, the document did not withstand any examination, but Prinz was able to prove where Wilkens had used his forgery to write it. Wilkens had taken over extensive parts of the text of the document from the founding document of the Essen Abbey , which had already been published and which was dated to 870. However, it was not suitable as a template for forging a document from the 9th century, as this document, which Wilkens could not have known, is itself a forgery from the 12th century. Wilkens found another source, which contributed the invocation formula , in a real Münster certificate for the Werden monastery . Wherever these acquisitions had to be adjusted, Wilkens made mistakes: The spelling of the place name Mimigafordiensis he chose is far too modern for a 9th century document. Since Wilkens' Latin was not the best, he also abbreviated sentences to distort the meaning when adapting the Essen certificate text for his forgery, while where Wilkens had to write his own text, his Latin was, according to Prinz, pathetic. Wilkens' other mistakes were the forms of the name, all of which are incorrect.
Just as bumbling as the textual form of the document was the content of the document, which in summary says that Gerfried, out of thanks for the gifts of God that he had received, had drawn up and implemented the plan from the church founded by Liudger in the County of Roibert to transfer precisely marked relics in Nottuln to the church of St. Maria "beyond the water". Wilkens made numerous mistakes in the process: The place name "in the county xx" came up later, but the date, which only indicates the year of incarnation , lacks the date of the ruler's reign, which was common in the 9th century. The recipient designation "capella ecclesiae beatae Mariae virginis trans aquas" is twice as incorrect: capella was the completely wrong word, since capellae only existed on royal fiscal property in the 9th century. In addition, the addition “trans aquam” appeared for the Überwasserkirche , which probably did not exist in the 9th century (it is proven from around 1040), only in the 12th century. The founding of Nottuln by Liudger, about which the contemporary Liudger-Vites know nothing, is also flawed. As a result, the founding date of the Nottuln Monastery is also wrong in the document, and even Heriburg as abbess is an invention of Wilkens: According to the Liudgerus Viten, she was a Sanctimoniale, so she had put her life in the service of the church, but an abbess position is not mentioned although such an office would certainly have been mentioned by the Vite writers. Research suggests she lived the life of a devout hermit.
All in all, Wilken's forgery was actually clumsy and can only be explained by his efforts to gain recognition. It was only part of his attempt to give Nottuln Abbey a longer story.
The certificate of the imperial daughter Sophie
However, Wilkens was not only an untrained forger, but also an imaginative interpreter of genuine documents. Presumably, in the archives of the Nottulner Hospital, Wilkens found a binder made of parchment sheets . These sheets of parchment came from one to Pergamentmakulatur disassembled Boethius -Codex that in the scriptorium of Essen Abbey was written. One of these file covers was the final page of the code , on which 17 lines were left free that had been used by Essen scribes for pen tests - often with the word "probatio" and variations such as "proba". Since there was still space on the sheet, an unknown Essen scribe had copied a certificate from the Essen abbess Sophia in which a suitor named Balderich assigned his inheritance and himself with his family as a slave to the monastery. The certificate, even if only received as a copy, is authentic, and the sheet with the copy probably came as a folder at a time after Nottuln when the two pens were connected in personal union.
Wilkens referred this document to his invented history of the Nottuln Abbey by declaring Sophia to be Abbess of Nottuln without any evidence. The otherwise unoccupied Balderich became a descendant of the Liudgeriden and relatives of Bishop Gerfried, who put himself, his unnamed wife and his named sons in the service of the Nottuln Abbey. Wilkens expanded Balderich's donation with two daughters named Probatia and Proba, whose names he deduced from the feather samples on the parchment.
Notes from local history
Albert Wilkens provided special poetic achievements in poems and small epics that revolved around a pleasure garden, the "Bagno", which the Nottulner dean Vehoff had laid out in a Bruch valley near the village. It is possible that this wildly romantic garden is the main source of Wilkens' innovations. Incidentally, he also located the Varus battle here . It is not unlikely that Wilkens was largely inspired by his inventions and poetic outpourings in the circle of friends of the clergy and canons of the former Nottuln convent.
Incidentally, Wilkens was - and Prinz was not aware of these circumstances when his essay was published in 1962 - not only negatively discussed in the “scene” of early friends of history in Westphalia. He was in contact with early historians such as Bernhard Sökeland and Freiherr von Stein , knew Hoffmann von Fallersleben , among others, and was one of the small group of founders of the still existing association for the history and archeology of Westphalia .
The Wilkens' collection in the Münster State Archives is of considerable importance for the local history of Nottuln, as the hardworking chaplain collected a wealth of documents, especially from the 18th century, without, however, specifying the provenances. Without his obsession with collecting , they would certainly have been destroyed. Soon after his death, his executors entrusted the documents, his own writings, copies and originals to the archive in Münster. In the anthologies, there are numerous sources on economic history, largely unordered and unheard of. Wilken's own works, Abhandlungen und Kollektaneen , at least provide a great deal of information that local historical research can use well, since it is confirmed by other sources. However, Wilkens' handwriting is a problem. Machine copies of his most important works are in the State Archives as well as in the Diocese Archives in Münster. His printed work on the St. Antoni Brotherhood Nottuln is a valuable folklore source.
It is difficult to make an objective judgment about Albert Wilkens, because one has to see his other work, his living conditions and his educational background in addition to his falsifications, believed over and over again by the best historians in Westphalia for almost 140 years. When he lived and wrote in the Romantic Era, "history as science" was not yet widespread.
literature
- Katrinette Bodarwé: Sophia von Essen and the certificate from Nottuln. In: The Minster on Hellweg. Bulletin of the Association for the Preservation of the Essen Minster . 56, 2003, ZDB -ID 400327-5 , pp. 29-39.
- Joseph Prinz: The document of Bishop Gerfried von Münster from 834 a forgery of Albert Wilkens. In: Westfälische Zeitschrift 112, 1962, ISSN 0083-9043 , pp. 1–51 ( PDF ).
- Hans-Peter Boer: Dean Johann Bernhard Vehoff, Chaplain Albert Wilkens and the Bagno zu Nottuln. A forgotten garden from the 18th and 19th centuries Century and its importance for the early regional studies of Westphalia . In: Geschichtsblätter des Kreis Coesfeld 10, 1985, ISSN 0723-2098 , pp. 113-152.
- Heinrich Donner: Contributions to the history of the aristocratic women's monastery in Nottuln . Phil. Diss. (Masch.), Münster 1936.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Joseph Prinz: The document of Bishop Gerfried von Münster from 834 a forgery of Albert Wilkens . In: Westfälische Zeitschrift 112 (1962), p. 3
- ↑ cf. Prinz 1962, p. 12
- ↑ cf. Prinz 1962, p. 14
- ↑ cf. Prinz 1962, p. 27ff.
- ↑ cf. Prinz 1962, p. 31
- ↑ cf. Prinz 1962, p. 43, cf. Bodarwé 2003, p. 38
- ↑ cf. Prinz 1962, p. 44 passim; see. Bodarwé 2003, p. 34
- ↑ Katrinette Bodarwé: Sophia von Essen and the certificate from Nottuln . In: Münster am Hellweg. Bulletin of the Association for the Preservation of the Essen Minster . Essen 2003, p. 35f.
- ↑ cf. Bodarwé 2003, p. 31 passim
- ↑ cf. Bodarwé 2003, p. 36
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Wilkens, Albert |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German homeland researcher and history forger |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 8, 1790 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Dörpen |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 1, 1828 |
| Place of death | Nottuln |