Albrecht von Rechenberg

Albrecht von Rechenberg (ca.1916)

Georg Albrecht Julius Heinrich Friedrich Carl Ferdinand Maria Freiherr von Rechenberg (born September 15, 1861 in Madrid , † February 26, 1935 in Berlin ) was a German consular officer, consul general in Warsaw , governor of German East Africa and member of the Reichstag .

family

His family can be recorded for the first time in the Meissen area in 1270 , the elevation into the nobility with the award of the title of baron took place in 1534 by the Roman-German king and later Emperor Ferdinand I. This award was made in 1612 by a coat of arms confirmed by Emperor Matthias . The father Julius von Rechenberg (1812-1892), son of the district administrator in Liebenwerda , later Royal Prussian Privy Councilor Carl Georg Friedrich Freiherr von Rechenberg (1785-1854), was a councilor and came from Lübben in Niederlausitz . His mother Helene Fiedler (1841-1911) was the daughter of the banker Carl Anton Fiedler and his wife Barbara Workuka.

Training and consular service

He attended the German grammar school in Prague , where his father had been transferred from Madrid as consul general. He studied law in Prague, Berlin and Leipzig. After graduating as Dr. iur. (1883), the legal clerkship and the assessor exam, he entered the service of the Foreign Office in 1893 upon request . In order to develop the administration and jurisdiction in the new German colonies in East Africa, he was appointed judge and district administrator in Tanga . In 1896 he was transferred to Zanzibar as vice / consul . Because of his uncompromising behavior towards the British, he was held in high esteem by the Germans and the locals alike.

In 1900 the Foreign Office sent him to Moscow as consul . From 1905 to 1906 he took over the position of Consul General in Warsaw from his father.

Governor in German East Africa

After the southern parts of the country were devastated in the Maji Maji War and between 75,000 and 300,000 Africans died in a subsequent famine, Reich Chancellor von Bülow appointed Rechenberg in 1906 as governor of German East Africa . Rechenberg saw himself on the line of Bernhard Dernburg , who headed the colonial department of the Foreign Office and strove for reforms in the German colonies.

The Kiswahili powerful Rechenberg took over the administration over 6,000 German and almost eight million locals. Rechenberg had studied the African culture and mastered both the Arabic language and several African languages ​​and dialects. The core of the reform efforts was to ease the constraints on the local population and allow them to grow more for their own needs; but they had to grow cotton for export. He also allowed a larger immigration of Indians to open the country more to trade. He forbade the German settlers to use the hippopotamus whip on their own to limit the punishment and suppressed the slave trade . Further relaxation and greater self-administration failed, as did the reduction in sentences and forced labor . Even with his first measures he received furious attacks from parliamentary circles and colonial associations. His commitment was not "selfless", but also pursued colonial economic goals. The "iron-headed Rechenberg" had roads, bridges and railways built with a network of 4,500 km. Above all, rubber, rice, peanuts and cotton were brought to Germany. During Rechenberg's tenure, exports from the colony tripled at a low level. For Germany, however, it remained unprofitable: imports far exceeded exports.

Return to Berlin and mandate in the Reichstag

In 1910, Rechenberg was at the center of a colonial scandal when Willy von Roy, editor of the German-Ostafrican newspaper , accused the governor of homosexuality with African subordinates. Due to disagreements with the Foreign Office, ordered back to Berlin in May 1912, Rechenberg resigned from his post and was put up for disposition. The removal of Rechenberg resulted on the one hand from the increasing tensions with the settler population, who actively agitated against him, and on the other hand from the extensive destruction of nature and animal extermination in the colony, which assumed dramatic proportions under Rechenberg. From then on he lived in Berlin. 1914 to the real Go Council with the title of excellence appointed, he was drawn into difficult political and diplomatic affairs for help.

On April 24, 1914, he took over a Reichstag mandate for the Catholic Center Party in the Reichstag constituency of Königsberg 6 (Braunsberg-Heilsberg) until 1918. As the center of the SPD approached, he withdrew from the party and did not run for office again.

After the war he stayed in Geneva at several international conferences. He traveled extensively to East Africa, Asia Minor, Siberia, Central Asia and the Chinese border. In the former German East Africa (now Tanganyika ) he had scientific laboratories and agricultural test stations built, which stabilized the development of the country.

In 1914 he married Gabriele Mittenzweig (1875–1965), daughter of the Prussian medical councilor Hugo Mittenzweig (1839–1904) and his wife Gabriele Sandmann in Marienbad . In Berlin he lived in Berlin-Charlottenburg at Kaiserdamm No. 113.

Corps student

As a law student, he joined the Corps Cheruscia in Prague . Rechenberg later no longer wore the ribbon of this corps, presumably because the federal government had long been suspended when the Prager SC joined the KSCV (1919). As a student and trainee lawyer in Berlin, he was a regular at Corps Guestphalia . The Corps awarded him the Corps Bow in 1885 and the Ribbon in 1922. Since he had not beaten a game on Kösener colors, the consent of the KSCV had to be obtained beforehand. Rechenberg's actual “corps career” began only after retirement. In 1922 he was elected to the old man's board and to the honorary council of Guestphalia. From 1926 to 1933 he was chairman of the AH-Verein. In 1924 he suggested the Berlin SC balls. Around 3,000 guests attended the first ball in the zoo. The financial surplus of around 10,000 marks was made available to the rector of the university for poor students. One of the most glamorous celebrations in Berlin society was the colonial ball initiated by Rechenberg , to which he invited all of the Berlin Corps brothers. He donated an impressive collection of spears, masks, shields and hunting trophies to his corps.

Rechenberg's wife Gabriele founded the Association of Corps Sisters of the Corps Guestphalia in Berlin in 1922. The "First Lady" of the Corps died in Wiesbaden in 1965 at the age of 90.

On the way to the foundation festival of the AHSC Grunewald, he suffered serious injuries in a traffic accident, to which he died on February 26, 1935. He was buried in the Heerstraße cemetery in today's Berlin-Westend district . The grave has not been preserved.

Memberships

• World economic society
• German society
• Chairman of the "German Society for Aboriginal Studies"

literature

• Robert Volz: Reich manual of the German society . The handbook of personalities in words and pictures. Volume 2: L-Z. German business publisher, Berlin 1931, DNB 453960294 .
• Ulrich van der Heyden :  Rechenberg, Albrecht Freiherr von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , p. 231 f. ( Digitized version ).
• German Colonial Lexicon , ed. by Heinrich Schnee, Leipzig 1920, Volume 3, p. 133

Web links

• Albrecht von Rechenberg in the database of members of the Reichstag
• Newspaper article about Albrecht von Rechenberg in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Notes and individual references

1. ↑ different year of birth 1859 in: Deutsches Koloniallexikon , ed. by Heinrich Schnee, Leipzig 1920, Volume 3, p. 133
2. ↑ Carl Peters and the DOAG had registered rights of use for some regions on the opposite mainland . In 1885 these areas were placed under the sovereignty of the empire through an imperial letter of protection, which took over administration from the DOAG in 1891.
3. ^ Sebastian Conrad : German colonial history. Beck: Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-406-56248-8 , p. 31.
4. ^ Sebastian Conrad: German colonial history. Beck: Munich 2008, p. 32.
5. ↑ Heike I. Schmidt: Colonial Intimacy - The Rechenberg Scandal and Homosexuality in German East Africa, in: Journal of the History of Sexuality , Vol. 17, No. 1, January 2008, pp. 25-59.
6. ↑ His successor in German East Africa was Heinrich Schnee .
7. ↑ H. Jürgen Wächter: Nature conservation in the German colonies in Africa (1884-1914) . Lit Verlag, Berlin 2008, p. 76-79 .
8. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1960, 2 , 200
9. ^ Rudolf Neugebauer: In memoriam Albrecht Freiherr von Rechenberg. Corpszeitung der Guestphalia Berlin, 2006, pp. 133–141.
10. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende : Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 . P. 493.