Alois Boczek

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Alois Boczek (* 1817 in Znaim ; † March 20, 1876 in Vienna ) was an Austrian tax officer and journalist. During the German Revolution of 1848/1849 he sat for almost a year as a member of the Frankfurt National Assembly .

Life

Origin, education and private life

Alois Boczek came from the Margraviate of Moravia , which was part of the Austrian Empire as crown land , and grew up in a family that was very interested in culture. Art and literature, especially music, were cultivated in the parents' house and visitors from the relevant circles were often guests. The historian Antonín Boček was his paternal uncle. He attended the grammar school in Olomouc . He then studied law at the University of Vienna and the Prague Charles University and became the rights (JUDr.) Doctor PhD .

In 1849 he married in Frankfurt am Main , a subsidiary of the baritone - and bass singer Eduard Wilhelm Marrder (1803-1849), among others, the Frankfurt National Theater worked. She died with the child in the first childbed . In the period that followed, Boczek financially supported the Marrder family, which was hard hit by the almost simultaneous loss of their father. In 1852 he married the older sister of his first wife. The couple had three sons and a daughter. In the last two years of his life in Vienna he suffered from a serious illness and was often bedridden. He died at the age of 59.

Professional beginnings in financial management

After receiving his doctorate, Boczek worked at the Chamber Procurature in Prague . Around 1846 and 1847 he worked in Brno as a concept intern in the imperial-royal Moravian - Silesian Fiscal Office. At the same time he was a secretary of the “Charitable Men's Association for the Support of the Poor in Brno”.

Political career

“He possessed a wide range of knowledge, an always quick wit, great formal dexterity, a rare workforce and honest will. But he lacked the parliamentary training and the experience in public life which make such qualities usable and nature had denied him the gift of the speaker. So easily and pleasantly, so varied and sharply pointed the speech from his lips flowed in a larger or smaller circle of friends and acquaintances, so intimidated he was in front of a large, strange audience. His youthful enthusiasm clung to the ideals to which he was honored and, even if he was not called to work in the foreground of the parliamentary arena for the cause he chose, he courageously took it upon himself to suffer for it. "

- Ferdinand Willfort (1835–1905) in his obituary for Boczek

Boczek already joined the emerging German-liberal movement in Prague . As part of the German Revolution ( "March Revolution"), he was as MP for the constituency Moravia- Tischnowitz in the Frankfurt National Assembly elected, to which he belonged from 27 June 1848th There he initially sympathized with the democratic left and joined the Donnersberg faction , but quickly turned away from them and opened up to the ideas of the Greater German Party . After the September unrest in 1848, the imperial government dismissed all Austrian members of parliament. However, Boczek chose to continue to exercise his mandate. As a result, he fell into disrepute at home and lost his post in the Austrian administration. After the dissolution of the National Assembly in late May 1849, he was the member until June 18 in Stuttgart meeting participants hull Parliament .

Journalistic career

Boczek then started his journalistic career with several critical articles in the Frankfurter Oberpostamts-Zeitung . In 1850 he began to work in Wiesbaden , the capital of the Duchy of Nassau , as the editor in charge of the Nassauische Allgemeine Zeitung . He initially acted as a representative of the editor-in-chief Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl , and from 1851 on as editor-in-chief himself. Boczek steered the paper, launched in 1848 as an organ of the Nassau government, to a Catholic- conservative course and directed the medium "decidedly Austrian-minded", pleaded for a tariff agreement and took decidedly pro-clerical positions during the Nassau church dispute. In this context, a conflict escalated in August 1854 with the censorship authorities who had banned Boczek from publishing church articles. He was instructed to leave the duchy within eight days. The Limburg Bishop Peter Joseph Blum then wrote a letter to the Archbishop of Vienna Joseph Othmar von Rauscher on August 23, 1854 - one day after the last edition of the Nassauische Allgemeine Zeitung was published . He emphasized the services that Boczek had made to the Roman Catholic Church and asked that the influential von Rauscher support him in his search for a new job in Austria. Boczek himself brought this letter to Vienna; he also traveled as a courier to Austrian diplomat Anton Prokesch from the east , to whom he had previously described his problem.

In Vienna he was relieved to find that the initially harsh reaction measures to the March Revolution had subsided and that the authorities were no longer causing him any problems. He initially joined the editorial team of the shipping company Österreichischer Lloyd , but soon after took over the management of the Krakauer Zeitung . He did not feel at home there in the long term, however, especially since the " Germanization tendencies " initiated by Interior Minister Anton von Schmerling led to conflicts with the national Polish population. Under the new Prime Minister Richard Belcredi the German official newspapers in 1866 were adjusted and Boczek the rank of Statthaltereirates retired.

During his time in Cracow, Boczek had already written a few articles for the Wiener Sonn- und Monday-Zeitung . Now that he had moved to Vienna, she became his main employer. Under several pseudonyms (often alias "Tim Trimm") he wrote up to 20 features articles per month, treated both cultural and socially critical topics and worked as a reviewer in all areas of art. The newspaper gave the very productive journalist "full freedom of expression". He also delivered articles for numerous other Viennese and other Austrian newspapers. In 1872 Boczek left the Wiener Sonn- und Mondags-Zeitung and joined the Neue Wiener Tagblatt , only to switch to the Neue Freie Presse a few months later . In the wake of the founders' crash in 1873, which also hit the newspaper industry hard, he received significantly fewer orders and got into financially more difficult circumstances. Then he began to work again for the Wiener Sonn- und Monday-Zeitung under the pseudonym "Ekkehart" . In the last years of his life he also turned to poetry and wrote numerous poems. In earlier years he had already tried novels and dramas with comparatively little success.

Cultural engagement and evaluation of work

In his obituary, Willfort attested Boczek an "eminent talent for social arrangements and intellectual entertainment" and noted that he developed "a comprehensive literary and social activity". He was one of the heads of the Viennese artists' association Hesperus and between 1869 and 1874 he was chairman of the Vienna-based artists and writers association Green Island . This was founded in 1855 on the basis of the Ludlam Cave . He had a close friendship with the writer Ada Christen , which developed after he had once reviewed one of her volumes of poetry with unusually sharp criticism.

Boczek was said to have extensive knowledge of foreign literature. Among other things, he devoted himself to the translation of foreign language songs in Vienna. In particular, his transmissions of Catalan folk songs were praised, which he made available to a broad German-speaking readership in this way.

Opinions differed as to the literary and journalistic quality of Boczek's newspaper articles. In a publication published in 1874 on the biographies of Viennese writers and journalists, Martin Cohn expressed himself critically and accused Boczek of the fact that his topics and writing style had fallen out of time and were still caught up in March-revolutionary thought patterns and enthusiasm:

“He always worked in such a way that he lacked the leisure to observe how everything changed around him, how the world of today has become completely different from the one in which the good times of his March memories fall. He is still trying to give a sapphire-style perfume to everything he writes and does not notice the smell of hay that this kind of humor already exudes. In his more recent works, there is also a worrying decrease in the number of idea funds. […] Dr. Alois Boczek is a living landmark of a time that has passed. "

In his obituary, Willfort came to a completely different conclusion: According to him, Boczek's article in the Wiener Sonn- und Mondags -Zeitung had attracted general attention through “wit and esprit”. They were "brilliant fireworks of good-natured mockery and sharp malice, which are unsurpassed in their kind and will remain so." Boczek himself has become the "ruler in the area below the line"; "He was at home everywhere and his word weighed heavily everywhere, because he rarely had the gift of always dousing the most sore spot with the sharpest lye of his mockery."

literature

  • B. Stein: The history of the Wiesbaden newspaper industry from its beginnings to the present. Typescript [without place and year, probably Wiesbaden 1943], found in March 2002 in the Wiesbadener Tagblatt archive (as a carbon copy). Download PDF

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r Ferdinand Willfort: Dr. Alois Boczek † . In: Wiener Sonn- und Mondags-Zeitung , 14th year, № 26, March 26, 1876, pages 1–3.
  2. ^ Provincial manual for Moravia and Silesia for the year 1847 . Franz Gastl Verlag, Brno, 1847, page 239.
  3. ^ Provincial manual for Moravia and Silesia for the year 1847 . Franz Gastl Verlag, Brno, 1847, page 41.
  4. a b Transcript of the letter from Bishop Peter Joseph Blum of Limburg to Archbishop of Vienna Joseph Othmar von Rauscher. Retrieved from thun-korrespondenz.uibk.ac.at on September 7, 2018.
  5. The People's Messenger for the Citizen and Farmer . 7th year, № 206, August 26, 1854, page 810.
  6. Article on the Viennese artists and writers' association Green Island . Retrieved from geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at on September 7, 2018.
  7. ^ Martin Cohn: Viennese writers & journalists. Types and silhouettes . Verlag Spitzer & Holzwarth jun., Vienna, 1874, pages 97-98.

Remarks

  1. The phrase “bottom line” refers to the column of the feature section , which in its early years was included in the lower third of the page of the main newspaper and was separated from the rest of the content by a thick line.