Citizen Captain

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Citizen captain was an honorary position that existed in various cities in Germany in modern times . In Hamburg a commander of the vigilante guard was referred to as a citizen captain. In the imperial city of Frankfurt am Main , the citizen captain was the elected head of one of the 14 city quarters.

Hamburg

Hamburger Bürgerwache

Up until the 19th century, the Hamburg Citizens' Guard was a unit that carried out police duties in particular . It was made up of able-bodied men. Citizens between the ages of eighteen and sixty were required to serve in the vigilante guard .

The vigilante guard consisted of five regiments . Together they had 57 companies . The commanders of the companies were the citizen captains.

Convivium

The convivium, the honor and joy meal of the citizen captains, took place annually in Hamburg . For this, a local musician was commissioned to compose the festival music.

Georg Philipp Telemann composed music for the vigilante party, the captain's music , as did Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach .

Frankfurt am Main

Since the Fettmilch uprising in 1614, the city area was divided into 14 quarters within the medieval city ​​walls . Similar to the Contraden in Siena or the Sestieri in Venice today , the quarters formed social communities within urban society. Each quarter consisted of 170 to 270 houses, which were numbered within the quarters. A modern numbering system according to streets was only introduced in Prussian times.

In the days of the imperial city the citizen-captain , as the head of a quarter was called, was a democratically elected representative of the citizenship. His tasks included the organization of fire protection , the night watch and the fortification work for the maintenance of the city fortifications. He was also the commander of the citizen company of his quarter. The citizen companies together formed the vigilante group , which, however, had no military value, but served exclusively representative purposes.

The citizen captain also had administrative duties: he was in charge of the quarters , the register of residents, which formed the basis of the appraisal , of the property tax assessment .

As a result of the Dalberg reforms, the office was abolished in 1812 and a number of tasks that had previously been in the districts were transferred to the city.

The old citizen captain

The popular actor Samuel Friedrich Hassel in his prime role as the citizen captain

The quarters and their contemplative self-organization were already an object of nostalgic transfiguration during the time of the Free City of Frankfurt . In the comedy The Old Citizen Captain by Carl Malß , which premiered in 1821 , the poet in the person of the innkeeper and former citizen captain Kimmelmeier and his body gunner Millerche created a literary monument to the bourgeois milieu of the imperial city. The dialect has seen hundreds of performances over 45 years, the actor Samuel Friedrich Hassel embodied the sedate old Frankfurt citizen. Up to the present day the comedy is one of the most frequently performed pieces in the Frankfurt Volkstheater .

Individual citizen captains

literature

Individual evidence

  1. a b program of the event on 12./13. March 2014 by barockwerk hamburg in cooperation with the State and University Library Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky as part of "300 years of CPE Bach" .
  2. Georg Philipp Telemann, Oratorio der Hamburgische Kapitänsmusik 1730 ( memento from September 12, 2017 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on September 12, 2017.
  3. Composers Quarter Hamburg , accessed on September 12, 2017.
  4. Eine Erbarn Raths Der Statt Franckfurt am Mayn Quartir -ordnung , Frankfurt am Main, October 25, 1614 ( digitized in the Google book search)
  5. The old citizen captain , accessed on September 12, 2017.