Carl Eugen Schmidt

Carl Eugen Schmidt

Carl Eugen Schmidt (born October 29, 1865 in Preßburg , Kingdom of Hungary ; † October 22, 1948 ibid.) Was an Evangelical Lutheran theologian and senior of the German-Hungarian parish in Pressburg .

origin

Carl Eugen Schmidt's father and grandfather were piano makers in Pressburg.

The grandpa

To Cothen in Anhalt was Carl Wilhelm Schmidt (* 1794, † 1872) was born as the son of the sculptor Wilhelm Schmidt. When he was forced to join Napoleon 's army in 1812 , he fled from Cöthen to Vienna . He learned the piano-making trade in Vienna and went to Leipzig in 1818 , where he worked for a short time at the Breitkopf & Härtel music publisher . However, Vienna had impressed him so much that he returned there. It was from Vienna that he got to know Pressburg, he liked the city a lot and he decided to set up a "piano shop" in Pressburg. In 1822 he built a piano factory in Schöndorfer Gasse in Preßburg, which by 1859 had built one thousand three hundred pianos. His apartment, which also contained a small concert hall, was visited by well-known artists such as Johann Nepomuk Hummel , Franz Liszt , Clara Schumann (Wieck) and Tobias Gottfried Schröer .

The father

CW Schmidt's eldest son Carl Jakob Ludwig Schmidt (* 1827, † 1905) took over his father's company in 1859 after stays in America , London and Paris . In 1853 he married Ida von Bakos, the daughter of a nobleman from Trenčín County . Due to economic difficulties, however, he had to stop building new pianos in 1877, so he was forced to limit himself to repairing pianos. Carl Jakob was an enthusiastic singer, a beautiful spirit, spiritually and politically a supporter of the liberal German bourgeoisie of his time. On his death, the Pressburger Zeitung wrote : The day before yesterday a man was buried here, whom everyone who knew him will probably remember with honorable memories. Incidentally, with him, not only a truly good, noble person has been divorced from our midst, but also a dignified musician and above all a self-sacrificing pioneer of patriotic industry.

The way of life

Young years

Carl Eugen Schmidt was born as a “weak lateling” after two sisters on October 29, 1865 in Pressburg and baptized on the day of St. Elisabeth . After attending elementary school, taught here by the important schoolboy Samuel Frühwirth , he attended the Evangelical Lyceum in his hometown from 1876, where he passed his school leaving examination in 1884. The day-to-day teaching routine hadn't done the enthusiastic boy very much; only the meetings of the German Association, a student association under the direction of a few high school professors, could inspire him. In the German Association at the Protestant Lyceum, which had existed since 1788 and was brought back to life by Tobias Gottfried Schröer in 1817 , the German youth of Pressburg gathered to deepen their knowledge of the German classics.

The search for a fixed “Weltanschauung” led Schmidt to decide to study philosophy. That is why he moved to the University of Vienna in autumn 1884 . However, since this study did not satisfy him, he returned to his hometown to begin studying theology at the Pressburg Theological Academy.

The former German Evangelical Church in Pressburg at the beginning of the 20th century

Since the Reformation, almost all theology students in the Carpathian region have attended German universities in their last semesters. Schmidt also moved to Heidelberg in the summer semester of 1888 ; he then studied at the Berlin University . When he returned home, he prepared for the first theological exam. On October 23, 1889 he was ordained by the first pastor and bishop Ludwig Geduly and appointed as a "vicarage assistant" for the sick pastor Viktor Freytag in the Pressburg parish. When Viktor Freytag died, Schmidt was nominated as one of the successor candidates. However, since the Lyceum and Academy professors considered him too “orthodox” and too little “Hungarian national”, Gustav Ebner from Deutsch-Jahrndorf in Burgenland was elected to this pastor instead of his pastor .

But when Bishop Geduly died a few months later and the first pastor's position became vacant, the parish convention appointed their “Pressburg child” to this pastoral position without any opposing candidates. Right at the beginning of his pastoral career in Bratislava, he became a religion teacher at the Pressburg commercial academy and at the teacher training institute. His strictly orthodox attitude soon brought him into opposition to the rather liberal local tradition.

On July 13, 1890, Ebner and Schmidt were introduced to their office at the same time, so that now Fürst, Ebner and Schmidt were responsible for looking after the German parish .

Schmidt soon gathered a group of theology students around him (“Pressburg School”) and in 1892 founded a Protestant “men's and young people's union”. In 1898 he took part in the general synod of the Lutheran Free Church in Breslau . From 1903 he was the only representative of the Hungarian Protestants in the General Evangelical Lutheran Conference .

The preacher, liturgist and deacon

On September 26, 1892, Schmidt married Adele von Kolényi, the daughter of a lawyer in Pressburg. The sons Karl, Felix and Walter emerged from the marriage. Karl fell on the Eastern Front right at the beginning of the First World War . The youngest son Walter died in 1923 as a result of this war. Middle son Felix moved to Budapest . In 1944 he was arrested by the Nazis after Nikolaus Horthy had been deposed , and taken to the Mauthausen concentration camp . When he returned home after the end of the war, as an intellectual he was harassed with a lot of cunning and cunning by the representatives of the new (communist) regime.

In 1905 Pastor Johannes Fürst died, who had worked in the Pressburg community since 1878. His successor was Heinrich Pröhle , who matched Schmidt very well in his theological attitude. After Gustav Ebner's abdication, Wilhelm Rátz was elected the third pastor of the Pressburg parish and was introduced to his office on January 16, 1910.

In 1890 the congregation decided to found a deaconess mother house. Since Schmidt was an admirer of Wilhelm Löhe, it was decided, at his suggestion, to appoint sisters from the Evangelical Diakoniewerk Gallneukirchen . Schmidt took over the spiritual direction of the Preßburger Anstalt in 1893, which he exercised on a voluntary basis in addition to his pastoral office until 1942. It was thanks to him that in 1912 the parish decided to build a new larger building complex (deaconess mother house, orphanage and hospital), which was inaugurated on May 3, 1914. Hermann von Bezzel preached on Joh 16,22  LUT in the German Church.

During the First World War, Schmidt was appointed to work in the field of military pastoral work as the first pastor of the German community, as a senior of the Pressburg church district, as a professor at the Pressburg Theological Academy . The encounters with the many wounded soldiers had prompted Schmidt to write a whole series of edification documents that were sent to many hospitals in Hungary.

In 1915 the Vienna Theological Faculty awarded him the title of Doctor of Theology.

After the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the overthrow of the state in 1918, the incorporation of the former Upper Hungary into the newly founded Czechoslovakia , Schmidt was placed in the forefront. Pressburg was renamed Bratislava by decree. The Slovak part of the Lutherans, who as a minority in the Hungarian Church fought for the right of the mother tongue in their parishes, had become the majority in the Church after the establishment of Czecho-Slovakia. The language struggle in the church, which had particularly concerned the Slovaks since the 19th century, continued after 1918, albeit with reversed roles. The Protestant congregations of the German tongue tried to merge them within the framework of the newly designed Slovak Evangelical Church with their Slovak majority. When at the Synod in Trenčín-Teplitz in 1921 a merger of the German parishes failed, Schmidt made an attempt to remove at least the Pressburg parish from the association of the Slovak Evangelical Church and sought to join the German Evangelical Church in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia ”. However, the connection was not politically enforceable. After the parliamentary elections in 1920 he was elected to the Senate of the Prague Parliament for the “Hungarian-German Christian Social Party”, to which he belonged until 1925. In 1924 he founded the parish association whose first chairman he became.

Since the amalgamation of all German parishes in Slovakia failed, it was Schmidt who - with the consent of the Slovak Bishop Samuel Zoch - succeeded in dissolving the senior council , which only comprised the city of Pressburg and Ratzersdorf , and a German senior council with the city of Bratislava and the surrounding communities to accomplish. With this new regulation, however, the division of the entire Preßburg community into a German community (which the Hungarians voluntarily joined) with approx. 8000 souls and a Slovak parish (1600 souls) connected. However, this dismantling was associated with great financial sacrifices for the German community, because the community assets came almost exclusively from the German community of the prewar period. Schmidt was also elected senior in the German-Hungarian parish.

When the flood of the “ German Christians ” knocked at the gate of the Diaspora Church in Slovakia in 1933 , Schmidt called for sobriety. From the beginning he saw through the destructive effect of this movement on the Church of the Reformation. He vehemently rejected National Socialism .

His anti-attitude towards the Third Reich may have been the reason why Schmidt did not want to leave Pressburg when the Eastern Front approached . The old senior and his two brothers in office Heinrich Pröhle and Wilhelm Rátz were also spared an expulsion based on the " Beneš Decrees ".

Carl Eugen Schmidt's grave slab in the right arcade of the Jeszenák mausoleum at the Gaistor cemetery

Shortly before the Red Army moved in, the senior moved to the deaconess home he had founded. His library and writings fell victim to the plundering Soldateska.

Altsenior Schmidt died on October 22nd, 1948 in the Preßburger Diakonissenheim. The Slovak Evangelical Church Congregation held him a dignified burial. He was buried in the crypt in one of the arcade wings of the Jeszenák mausoleum at the Evangelical Gaistor cemetery . Here an Our Father was allowed to be spoken in German.

Carl Eugen Schmidt was definitely the most important theologian of the German Evangelical Church Community in Pressburg since Matthias Bel .

The hymn book

The hymnbook appeared relatively late in Pressburg as an "aid to community singing". The first Preßburger hymnbook, the so-called “Preßburger Büchel”, dates from 1669 and was published three times. It is closely related to the Silesian " Hirschberger Gesangbuch". In 1716, under the influence of Pietism , a new Pietistic hymn book was introduced. This already counted 420 songs, 56 of which were taken from the "Preßburger Büchel". Pietism revived the poetry of the hymn, but allowed the Reformation chant to exist in its original form.

Up until the first half of the 19th century, questions of religious trends were hotly debated - among theologians as well as among laypeople - and the struggle for “pure teaching” was fought with great commitment. In ancient Hungarians was in the Synod of Rosenberg (1707) of the at the University of Halle / S . scholarly pietism expressly condemned and rejected in a separate article. In the communities of old Hungary generally the rationalism of the Enlightenment prevailed . Worship services were transformed into pure "sermon worship services"; the old, traditional hymns were made "reasonable" and even Luther songs were banned from the hymn books. The Enlightenment of Pressburg also wanted a new Evangelical hymn book. It was to be built on the principles of "good common sense" shaped by rationalism and the "old 'unfashionable' hymns that were useful in their time, but too dark and mystical in their conceptions or too rough in their expressions for the present day and are low " should be removed from it. The rationalists went so far that even important songs from the Reformation era were no longer represented in the new hymn book . Even Martin Luther's “ A strong castle is our God ” was not included in the new hymn book!

Title page of the hymn book of the German Evangelical Church Community in Preßburg (edition 1936)

Carl Gottlieb von Windisch took an active part in this development. Preparatory work for the new hymn book was published in Pressburg as early as 1786 (collection of Christian songs and chants for the use of evangelical relatives , Pressburg 1786). This should pave the way for a new Pressburg congregation hymn book. In the church protocol of April 10, 1787, Windisch is referred to as a member of the "hymn book deputation" and by Crudy he is referred to as "secretary of the editorial committee". The intellectual originator of the entire company, however, was the then senior of the parish, Pastor Daniel von Crudy . The first edition of the hymn book with the title: New hymn and prayer book for worship use by the evangelical community in Pressburg was published in Pressburg in 1788. Because of the strong rationalistic influence that prevailed in Pressburg, this hymnbook lasted quite a long time; it reached several editions (1788, 1829); and even in the year 1880 the “Crudy's hymn book” was reprinted in Hungarian Altenburg .

Only very slowly - and with a time lag compared to Germany - the rationalism of the Enlightenment was overcome in old Hungary and gradually the church renewal had an invigorating effect on the cold community life.

The "new" hymn book from 1896

When Carl Eugen Schmidt took office in 1890, a revision of the rationalistic hymn book was urgently required. He took over the preparatory work, which he presented to his fellow ministers, the pastors Fürst and Ebner, in the parish council in 1893. With this, Schmidt had taken the first step towards turning away from rationalism in the life of worship. In the new hymn book, the Reformation chorales were reintroduced in their original version, many shallow rationalist songs were deleted and new songs were added in the Lutheran spirit. The hymn book came on the market in 1896 and found several new editions by the end of the German Evangelical Church Community in Preßburg in 1945.

For Schmidt, the hymn is “an experienced Gospel and therefore a song of the victory achieved and hoped for. In the congregation the song rings out of the hoped-for victory, the victory over sin, death and hell, which our Lord and Savior achieved with his death on the cross and his resurrection. In faith the Church has this wonderful victory; every Christian has this victory! "

With the introduction of the new hymn book, the liturgy was again upgraded. It is thanks to Schmidt that the Sunday liturgy was once again designed in the Lutheran tradition. He had put his poetic and musical talent into the service of hymnological research. It was thanks to him that the Pressburg hymnbook, which was also used in many German municipalities in Slovakia , was on a par with the German hymn books.

Fonts

• Inaugural sermon on 1.Cor 2, 1-5, Pressburg 1890
• Ceremonial sermon to commemorate the liberation of the galley slaves in Pastoral Blätter, 69th vol., Issue 7, p. 429ff
• What should I comfort you? , Dresden 1893
• Under the Cross , Dresden 1895
• Keresztény vallástan (Hungarian; "Christian religious teaching"), Budapest 1898
• The Lutheran Church in Hungary , Dresden 1900
• Several questions for Lutheran deaconesses , Preßburg 1900
• Pictures from the life of Jesus , Pressburg, 1905
• Contributions to the history of the Evangelical Congregation AB zu Preßburg - The résumés of the pastors , Preßburg 1906
• The liturgical life in the history of the Protestant parish AB zu Preßburg-Pozsony 1906 , Preßburg 1921, p. 19ff
• Three charities of the Pressburg community , in Kreuzkalender, Pressburg 1921, p. 19ff
• The Lutheran Church in Slovakia and the struggle of the parish in Preßburg , Preßburg 1922
• The position of the clergy on the questions of our time (lecture), Pressburg 1926
• Characteristics of German literature , Pressburg 1927
• Where we come from, a historical chat for Pressburgers , in Kreuzkalender, Pressburg 1936, p. 63ff
• Sermon on the occasion of the introduction of the new hymn book, Pressburg 1937
• My curriculum vitae in Die Evangelische Diaspora, vol. XXII, Leipzig 1940, p. 65ff
• Farewell sermon on Ephesians 3: 13-21, Pressburg 1941
• Something from my life , in Gustav-Adolf-Kalender, Preßburg 1945

Since 1897 he published “ The correspondence sheet for the evangelical men and youth clubs in Hungary ” and the ecclesiastical folk paper “ Der Friedensbote ”.

Web links

• Austrian Biographical Lexicon

literature

• Adalbert Hudak : Carl Eugen Schmidt, Stuttgart 1965
• P. Rainer Rudolf, Eduard Ulreich: Karpatendeutsches Biographisches Lexikon. Working group of Carpathian Germans from Slovakia, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-927096-00-8 , p. 291.
• Anton Klipp: Fragments on the history of Protestantism in Old Hungary ( Maria Dorothea von Württemberg and Georg Bauhofer ) in Carpathian Yearbook 2006 ISBN 80-88903-78-5 , vol. 57, page 49 ff
• Andreas Metzl: Workers in God's Vineyard, Life Pictures of German Protestant Pastors in and from Slovakia in the 20th Century , Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 80-88903-63-7
• Anton Klipp: Pressburg. New views on an old city. Karpatendeutsches Kulturwerk, Karlsruhe 2010, ISBN 978-3-927020-15-3 .
• Andreas Metzl: The last fifty years of the German Evangelical Church Community Preßburg, lecture in Bernried / Starnberger See on April 11, 2017

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} ÖBL 1815-1950 ( Austrian Biographical Lexicon ), Vol. 10, p. 249
2. ^ Preßburger Zeitung of January 26, 1905
3. ^ Adalbert Hudak: CE Schmidt, p. 23.
4. ↑ ^{a b c} ÖBL 1815-1950 ( Austrian Biographical Lexicon ), Vol. 10, p. 247.
5. ^ Adalbert Hudak: ibid., P. 33.
6. ↑ On March 14, 1919, Ministerial Decree No. Z. 1236 / adm was issued, which states that the city of Pressburg was officially given the name "Bratislava" and that this name cannot be translated. Quoted from Anton Klipp: Preßburg ..., p. 35 but also from László Szarka: Etnické zmeny v Bratislave (Ethnic Changes in Bratislava) in Kapitoly z dejín Bratislavy, p. 423
7. ↑ Czech: "Maďarsko-německá křesťansko-socialní strana"
8. ↑ Hudak, ibid. P. 33.
9. ↑ ^{a b} Anton Klipp: Fragments ..., p. 49f.
10. ↑ ^{a b} quoted from Fritz Valjavec: Karl Gottlieb Windisch, The life picture of a southeast German citizen in the Enlightenment period, Munich 1936, p. 93f.
11. ^ Anton Klipp: Pressburg ..., p. 176
12. ^ CE Schmidt: Sermon on the occasion of the new edition of the hymn book in 1937
13. ↑ During the Reformation, the songs were sung in the Preßburg community without an organ accompaniment. The parts of the liturgy performed by the choir ( Kyrie , Gloria ) were sung with instrumental accompaniment. When, in the age of pietism, congregational singing became uncertain - due to the many new melodies - it was supported by the organ. But it was still sung rhythmically. It was not until the era of rationalism that “balanced singing” with flourishes and interludes was introduced.
14. ^ Adalbert Hudak: ibid. P. 45