Carl Meyer (lawyer)

Carl Meyer (* December 22, 1873 in Tablat , today the municipality of St. Gallen ; † October 13, 1947 in St. Gallen; resident in Krummenau , from 1906 in Herisau ) was a Swiss lawyer , cantonal councilor and founder and president of the Säntis suspension railway from the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden .

Life

Carl Meyer was the son of Joseph Meyer, a master painter and debt enforcement officer , and later a brickyard owner , and Elisabeth Bänziger. In 1904 he married Juli Eugenie Maag, daughter of Johannes Maag. After his father's failure with the St. Fiden brickworks , Meyer grew up with his mother in poor conditions in Speicher . After her death in 1885, he found a new home with the cantonal school teacher Johann Jakob Kürsteiner in Trogen . He attended the Trogen Cantonal School . After 1891 a two-year made a draftsman - teaching in Zurich . He then studied law at the University of Zurich , the University of Leipzig and the University of Lausanne . He received his PhD in 1896.

After taking the first steps as a bankruptcy official and editor , Meyer ran a law practice in Herisau from 1899 to 1929 . He gave this up because of his election as chief justice . From 1906 to 1909 he held the office of a local council in Herisau. From 1906 to 1908 he was a member of the cantonal constitutional commission. From 1927 to 1946 he served as a free-thinking Ausserrhoder cantonal councilor and from 1929 to 1836 as chief judge. He presided over the Supreme Court from 1930 to 1936. Meyer was a member of the State Economic Commission from 1928 to 1933. He was president from 1930 to 1933. From 1938 he was a member of the finance committee. In 1942 he acted as the initiator of a cantonal economic commission. He presided over it from 1942 to 1945. He was a member of the board of directors of the Appenzeller Bahn , the Herisau gasworks and a South American electricity company . From 1933 to 1947 he was chairman of the board of directors of the Säntis suspension railway and from 1946 to 1947 of the Walke Buntpapierfabrik Herisau AG.

His real life's work was the Säntisbahn . He crowned this with the opening of the suspension railway in 1935 . In addition, he worked from 1908 to 1946 as an editor and freelancer for the Appenzeller Landeszeitung . The politician's editorials carried weight. His initially pro-German attitude gave way to a critical stance in 1923. This made him a warner of "Hitler's national Bolshevism" at an early age. He pursued a wide range of collecting activities . This includes books and pictures, among other things. Meyer was Vice President of the Eastern Switzerland Press Association.

literature

• A. Nägeli: Dr. iur. Carl Meyer 1873-1947. In: Appenzellische Jahrbücher, Volume 75/1947 (1948), pp. 42–48. Web access via e-periodica.ch.
• Walter Schläpfer: Press history of the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden. Herisau: Schläpfer 1978.
• Peter Holderegger: Entrepreneurs in Appenzellerland: History of industrial entrepreneurship in Appenzell Ausserrhoden from the beginning to the present. Herisau: Schläpfer 1992.
• Rudolf Gamper et al .: Carl Meyer collection in the Appenzell Ausserrhoden canton library in Trogen: Catalog of manuscripts and prints up to 1600. Edited by Rudolf Gamper and Matthias Weishaupt. Dietikon-Zurich: U. Graf 2005.
• Heidi Eisenhut: Contemporaries: Carl Meyer (1873–1947) In: Appenzellische Jahrbücher, Volume 143/2016 (2017), p. 49 f. Web access via e-periodica.ch.
• Carl Meyer's estate in the Appenzell Ausserrhoden Cantonal Library

Web links

• Thomas Fuchs: Carl Meyer. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . August 18, 2009 , accessed June 24, 2020 .
• Literature by and about Carl Meyer (lawyer) in the bibliographic database WorldCat

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