Caspar Butz
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Caspar Butz (born October 23, 1825 in Hagen , Kingdom of Prussia , † October 19, 1885 in Des Moines , Iowa ), a German-American writer and politician, was a friend of Friedrich Hecker participant in the revolution of 1848/49 and was a leader including the Iserlohn uprising of 1849 .
Life
Caspar Butz was born as a Westphalian landlord's son in 1825 and developed an interest in the theater at an early age. His father's early death in 1841 and the poor financial situation of the family prevented his desire to study theology. As an employee of an Elberfeld industrial company, he traveled to Algeria in 1847 and later to Paris for a longer period of time. On these trips he gained insights into political revolutionary ideas, at the same time he got to know the power of the press and political poetry.
He therefore gave up his job and tried unsuccessfully for editorial positions at various newspapers and publishers, even the attempt to publish his own newspaper failed. During this time he made his first relationships with Friedrich Hecker and worked as a political agitator.
In 1849 he sat as spokesman at the head of over 400 armed men to support the Iserlohners in their arsenal storm, which claimed over 40 dead and wounded. Before the subsequent persecution, he fled to England via the Netherlands and emigrated to the USA in the same year. There he worked for a while in a fur shop in Detroit and later co-founded a successful lithographic printing company. At the same time he worked there as one of the Forty-Eighters as a writer and politically supported, among other things, the formation of the Republican Party in Illinois . In 1857 he was elected to the legislature in Chicago . From 1859 Butz was Secretary of the High Court and from 1864 City Treasurer of Chicago.
From 1864 to 1866 he was the editor of the “German-American Monthly Issues for Politics, Science and Literature”, which criticized Abraham Lincoln's slow war policy, among other things .
After 1865 he turned back to business for a while and did not resume his literary work until 1871 after all his belongings had been destroyed in a major fire in Chicago in 1871 , including the diary of his trip to North Africa and the two dramas by Oliver Cromwell and Florian Geyer . From 1873 he was editor of the literary Sunday paper The West in Illinois; in the early 1880s he wrote articles for the Evening Post and Western Post newspapers . During the last years of his life he lived with his wife in Des Moines , where he died a few days before his 60th birthday.
literature
- Caspar Butz (ed.): German-American monthly books for politics, science and literature . Friends of the House printing house, Chicago 1864ff.
- Udo Brachvogel: biography of Caspar Butz . In: Illustrirte Zeitung (by Frank Leslie) 1875
- Paul Simon: A German-American poet. Caspar Butz . Münster 1919 (dissertation)
- AE Zucker (ed.): The Forty-Eighters. Political Refugees of the German Revolution of 1848 . New York 1950.
- Gabriele Rose: Caspar Butz - politician and poet in Algeria and the USA . In: Fabian Fechner u. a. (Ed.): Colonial pasts of the city of Hagen , Hagen 2019, ISBN 978-3-00-063343-0 , pp. 82–85.
Web links
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Butz, Caspar |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German-American bookseller, writer and politician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 23, 1825 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Hagen , Kingdom of Prussia |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 19, 1885 |
| Place of death | Des Moines , Iowa |