Gottlob Moriz Christian von Wacks

From Wacks 1800

Gottlob Moriz Christian von Wacks (born October 30, 1720 in Heilbronn ; † April 15, 1807 in Heinsheim ) was Mayor of Heilbronn from 1770 to 1803 .

Life

He was the son of Heilbronn mayor Adam Christian Wacks (1675–1732) from his second marriage to Sibilla Martha Feyerabend. Gottlob attended grammar school in Heilbronn and enrolled on November 7, 1736 at the University of Strasbourg for philosophy and law . After completing his studies, he settled in Heilbronn as a legal adviser and became the eighth or last senator member of the small, inner council (" von den burgern ") from December 31, 1746 , in 1750 he moved up to the sixth and successively up to 1756 the first senatorial position. At that time he was already considered the richest non-merchant in the city, and in 1752 he taxed 48,475 guilders.

On April 14, 1757 he was raised to the nobility , in the same year he became a tax administrator. In 1758 he became third tax owner , in 1759 second tax owner. From April 22nd, 1766 to January 10th, 1769 it was a school hot town . He was also the ducal government councilor of Württemberg. After the death of Mayor Georg Heinrich Orth in 1769, he became the third mayor of Heilbronn. In the same year he moved to the second position of mayor after the death of Franz Leonhard Roth . After mayor Georg Philipp Mylius retired at the beginning of 1781, von Wacks became the first mayor. Wacks held numerous other offices: He was Vogt zu Böckingen , visitor to the pharmacists, hunter master, caretaker of the Klarakloster and the Carmelite monastery , scholarch, librarian, censor of the book printer, master rifleman and master craftsman of the barbers. His tenure as mayor, which lasted more than 30 years, was marked by a consolidation of the city's finances, which is attributed to his prudent administration.

The von Wacks house, the former beguinage near St. Wolfgang , was the center of intellectual and musical social life in the city. Here u. a. Otto Heinrich von Gemmingen-Hornberg . Wacks is said to be a pandemonium in which foreign and local spirits used to gather as if on the magic of his master. Also Schubart boasts in his biography of humanity Wacks.

After the transition of the imperial city of Heilbronn to Württemberg in 1803, Wacks no longer entered the Württemberg civil service, but instead took his retirement. He moved to Heinsheim, where he died in 1807.

Wives

Dorothea Erna Sophie of Liège

Wacks was married to Dorothea Erna Sophie von Lüttich († 1760), daughter of the British and Hanoverian Major General Johann Christian von Lüttich, from 1758 onwards. The marriage remained childless.

Charlotte Sophie von Pflugk

In his second marriage from 1762 he was married to Charlotte Sophie von Pflugk (1743-1805), daughter of a Württemberg government councilor. She was a “woman from the city nobility”. She belonged to that part of the bourgeoisie that “was culturally interested and informed; they were up to date when it came to music, literature, architecture and art ” . Schubart describes the nobles, when he was in the summer of 1777 in the house of the couple Wacks, as "a fine connoisseur of the world of beautiful mental culture, sang, and played the piano with taste." She was on the mesmerism - therapy of Eberhard Gmelin interested and member of the Bund für Righteousness , a Masonic-like association for both sexes that Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt founded. They had a daughter, Charlotte Sophie (1765-1827), who married Karl von Racknitz (1756-1819), the Bavarian treasurer and descendant of the Heinsheim lords' Racknitz family . Wacks' second marriage fell apart. When he moved to Heinsheim in 1803, his wife stayed in Heilbronn, where she died in 1805 and was entered in the death register without mentioning her husband.

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Web links

• Schiller's letter to Wacks

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Life picture of a woman from the city nobility: Charlotte Sophie von Wacks (1743–1805)
2. ↑ Enlightenment and cultural heyday
3. ↑ Christhard Schrenk , Hubert Weckbach , Susanne Schlösser: From Helibrunna to Heilbronn. A city history (=  publications of the archive of the city of Heilbronn . Volume 36 ). Theiss, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-8062-1333-X , p. 99 .

literature

• Wilhelm Steinhilber: Mayor of Heilbronn in the 18th century (IX) . In: Swabia and Franconia. Local history supplement of the Heilbronn voice . 12th year, no. 6 . Heilbronner Voice publishing house, June 11, 1966, ZDB -ID 128017-X .
• Moriz von Rauch : Heilbronn in the second half of the 18th century . In: From the Heilbronn city history. Selected essays on the history of the city of Heilbronn from volumes 1–16 of the yearbook of the Heilbronn Historical Society (yearbook for Swabian-Franconian history) . Jahrbuch Verlag, Weinsberg 1988. pp. 73-104
• Harald Hoffmann: Constitution and administration of the imperial city Heilbronn at the end of the old empire. In: Yearbook for Swabian-Franconian History. Volume 26.Historical Association Heilbronn, Heilbronn 1969
• Bernd Klagholz: Heilbronn and its mayors in the period from the 16th to the 19th century (approval work), Tübingen 1980, p. 89