Christoph Schönebeck

Christoph Schönebeck (born June 13, 1601 in Stendal ; † September 29, 1662 in Berlin ; also Christoph Schönbeck ) was a lawyer, electoral secret council and archivist in Berlin.

Christoph Schönebeck was the youngest son of Bartholomäus Schönebeck from the von Schönebeck family . He attended the Joachimsthaler Gymnasium , studied at the age of 13 in 1614 in Frankfurt an der Oder , together with the Stendalers Julius Goldbeck, his brother Benedikt Schönebeck , Andreas and Peter Bune, Bastian Wernicke, then in Halle , Wittenberg and Leipzig . For his Grand Tour during the Thirty Years' War , which took him to Holland, England, France, Leyden, Cologne and Switzerland, he received scholarships from the Schönbeck Family Foundation .

In 1629 he married Magarethe Möring, daughter of the Stendal mayor Werner Möring. When the plague raged in Stendal in 1636 , he lost his wife and three children. Four other children had died earlier.

Thereupon he followed a call from the Brandenburg Elector Georg Wilhelm to the Secret Archives in Berlin in 1636 . At the suggestion of the councils, he was appointed archivist in 1639. He no longer married and has since devoted himself entirely to the organization and structure of the archive. Under the Great Elector he set up the first 62 repositories , which in principle still exist today. With the expansion of the palace on the Spree island of Cölln and the development of Berlin into a residence, the archive there - in the "Gewelte aufm Grün Hut" - was given a permanent storage location. In 1653 he became a Privy Councilor, in 1656 Canon of Havelberg . In Berlin he had contact with Paul Gerhardt , of whose son Paul Friedrich he was the godfather and who, along with his colleague Christian Nicolai , spoke to him over the last few hours on his deathbed. His doctors were Thomas Panckow and Martin Weise .

Johannes Stralow gave the funeral sermon, which was printed in Magdeburg in 1663 . His life is described in detail on pp. 33–42.

His grave is preserved in the south transept of Stendal Cathedral (inv. No. 59). The grave inscriptions are painted gold on black on both walls on canvas. The couple's seven children, who all died as children, are also buried here. In his tombstone, which he himself wrote in Latin, it says: I loved the fine arts, as a youth I roamed foreign realms and countries, then got to know the life at the court of two eminent electors in my capacity as archivist, later I became completely friends of all of them deprived […].

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Christoph Schönebeck had no descendants and therefore bequeathed most of his fortune to the Schönbeck family foundation on September 26, 1662, three days before his death . He also donated his library and his father's library to the family foundation.

literature

• Johannes Stralius: Binum Lugubre Schönbeccianum, That is / Two Christian Sermons, as namely / A funeral sermon and parenting … Magdeburg: Müller, 1663
• Melle Klinkenborg: History of the Secret State Archives in Berlin. Leipzig 1911
• Georg Wilhelm von Raumer; Eckart Henning (ed.): History of the secret state and cabinet archive. In: Archivalische Zeitschrift 72 (1976), pp. 43–54.

Web links

Commons : Christoph Schönebeck  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Uwe Czubatynski:  Schönbeck, Christoph. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 23, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-428-11204-3 , p. 384 ( digitized version ).