Edward Breck

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Edward "Eddie" Breck (born July 31, 1861 in San Francisco , California , † May 14, 1929 in Washington ) was an American author , diplomat and spy . He was one of the first unofficial German champions in foil fencing as well as in golf .

Sportsman and author

Breck's brother John Leslie (seated in front) with the Monet family

Edward Breck was the son of an officer in the US Navy , Joseph Berry Breck born. His family is descended from one of the first settlers who came to Massachusetts in 1630 , and they may also have German roots. After the father's death in 1878, the mother moved with Edward and his older brother John Leslie to Leipzig , where the boys went to school. From 1882 Edward Breck attended the Oberlin Conservatory College in the USA for a year and had his tenor voice trained. In 1883 he began studying at the University of Leipzig and was awarded a Dr. phil. with a dissertation on the Old English language. In 1889 he married Antonie Wagner von Kleeblatt from Bohemia in Prague ; the couple had two daughters.

His mother had meanwhile married the wealthy entrepreneur Frederic William Rice as a second marriage. While Edward Breck worked as a writer and journalist, John Leslie Breck made a name for himself as a painter. The two brothers were financially well off and traveled across Europe. In 1887 they stayed together with their mother in the artists' colony in Giverny , France , where Claude Monet also lived. John Leslie Breck fell in love with Monet's stepdaughter Blanche Hoschedé , but Monet was against marrying the two.

Breck was a versatile athlete and a member of the Boston Athletic Association . A year after he moved to Berlin in 1895 after a two-year stay in the USA , he took part in tournaments in tennis , fencing and golf at the trade exhibition there . In the same year he won a championship on the golf course of the Berlin Golf Club located in Spandau , which mainly consisted of members of the British and US embassies. The tournament was entitled “Championship of Germany and Austria”, but the official German golf championships were only held years later by the German Golf Association , founded in 1907 . In a demonstration duel he fought against the professor's wife Emma Teege; this was the first public fencing competition in Germany in which a woman was involved. Also in 1896 he became the first (unofficial) German champion in foil fencing. In 1897 he took over the post of fencing warden in the newly founded German and Austrian Fencing Federation (DÖFB), a forerunner organization of today's German Fencing Federation .

In the late 1880s, Breck was an advisor to the prestigious Boston art publisher Estes & Lauriat, from 1890 to 1892 as editor of the London magazine Life , until 1895 editor of The Swordsman , the association magazine of the Amateur Fencers League of America (AFLA), and he wrote as a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald and the New York Times . After 1895 he became Vice Consul General in Berlin and also assistant to the local naval attaché .

Activities as a spy

In April 1898 the Spanish-American War broke out, and Edward Breck, who is said to have spoken fluent Spanish and Portuguese, decided to spy on the coastal fortifications in Spain in the event of an American invasion. Equipped with a pistol and a borrowed passport from a German friend, he traveled as Dr. King to Spain. There he made the acquaintance of German-born Spanish general Valeriano Weyler , who provided him with a letter of recommendation that gave Breck great freedom of movement.

Breck toured numerous Spanish ports, including those of Barcelona , Tarragona , Valencia , Alicante , Murcia and Bilbao , taking notes and taking photos. Except for one incident when a security guard looked suspicious and the security guard fired a shot at him, he was unmolested. However, his findings were never used, as the war ended after a few months and there was no invasion of Spain. On his return to Berlin, he hoped in vain that this engagement would make him the successor to the recently deceased US consul Julius Goldschmidt. After the death of his brother John Leslie in 1899 - he presumably committed suicide - he returned to the USA. The brother had earned a good reputation as a painter and is now considered the "head of American Impressionism".

Nature lover, again spy, military attaché and archivist

Willibald Gebhardt terminated his friendship with Breck because of his espionage activities.

In 1903 Edward Breck wrote a letter from the USA to Willibald Gebhardt ("My dear Doctor!"), Chairman of the DÖFB and old friend from Berlin days, and served as head of the German team's delegation for the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis on. Gebhardt was also the chairman of the Committee for Participation in the Games, there was no National Olympic Committee yet. Gebhardt rejected this request, however, on the grounds that Breck had abused the hospitality of the empire, a reference to Breck's espionage activities, of which Gebhardt obviously knew. Breck, in turn, attributed this rejection to the Germans' “lack of humor”.

Breck now lived as a long-term guest at Milford House in Annapolis Royal , Nova Scotia , Canada , and made a name for himself as an expert on nature there, but also frequented the social circles of Boston . He wrote articles for The Outing Magazine , 44 Field & Stream and Forest & Stream and worked as a “product tester” for the outdoor outfitter Abercrombie & Fitch . He led walking tours, and one of the participating tourists, the writer Albert Bigelow Paine , made him a main character in his popular book The Tent Dwellers . In 1909 the Nova Scotia Guides Association elected him their president.

Karl von Luxburg, ambassador to Argentina, was betrayed by Breck.

In 1917, shortly before the United States entered the First World War , Edward Breck traveled again for espionage purposes , this time to Brazil in order to ask around in the German community there. He pretended to be Swiss, but members of the German-Brazilian community exposed and beat him up, and Breck fled headlong to Argentina . Under the name of Dr. Ernst Brecht made himself national German in Buenos Aires and earned the trust of the German ambassador Karl von Luxburg and the members of the German association there, for example by singing German songs with his trained voice in the local Bismarck restaurant . He became aware of the content of a top secret telegram that had wired from Luxburg to Berlin, in which he recommended, among other things, the "without a trace" sinking of neutral, including Argentine, ships and described the Argentine foreign minister as "a donkey of reputation". The telegram was made public by the United States Department of State and Luxburg had to leave Argentina. Breck's role in this affair went undetected.

Edward Breck, in turn, was appointed US military attaché with the rank of frigate captain in Lisbon in 1918 . He developed a strategy for Portugal to secure its borders, was responsible for the repair, maintenance and ammunition of US ships and also had police powers, according to which he was even allowed to arrest suspects in Portugal. When a famine broke out in Madeira , he organized a shipload of grain for the island in Africa.

Due to illness, Breck returned to the United States in 1919 and became curator of the Naval Archives in Washington. He retired in 1925 and continued touring Canada with his second wife, Mary Stanley Breck, who also took photos. In 1925 he was one of the founders of the Anti-Steel Trap League , which fought against the use of steel traps ( leghold traps ) to catch fur animals. To illustrate the League's concern , Breck wrote soulful poems about the torments of the captive animals. While the men of the League organized the protest, the female members took over the active protest. Breck said of the women that they were “the moral backbone of the land, and it is primarily their chief duty to right this great wrong, just as they have been the chief offenders in condoning it, though innocent, for the most part, through ignorance "(German: women are" the moral backbone of the country, and therefore it is their main task to redress this injustice, just as they have become perpetrators through tolerance, innocent, but mostly out of ignorance ").

Edward Breck died of a heart attack in 1929 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. His widow continued to be involved in animal welfare and assumed the presidency of the Anti-Steel Trap League , which existed until 1942.

Honors

Publications (selection)

  • A chapter in: The art of fencing by Regis and Louis Senac. American Sports Pub. Co., New York 1904.
  • The Way Of The Woods - A Manual For Sportsmen In Northeastern United States And Canada . 1908.
  • Sporting guide to Nova Scotia . The Imperial publishing Company, Halifax 1909.
  • Wilderness pets at Camp Buckshaw . Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston / New York 1910.
  • Ernst von Wolzüge : The Kraft Mayr. a humorous tale of musical life (translation by Edward Breck and Charles Harvey Genung). BW Huebsch, New York 1914.

literature

  • Heiner Gillmeister: Edward Breck, golf master, master spy and prevented attaché of the German Olympic team . In: German working group of sports museums, sports archives and sports collections (Ed.): DAGS magazine . September 2012, p. 55-69 ( issuu.com ).
  • Heiner Gillmeister: Edward Breck, Anglo-Saxon Scholar, Golf Champion and Master Spy . In: Mayumi Sawada / Larry Walker / Shizuya Tara (eds.): Language Beyond. A Festschrift for Hiroshi Yonekura on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday . Eichosha, Tokyo, S. 33-56 ( iaak.uni-bonn.de ).

Web links

Wikisource: Edward Breck  - Sources and full texts (English)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Gillmeister: Edward Breck, Anglo-Saxon Scholar, Golf Champion and Master Spy. P. 33
  2. ^ A b Gillmeister: Edward Breck, Anglo-Saxon Scholar, Golf Champion and Master Spy. P. 45.
  3. ^ Genealogy of the Breck family: descended from Edward of Dorchester and his brothers in America ... (1889)  - Internet Archive
  4. ^ A b Gillmeister: Edward Breck, Anglo-Saxon Scholar, Golf Champion and Master Spy. P. 34
  5. ↑ Heiner Gillmeister: Edward Breck, golf master, master spy and prevented attaché of the German Olympic team . In: German working group of sports museums, sports archives and sports collections (Ed.): DAGS magazine . September 2012, p. 75 ( issuu.com ).
  6. ↑ Heiner Gillmeister: An eventful life: golf master and master spy. In: FAZ . January 3, 2006, accessed October 26, 2014 .
  7. ^ A b Gillmeister: Edward Breck, Anglo-Saxon Scholar, Golf Champion and Master Spy. P. 35 f.
  8. ↑ Gillmeister: Edward Breck, Anglo-Saxon Scholar, Golf Champion and Master Spy. P. 37 f.
  9. ↑ Gillmeister: Edward Breck, Anglo-Saxon Scholar, Golf Champion and Master Spy. P. 38.
  10. ↑ In the Valley of the Seine. Museum of Fine Arts, accessed October 26, 2014 .
  11. ↑ In November 2000, a painting by John Leslie Breck was auctioned at Christie's for $ 270,000. See: Gillmeister: Edward Breck, Anglo-Saxon Scholar, Golf Champion and Master Spy. P. 46.
  12. ↑ Gillmeister: Edward Breck, Anglo-Saxon Scholar, Golf Champion and Master Spy. P. 37.
  13. ^ A b Gillmeister: Edward Breck, Anglo-Saxon Scholar, Golf Champion and Master Spy. P. 39.
  14. ↑ Gillmeister: Edward Breck, Anglo-Saxon Scholar, Golf Champion and Master Spy. P. 40 f.
  15. ↑ Gillmeister: Edward Breck, Anglo-Saxon Scholar, Golf Champion and Master Spy. P. 43 f.
  16. ↑ Gillmeister: Edward Breck, Anglo-Saxon Scholar, Golf Champion and Master Spy. P. 44 f.
  17. ↑ Gillmeister: Edward Breck, Anglo-Saxon Scholar, Golf Champion and Master Spy. P. 51.
  18. ↑ Gillmeister: Edward Breck, Anglo-Saxon Scholar, Golf Champion and Master Spy. P. 41 f.
  19. ↑ Thomas R. Dunlap: Saving America's Wildlife. Ecology and the American Mind, 1850-1990 . Princeton University Press, 1988, pp. 95 f .
  20. ↑ There is hardly any information about Breck's two marriages. According to research by travel photographer and author Sarah Phinney, the existence of at least one granddaughter named Ellen Frances Macnee Coggeshall is known. She died in January 2006 at the age of 86. See: Mike Parker. sandraphinney.com, December 4, 2013, accessed October 26, 2014 . and Obituaries: Ellen Frances Macnee Coggeshall, 86. (No longer available online.) January 16, 2009, archived from the original on October 26, 2014 ; accessed on October 26, 2014 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.barnstablepatriot.com
  21. ↑ Trapping. The Spectator Archive, January 17, 1931, accessed October 26, 2014 .
personal data
SURNAME Breck, Edward
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Breck, Eddie (short name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American author, diplomat, spy, foil fencer, and golfer
DATE OF BIRTH July 31, 1861
PLACE OF BIRTH San Francisco , California
DATE OF DEATH May 14, 1929
Place of death Washington, DC