Ehrenreich Bogislaus von Creutz

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Ehrenreich Bogislaus (Boguslaw) Creutz , 1708 by Creutz , other sources also Ehrenreich Boguslav Kreutz (* around 1670 in Stargard in Pomerania , † 13 February 1733 in Berlin ) was a Prussian Minister of State and Cabinet Secretary under King I. Friedrich Wilhelm in Prussia.

Career in the Prussian civil service

Creutz, the evangelically baptized son of a Brandenburg bailiff , studied law at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder . Supported by Count Wartenberg , he became chief auditor in the Prussian Crown Prince Regiment . After Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm took over the regiment himself, he made Creutz, a giant figure, his personal secretary. From 1705 to 1713 Creutz was a highly privileged court and chamber councilor to the Crown Prince. On his recommendation, he was on December 1, 1708 King Frederick I in the Prussian nobility raised . After Friedrich Wilhelm I ascended to the throne, the ambitious, hardworking and knowledgeable confidante of the king held the most important offices in the Prussian state. In 1713 he became the Real Secret State and War Council General Controller of the Treasuries. In this role he drafted and dispatched numerous cabinet orders from the king.

After founding the General Chamber of Accounts, Frederick I appointed him its first president in August. In this position he arranged the finances of Margrave Albrecht von Brandenburg from September 1715-1716 and received a salary bonus of 1000 thalers on May 5, 1716. On June 16, 1717, he was confirmed in his function as President of the Chamber by cabinet order, and on July 17, 1717, he was openly declared in an intelligence paper. In 1718 he headed a commission of inquiry into the as yet unadjusted accounts of the Landkastens (the main treasury of the accounting chamber). In February 1719, von Creutz also received the position of senior director of the Oberfinanzdirektorium. On January 23, 1723, the king appointed him conducting minister (vice-president) in the newly established general directorate . on November 24, 1725 he received the post of chief director of the medical sector for all of Prussia and became protector of the Society of Sciences .

In addition, von Creutz, as the monarch's confidante, was director of various city treasuries, u. a. in Ruppin and Frankfurt (Oder) as well as on December 13, 1728 also estate director of the Kurmärkische landscape . With a pension of 6,000 thalers, von Creutz resigned all his offices on June 21, 1731 and died of illness in 1733. The funeral procession of 14 funeral carriages took place on February 26, 1733 in Berlin.

Contemporary judgments

Due to his close relationship with Friedrich Wilhelm I, whose virtues such as thrift, discretion, love of order and pragmatic tone of voice von Creutz shared, judgments by his contemporaries turned out to be highly negative or tendentious. In particular in the memoirs of Margravine Wilhelmine von Bayreuth , who accused him of intrigues and a love affair with the maid of honor von Wagnitz, von Creutz received an extremely bad character testimony that not only rubbed off on his position in the service, but also on later publications about him. The margravine called him u. a. an upstart and “a paragon of all vices”. His royal patron recommended him in his instructions for the successor in 1722 with the words: "You have to watch him but he is habille and if he is not so his paßiones would have a very habiler financies"

Von Creutz's enormous fortune caused displeasure at court. The Crown Prince Friedrich called him z. B. in a letter to Field Marshal von Grumbkow on December 27, 1731, a contemptuous Croesus .

Private life

Von Creutz's brother-in-law was the Magdeburg government and privy councilor Gottlieb von Haeseler , whose 15-year-old sister Gertrud he married on April 29, 1710 in the Heiligegeistgemeinde in Magdeburg . From her father, the Magdeburg wholesale merchant Valentin Haeseler, she brought a considerable fortune into the marriage.

Baroque staircase in the former Palais von Kreutz, 1910

From Creutz lived with his wife until 1717 on Spandauer Strasse in Berlin, in a tenement house belonging to the chief steward Wilhelm Dietrich von Bülow . He then built his own two-and-a-half-story palace on the corner of Klosterstrasse and Sieberstrasse, which later extended to house numbers 92–96 (now number 36). The central risalit of the main front was modeled on the pleasure garden portal IV of the palace . The staircase of the house and the rococo festival hall, which the Royal Building Director Martin Heinrich Böhme had designed, were among the most filigree baroque works in old Berlin , along with the hall of the Berlin Palace .

The magnificent residential building came into the ownership of the Prussian state as early as 1820 , which soon housed the Beuth-Thaersche Industrial Institute founded in 1823 (a forerunner of the Beuth University of Applied Sciences in Berlin ). In 1887 Robert Koch's Hygiene Institute moved into the building, later users became offices and museums. City planners in the 1920s called for the palace to be demolished because it stood in the way of growing traffic, but it remained standing. Shortly before the end of the Second World War , the palace and other neighboring buildings were destroyed and then cleared above ground. The foundations have been preserved under the northern sidewalk of Grunerstrasse in front of the multi-storey car park.

Since von Creutz left no sons, his line died out in the male line with his death . His widow Gertrud died on October 1, 1741 in Berlin and was buried next to her husband in the Sparr family crypt in the Marienkirche . His daughter Sophie Albertine (1710–1757) married the Prussian Hofjägermeister, captain in the Potsdam Leibregiment, later general and city commander Hans Christoph Friedrich Graf von Hacke (1699–1754). The marriage resulted in the son Friedrich Wilhelm, who died in 1789.

As a friend and confidante of the king, the king repeatedly showed him the grace of a personal visit to his estate in Berlin. In July 1716 he publicly visited Creutz's tobacco plantation in his garden in front of the Leipziger Tor. The wedding of his daughter was also a major event at the Berlin court, at which Friedrich Wilhelm I gave the courtship in the presence of the entire court society.

His brother Martin Friedrich Creutz (* around 1670, † 1735) was the Prussian agricultural director and councilor.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Historical buildings - almost all large town houses and aristocratic palaces have been destroyed or torn down. But there are ideas to make their traces in old locations visible. Six examples from the old center. Picture-text article in Berliner Zeitung , based on elaborations by Benedikt Goebel (stadtforschung.berlin) and Lutz Mauersberger (berlin-mitte-archiv.com) October 9, 2017, p. 16.
  2. ^ Eduard Vehse : History of the German Courts since the Reformation , Volume 2, Hamburg 1851, p. 227 .
  3. ↑ Maximilian Gritzner : Chronological register of the Brandenburg-Prussian class elevations and acts of grace from 1600–1873. Berlin 1874, p. 15.
  4. ^ Leopold von Zedlitz-Neukirch (ed.): Neues Preussisches Adels-Lexicon , Leipzig 1836, p. 382 .
  5. ^ Hans-Stephan Brather: Leibniz and his academy. Selected sources on the history of the Berlin Society of Sciences 1697–1716 , Akademie Verlag, 1993, ISBN 3050017953 and ISBN 9783050017952 , p. 453 ( digitized version ).
  6. ↑ It began with the “General-Rechen-Kammer” on www.bundesfinanzministerium.de on the occasion of the issue of a new postage stamp in 2014; accessed on October 18, 2017.
  7. ↑ Berlin written newspapers from the years 1713 to 1717 and 1735 [and] 1740. A contribution to Prussian history under King Friedrich Wilhelm I. [and] The beginning of the reign of Frederick the Great , ed. v. Ernst Friedländer / Richard Wolff, (= writings of the Association for the History of Berlin, No. 38), Berlin 1902, p. 649.
  8. ^ Berlinische Privilegierte Zeitung , No. 25 (February 26, 1733).
  9. ↑ Cf. Memoirs of Margravine Wilhelmine von Bayreuth, Sister of Frederick the Great: based on the handwritten French version; 1, ed. v. Wilhelmine Friederike Sophie Margravine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth, Leipzig 1926 p. 16.
  10. ↑ Acta Borussica II, p. 456.
  11. ↑ Letter from Crown Prince Friedrich to von Grumbkow, December 27, 1731 in: Friedrichs der Grosse's correspondence with Grumbkow and Maupertius , ed. v. Reinhold Koser (= publications from the Prussian state archives , volume 72). Hirzel, Leipzig 1898, 10 (No. 5).
  12. ^ World History.
  13. ↑ Georg Gottfried Küster : Des old and new Berlin third department, Berlin 1756, p. 73.
  14. ↑ Ernst Heinrich Kneschke (Ed.): New general German Adels Lexicon , 4th volume, Leipzig 1862, p. 123.
  15. ^ Berlinische Privilegierte Zeitung, No. 26 (February 28, 1732).
  16. ↑ Letter from Grumbkow to Hille, Potsdam February 23, 1732, in: Briefwechsel Friedrichs der Große mit Grumbkow and Maupertuis, ed. v. Koser Reinhold (= publications from the Prussian state archives, volume 72). Hirzel, Leipzig 1898, p. 43 (No. 29).
personal data
SURNAME Creutz, Ehrenreich Bogislaus from
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Creutz, Ehrenreich Bogislaus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Prussian Minister of State
DATE OF BIRTH around 1670
PLACE OF BIRTH Stargard , Pomerania
DATE OF DEATH February 13, 1733
Place of death Berlin