Ernst Gustav von Gersdorf

Ernst Gustav von Gersdorf (1780–1843)

Ernst Gustav von Gersdorf (born August 10, 1780 in Weigsdorf near Zittau, † October 24, 1843 in Bautzen ) was a German manor owner , lawyer and politician. He was the first President of the First Chamber of the Saxon State Parliament .

Live and act

As was customary at the time for young country nobles, he initially received lessons from a tutor. After a secondary school education at the Gymnasium in Bautzen, he studied from 1800 to 1803 at the University of Leipzig , the Law and graduated from 1804 to 1805 to study political science at the Universities of Jena and Halle / Saale on.

With his brother Carl Heinrich Traugott von Gersdorf he jointly inherited the manor of his father as well as the manor of his great-uncle Adolf Traugott von Gersdorf († June 1807). By exchanging the shares, he became the sole owner of the Gröditz manor . Financed by a family scholarship, he traveled via Austria to Italy in 1808/1809 , then to southern France and Switzerland , until he reached Paris , where he stayed for some time. When he returned to Saxony, he did not take a job in the Saxon civil service, as was customary at the time. From 1811, however, he was a member of the knighthood in the Upper Lusatian Estates Assembly . In November 1812, as one of the two state elders of the Budissiner circle, he was accepted into the 15-person Select Committee of the Knighthood , the most distinguished body in the country. After the division of Saxony, decided at the Congress of Vienna , the Saxon estates met for the first time in 1817, including the parts of Upper Lusatia that had remained with Saxony . Here and at the following meetings of the estates, Gersdorf was a member of the select committee of the knighthood , in which he was involved in the deliberations on the Saxon constitution of 1831 .

Since he was one of the richest and most influential manors in Saxony, he was appointed by King Anton in 1832 to the first chamber of the newly created constitutional state parliament , of which he was president for the first four state parliaments. Gersdorf died in 1843, two months after the end of the 1842/43 state parliament.

Ernst Gustav von Gersdorf was a member of the Freemasons Association . His lodge was assigned to the Great National Mother Lodge "To the Three Worlds" ( GNML 3WK ).

family

Ernst Gustav von Gersdorf was the posthumous son of the manor owner Heinrich Rudolf von Gersdorf (1739–1779) and his wife Johanna Juliane Elisabeth (née von Gersdorf). In 1817 he married Wilhelmine Caroline von Gersdorf, whose marriage however remained childless.

literature

• Josef Matzerath: Aspects of Saxon State Parliament History - Presidents and Members of Parliament from 1833 to 1952 . Saxon Printing and Publishing House, Dresden 2001. , p. 11f.
• Erhard Hartstock: "Do right and spare no one". Ernst Gustav von Gersdorf (1780-1843) . In: Landtag Courier Free State of Saxony . tape 2 , 1992, p. 3 .
• Josef Matzerath: Gersdorf, Ernst Gustav von . In: Institute for Saxon History and Folklore (Ed.): Saxon Biography .
• Walter von Bötticher: History of the Upper Lusatian nobility and its goods 1635-1815 . Görlitz 1912. , pp. 548-553.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Matzerath erroneously names Gröditz as Grödnitz .
2. ^ Institute for Nobility Research : Aristocratic German Freemasons in the year. 1817 The members of the Great National Mother Lodge for the three globes in Berlin (last accessed: January 22, 2011)