Ernst Henrici (politician)

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Ernst Henrici
Ernst Henrici, 1880

Carl Ernst Julius Henrici (born December 10, 1854 in Berlin , † July 10, 1915 in Döbeln ) was a German high school teacher, writer , colonial adventurer and anti-Semitic politician .

Life

Ernst Henrici was born as the son of tax collector Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig Henrici and his wife Wilhelmine nee. Lüdecke was born. In Berlin he attended the Friedrich-Werdersche-Gymnasium and passed his Abitur in 1874. He then studied philology at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität and received his doctorate in 1878 with an award-winning thesis on “ Notker's Psalms Commentary”. He then worked as a teacher at a private secondary school for girls. Together with his older brother, the grammar school teacher Emil Henrici , he founded the “Society for German Philology” and published widely acclaimed works on linguistic and historical topics. In 1879 he traveled to London to study and got his first marriage there. After his return in the same year he did an internship as a grammar school teacher at the Luisenstädtische Realschule in Berlin and the next year he switched to the Viktoriaschule, a secondary school for girls.

Anti-Semitic agitator

Henrici was initially politically active in the left-liberal Progress Party , but from 1880 onwards he emerged as a radical anti-Semitic agitator of the “ Berlin Movement ”. Because of his populist and radical speeches and contributions to the discussion, he was also referred to as a " radical anti-Semite ". He was one of the initiators of the anti-Semite petition and founded? the Social Reich Association , 1881 the Social Reich Party and propagated in numerous meetings (December 17, 1880 "Reichshallenrede", December 30, 1880 "Bock Assembly") a racist anti-Semitism with anti-capitalist , anti- liberal and anti-conservative features. On New Year's Eve 1880 there were anti-Jewish riots in Berlin, which were attributed to Henrici's inflammatory speeches. At the beginning of 1881 he was therefore dismissed from school. In 1882 he took part in the first International Anti-Jewish Congress in Dresden.

The synagogue fire in Neustettin

On February 18, 1881, just a few days after Ernst Henricis gave an anti-Semitic inflammatory speech in Neustettin (February 13, 1881), the city's synagogue burned down . While the local Jews and the liberal press suspected an arson attack, the anti-Semites claimed that the Jews set fire to the synagogue themselves in order to discredit anti-Semitism and collect the insurance sum. Five members of the Jewish community have been indicted and four of them in 1883 by the Circuit Court of Pomerania for aid for arson and failure to report planned offenses sentenced to prison terms. After this judgment was overturned by the Imperial Court, the Konitz jury acquitted all of the accused in 1884. The cause of the fire was never clarified; however, the testimony of the main witness, among others, turned out to be an obvious falsehood. In connection with the trials, there were anti-Jewish riots in Neustettin and other places in Western Pomerania and West Prussia . These were also fueled by Henrici, who agitated again in June 1881 in Western Pomerania.

Election defeat and end of political career

Henrici remained an ultra-radical outsider within the “Berlin Movement”. Henrici did not participate in the alliance of conservatives and anti-Semites in the Conservative Central Committee , but ran for the Reichstag elections as an independent in the 3rd constituency of Berlin. With only 843 votes, he suffered a crushing defeat against Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg . Until 1885 he kept moving in radical anti-Semitic circles until he turned to the colonial movement. In 1884 he concluded a second marriage with Clara Agnes Luise Lehmann, with whom he had the children Elsa Hedwig Luise, Walther Ludwig Adalbert and Lothar.

Colonial adventurer

After participating in a government expedition through the largely unexplored German colony of Togo in 1887, he became co-founder and chairman of the " Gustav Nachtigal Society for Patriotic Africa Research " named after the African researcher Gustav Nachtigal , and gave lectures on German cultural tasks in Africa . With his brother-in-law, the landscape painter Franz Leuschner , he traveled a second time to Togo to buy farmland. However, his attempt to gain a foothold as a planter in the German colony failed due to insufficient knowledge of agriculture and geography. In 1890 he founded the "German Togo Society. Henrici and Comrades ”, which had to be dissolved again in the same year. In 1891 he returned to Germany completely impoverished and heavily in debt, from where he embarked overseas.

In the New World he was employed since 1891, first as a surveyor for the German railway construction in Venezuela and then as a bridge builder and coffee planter in Costa Rica . In 1902 he took a job as a mechanical engineer in Baltimore ( USA ) at Bartlett, Hayward & Co. In Baltimore, he also published his dramatic works and was co-initiator of the Baltimore flower game. In 1905 Henrici returned to Germany and married Edith Meyer in third marriage. From 1907 he worked in Leipzig as editor of the Spanish and English language export magazines El Comprador and Energy . In 1908 he traveled again to the USA, gave lectures in New York and then ran a farm near Mechanicsville in the state of Maryland . After his third wife was killed in a lightning strike , he married Paula Riedel in 1909 and sold his farm the following year.

In 1910, Henrici tried in vain for a habilitation at the University of Leipzig in the fields of colonial economics and transport. In 1911 he headed an agricultural-technical office and laboratory in Klinga and tried to run for the Saxon Conservatives in the Reichstag elections in 1912 without a prospect . In Klinga, from 1913, he also ran the Klinga schoolhouse for students and became editor of the anti-Semitic, evangelical-national magazine Frankfurter Warte . A newspaper article in which Henrici sharply criticized a speech by Rosa Luxemburg , as well as his denunciation to the public prosecutor's office, led to a judicial conviction of Luxemburg for inciting disobedience to the prevailing order. In 1914 Henrici worked as a research assistant at the Leipzig exhibition for book trade and graphics and in September 1914 became an assistant teacher at the Royal Realgymnasium with a higher agricultural school in Döbeln.

Ernst Henrici died in Döbeln in 1915 at the age of 60.

Awards and honors

Works

  • The sources of Notker's psalms. KJ Trübner, Strasbourg a. London 1878. (Extended version of the dissertation Berlin 1878: About the sources and the purpose of Notker's psalm commentary. ) Digitization of the dissertation.
  • The Latin text in Notker's Commentary on Psalms. In: Journal for German Antiquity and German Literature Vol. 23 (= NF 11). 1879, pp. 217-258. On-line
  • (With Emil Henrici): The Heinersdorfer Stein. In: Journal for German antiquity and German literature, Vol. 24. 1880 (= NF 12), pp. 455–462 Online ; 25. 1881 (= NF 13), pp. 57-59 (supplement) Online
  • Dr. Ernst Henrici's Reichshallen speech on December 17, 1880 . Oscar Lorenz, Berlin 1880. Online (PDF; 1.6 MB)
  • What is the core of the Jewish question? Lecture given on January 13, 1881. Verlag der "Truth" (also: M. Schulze), Berlin 1881. Online (PDF; 629 kB)
  • Tolerance and national honor. Speech given on February 10, 1881 in Dresden. M. Schulze, Berlin 1881. Online (PDF; 519 kB)
  • How should the people of Berlin behave in the upcoming Reichstag elections? At the same time a warning to all German voters. Speech given on February 17th in Berlin. M. Schulze, Berlin 1881. Online (PDF; 655 kB)
  • Boetius. Tragedy in five acts. Oscar Lorentz, Berlin 1882.
  • The Neustettiner synagogue fire in court. M. Schulze, Berlin 1883.
  • The German Togo region and my trip to Africa. - Leipzig: Reissner, 1888. Digitized edition of the University and State Library Düsseldorf
  • Textbook of the Ephe language (Ewe). Anlo, Anecho and Dahome dialects with a glossary and a map of the slave coast. W. Spemann, Stuttgart a. a. 1891. Digitization.
  • The people's law of the Ephenegians and its relationship to German colonization in the Togo area. In: Journal of Comparative Law 11 (1895), pp. 131–152. Digitalization.
  • Indiana. Narrative poetry. Dedicated to the Germania Club of the City of Baltimore for the flower game 1904. Self-published, Baltimore 1904. (Reprint with detailed introduction in: Gabrijela Mecky Zaragoza [Hrsg.]: Die Aztekenblume . E. Pierson, Dresden 1904, ISBN 978-3-86205-295-0 .)
  • Dramatic works. 1-4. CW Schneidereith & Sons, Baltimore 1904–05. (3rd ed. 1905.)
  • The aztec flower . E. Pierson, Dresden 1904. (Reprint with detailed introduction, edited by Gabrijela Mecky Zaragoza. Iudicium, Munich, 2013. ISBN 978-3-86205-295-0 .)
  • Colonial economic tasks of the German businessman. Hesse, Leipzig 1908.

literature

  • Henrici, Ernst . In: Brockhaus' Conversations-Lexikon . 14. Completely reworked. Ed. Brockhaus, Leipzig, Volume 9 (1894), p. 40. Online.
  • Vogt, Bernhard: Anti-Semitism and Justice in the Empire. The synagogue fire in Neustettin. In: Margret Heitmann u. Julius H. Schoeps (Ed.): "Keep away from the whole country any ruin ..." History and culture of the Jews in Pomerania. Anthology. Georg Olms Verlag , Hildesheim 1995, ISBN 3487100746 , pp. 379-399.
  • Hoffmann, Gerd: The trial of the fire in the synagogue in Neustettin. Anti-Semitism in Germany at the end of the 19th century. With an introductory bibliography and biobibliographical notes on Ernst Henrici, Hermann Makower , Erich Sello . Gerd Hoffmann, Schifferstadt 1998, ISBN 3-929349-30-2 . ( Table of contents. )
  • Nicholls, Stephen CJ: The burning of the synagogue in Neustettin. Ideological arson in the 1880s. Center for German-Jewish Studies, Brighton 1999. (Research paper / Center for German-Jewish Studies; 2.)
  • Hoffmann, Christhard: Ernst Henrici, 1854–1915, in Richard Simon Levy: Antisemitism. A historical encyclopedia of prejudice and persecution. Vol. 1. ABC-Clio, Santa Barbara (California) 2005, ISBN 1-85109-439-3 , p. 296. Online
  • Henrici, Ernst. In: Handbook of Antisemitism. Hostility to Jews in the past and present. Ed. Wolfgang Benz & Brigitte Mihok, Vol. 2, Part. 1. K. G. Saur , Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-24072-0 , p. 350 f.
  • Borgstede, Simone Beate: Dr. Ernst Henrici: Just a "well-known arsonist" of the German Empire or foreman in the production of an Aryan "Volksgemeinschaft"? In: English and German nationalist and anti-semitic discourse, 1871–1945. [International Conference "English and German Nationalist and Anti-semitic Discourse, 1871-1945" (2010: Queen Mary, University of London).] Ed. Geraldine Horan (et al.). Lang, Oxford (et al.) 2013, ISBN 978-3-0343-0258-6 , pp. 163-181.
  • Zaragoza, Gabrijela Mecky (Ed.): The Aztec Flower. Indiana. Narrative poems by Ernst Henrici. Academic, Munich, 2013. ISBN 978-3-86205-295-0 . (Includes introductory information on Ernst Henrici on pp. 6–19.)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Reimar Fürst: Emil Henrici. A biographical portrait. In: Codices Manuscripti. Zeitschrift für Handschriftkunde 12 (1986), 4, 137-141. ZDB ID 128516-6 .
  2. ^ The history of the Society for German Philology in the 25 years of its existence. Report of the chairman (Gotthold Boetticher) in the festive session of the 25-year foundation festival on January 4, 1902. - Berlin 1902. 12 p. (Appendix: Membership October 1902.)
  3. ^ The publication organ of this society was: Mitteilungen der Nachtigal-Gesellschaft für vaterländische Afrikaforschung , Berlin 1 (1888) - 7 (1894), No. 4/5, ZDB -ID 13043882 .
  4. ↑ The Baltimore Flower Game 1904. Prize and dedication poems. Edited by the Germania Club of the City of Baltimore. John Hinrichs Publishing House, Baltimore 1904.
  5. ^ Carl von Ossietzky: The trial of Mr. Henrici. In: The free people. Democratic weekly paper. Berlin, issue of February 28, 1914. ZDB -ID 749701-5 .
  6. ↑ The Charlottenstiftung für Philologie was founded in 1874 by Charlotte Stiepel, b. Baroness von Hopffgarten. The Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences was responsible for managing the foundation and awarding the prizes.
  7. ↑ Monthly reports of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, 1880, 637-638. ZDB ID 206302-5 .
  8. ↑ Printed in: Yearbook of the Cologne Flower Games. Cologne 1903 (1904), 127-129. ZDB ID 973319-x .
  9. ↑ P. 247–281: Biography of Henricis and a list of his political and scientific writings.
personal data
SURNAME Henrici, Ernst
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Henrici, Carl Ernst Julius (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German high school teacher, writer and politician
DATE OF BIRTH December 10, 1854
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH July 10, 1915
Place of death Chub