Ferdinand brain

Ferdinand Hirn (born December 22, 1875 in Silz ; † April 14, 1915 in Innsbruck ) was an Austrian historian who made the history of Tyrol and Vorarlberg during the Bavarian interregnum from 1809 to 1814 the main subject of his research and wrote fundamental works on it.

Life

Ferdinand Hirn was the son of a farmer and community leader. After attending elementary school, he attended the Vinzentinum grammar school in Brixen , where he was very much appreciated by his teachers and classmates for his excellent intellectual gifts and his humorous nature. After graduating from high school, he studied history and geography at the University of Innsbruck . During his student days he made a contribution to the organization of the Catholic finchship in Innsbruck. His ability to present historical material in an interesting and understandable way was already so pronounced at that time that he was repeatedly invited as a speaker by the Academic History Club. In March 1901, Hirn received his doctorate in philosophy. He found his first professional job as a supplement at the state secondary school in Jägerndorf in the former Austrian Silesia . In autumn 1902 he switched to the secondary school in Dornbirn , where he worked as a teacher for over ten years. In August 1905, in the parish church of St. Martin in Dornbirn , he married the doctor's daughter, Antonia Thalmann, who was eight years his junior and who gave birth to four children (Margaretha Kreszenz, Wolfgang Johann, Elsa and Ferdinand). The youngest child, Ferdinand Hirn jun. (Born November 25, 1915), was born seven months after his death.

In addition to his job as a middle school teacher, Hirn was also active in community politics and also found time for his studies. As a historian, he was influenced by his uncle Josef Hirn, who had worked as a university professor for Austrian history in Vienna since 1899 and, for the centenary celebration in 1909, summarized the extremely rich literature on the Tyrolean popular uprising in his work "Tyrol's Uprising in 1809" into a unified whole would have. Ferdinand Hirn added the memorandum “Vorarlbergs Erhebung in 1809” to this work. The greatest difficulty Hirn faced in writing this paper was the lack of usable sources. While in Tyrol everything connected with the patriotic uprising of 1809 or with the leading figures had been eagerly collected and recorded for decades, Vorarlberg had not kept pace with its neighbors in this regard. The little that was written down in various small essays could not serve as the basis for a detailed history of the uprising of Vorarlberg in 1809 . It is Hirn's merit to have closed this gap. The search for historical documents relating to his research subject, carried out with great personal commitment, led him beyond the borders of Vorarlberg. During his forays into the archives, he unearthed a huge number of details previously unknown in Vorarlberg history, a fact that makes his work so valuable. One year after its publication, Hirn published the life picture of the Vorarlberg freedom fighter Siegmund Nachbauer in the first issue of "Treuen Kameraden" .

In March 1913, the Minister of Education awarded him a professorship at the Academic Gymnasium in Innsbruck . It is not known whether he was aiming for this position or whether there were other reasons for moving to Tyrol. Almost simultaneously with the transfer of his residence to Tyrol, Hirn published the text "Bayrisch Tirol im December 1813", which provided surprising information about the Tyrolean December uprising of that year. At the suggestion of his role model Professor Josef Hirn, Ferdinand Hirn undertook the task in the last years of his life to deal with the "History of Tyrol from 1809 to 1814" (with an outlook on the organization of the country and the great constitutional struggle) in its own larger context. In his research in the archives, he used the large holdings of the Tyrolean State Museum Ferdinandeum , the collections of the Bavarian Secret State Archives in Munich and the writings of the House, Court and State Archives and the Ministry of the Interior in Vienna. Family archives of Tyrolean aristocratic families, whose ancestors had played an important role in this period, were also opened to the researcher. In this work, Hirn deals in detail with the Bavarian administration of North Tyrol, which, following the French model, was divided into three districts named after their main rivers Inn, Etsch and Eisack. The résumé he made of the period of the interregnum is by no means as negative as one might expect from a patriotically minded Tyrolean historian at that time. On the contrary: Hirn valued the efficiency and merits of the Bavarian General Commissioner of the Innkreis , Maximilian Emanuel von Lerchenfeld, and duly highlighted them in his work. "Von Lerchenfeld's administration has a particularly beneficial effect on his care for the school system, his efforts to introduce singing lessons in schools, for manual skills lessons, for the creation of school gardens, nothing but achievements that have only found their way into our school curricula for a few decades", judges the schoolboy brain. The centralization and modernization of the administrative apparatus according to the principles of enlightened absolutism outweighed many of the disadvantages that the Tyroleans had to endure through the occupation.

After the publication of the work that was fundamental to the history of Tyrol, the author was only granted a short life. Ferdinand Hirn died at the age of 39 in the Kettenbrücke sanatorium in Innsbruck as a result of an inflammation of the leg skin that had turned into a painful bone inflammation. In addition to this life-threatening disease, there was also pneumonia, which completely exhausted the doom's strength. Ferdinand Hirn was buried in Innsbruck. A year later he was exhumed and buried in the family grave in Dornbirn.  

Works

• Adopting the pragmat. Sanction by the Tyrolean estates, in: Journal of the Ferdinandeum Museum, 1903
• Adopting the pragmat. Sanction by the Vorarlberg estates, in: Program of the Realschule Dornbirn, 1903
• History of the Tyrolean provinces from 1518-25, 1905
• The stay of Dr. Schneiders in Vorarlberg i. J. 1811, in: Research and communications on the history of Tyrol and Vorarlberg, 1905
• Vorarlberg's change of ruler a hundred years ago, in: Program of the Realschule Dornbirn, 1906
• Attempts to resist the church police ordinances of the Josephine and Bavarian times in Götzis, 1906, in: Archive for History and Regional Studies of Vorarlberg, No. 7
• The removal of the royal Württemberg granary in Hofen by Vorarlbergers on May 16, 1809; Contributions to the history of the special hospital in Töbele between Bludenz and Nüziders, 1906, both articles published in: Archive for History and Regional Studies of Vorarlberg
• The women's revolt in Krumbach, in: Research and communication on the history of Tyrol and Vorarlberg, 1907
• Vorarlberg's survey in 1809, 1909
• The special dish in Lindau. A sequel to Vorarlberg's elevation i. J. 1809, in: Program of the Realschule Dornbirn, 1911
• The raising of the hostages in Vorarlberg i. J. 1813, ibid., 1913
• "Bavarian Tyrol in December 1813 (digitized version)"
• History of Tyrol from 1809-14, 1913
• Suworows Alpenübergang , in: Archives for the history and regional studies of Vorarlberg, 1913
• Vorarlberg before falling back to Austria, ibid, 1915

literature

• Program of the State High School Innsbruck, 1915

Individual evidence

1. ^ Vorarlberger Volksblatt , April 16, 1915, p. 4
2. ↑ Innsbrucker Nachrichten June 11, 1897, p. 3 and May 4, 1898, p. 4
3. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from June 27, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) 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.  
4. ^ Parish chronicle of Silz, written by Josef Sparber, ad anno 1915
5. ^ Vorarlberger Volksblatt of May 22, 1909, p. 1
6. ↑ Vorarlberger Volksblatt, October 16, 1910 p. 10
7. ↑ Innsbrucker Nachrichten, March 1, 1913, p. 21
8. ^ Reichspost April 26, 1914, features section on the history of Tyrol
9. ↑ Innsbrucker Nachrichten, April 11, 1916, p. 6
10. ^ Vorarlberg Volkszeitung, February 6, 1906, p. 4
11. ^ Vorarlberger Landeszeitung, March 1, 1906, p. 3