Franz Alexander Heber

Franz Alexander Heber

Franz Alexander Heber (Czech František Alexandr Heber ; born July 19, 1815 in the forest house Třebekov near Jarov, Plzen-Nord district ; † July 29, 1849 in Náchod ) was a Bohemian merchant, lay historian and castle researcher.

Life

The only son of the German forester Johann Heber first attended secondary school in Pilsen . The early death of his father and financial difficulties of his mother meant that he had to drop out of school. From 1836 he learned a merchant in Prague and returned a year later to the area around Rokycany. In 1839 he married and ran a business in Zbiroh . In a gunpowder explosion in his shop, he mutilated his left hand and left the business to his wife.

He moved to Prague and began intensively with his life's work, regardless of his unstable health. The work was interrupted by pneumonia . Then he concentrated even more on his collection for fear of an imminent death and that his work would remain unfinished. When he described the castle there in Náchod , there was a hemorrhage and Heber died at the age of 34.

Since his earliest youth he visited castles, made sketches and notes. Little by little he decided to visit all the Bohemian castles and describe them in a work. He estimated the number of historic buildings to be around 800, some of which no longer existed. He published his first work in the journal Memories published by Karl Wilhelm Medau (1791–1866) .

From 1840 to 1842 he toured Bohemian castles, studied in archives and wrote down legends. He described the castles in six volumes. The first volume appeared in 1843 with an edition of 2000 copies and was sold out shortly afterwards.

Heber lacked the necessary education, which he acquired as an autodidact. He learned Latin, improved his Czech and studied the works of Bohuslav Balbín , Václav Hájek z Libočan , Josef Schaller , Johann Gottfried Sommer , František Martin Pelcl's chronicle and numerous historical magazines. He also drew his knowledge from the land tables of the Kingdom of Bohemia, the confirmation books and manuscripts from the University Library in Prague .

He described a total of 586 castles and fortresses that he visited personally and made 358 valuable drawings for them. Death caught up with him when he finished the 7th volume.

Heber also made six maps in which he drew the location of the castles and differentiated them according to castle, fortress, partial ruins, ruins and barely verifiable castle locations.

Works

• Bohemia's castles, forts and mountain castles (1843–1849), the first systematic description of Bohemian castles, 7 volumes. The work has been reissued in the Czech language in 5 volumes since 2006:
  • Franz Alexander Heber: České hrady, zámky a tvrze I .: Západní Čechy. (West Bohemia) Argo, 2007. ISBN 80-7203-424-3
  • Franz Alexander Heber: České hrady, zámky a tvrze II .: Severní Čechy. (Northern Bohemia) Argo, 2006. ISBN 80-7203-791-9
• Moravian castles and their legends (1848)
• History of Bösig Castle from the 8th century to our time

literature

• Constantin von Wurzbach : Heber, Franz Alexander . In: Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich . 8th part. Imperial-Royal Court and State Printing Office, Vienna 1862, p. 182 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

Commons : František Alexandr Heber  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Franz Alexander Heber in the catalog of the German National Library