Franz Heinrich Ziegenhagen

Illustration from Ziegenhagen's teachings (1792): A teacher makes his students fearful by referring to the devil.

Franz Heinrich Ziegenhagen (born December 8, 1753 in Strasbourg ; † August 21, 1806 in Rothau in Alsace ) was a German businessman and social utopian in the late Enlightenment period .

Life

Franz Heinrich Ziegenhagen was born on December 8, 1753 as the son of a surgeon Daniel Gottlob Ziegenhagen (from a Pomeranian pastor family) and Maria Margarete, née Schwarz, in Strasbourg. He was brought up in the spirit of pietism , among others by Johann Friedrich Oberlin, who was court master (i.e. private tutor) between 1762 and 1765, and later at the Protestant grammar school. After his school education he went through a thorough commercial apprenticeship in the field of the cloth trade, which took him on long journeys, went into business for himself and quickly became very successful as a businessman.

In 1775 Ziegenhagen - although still based in Strasbourg - became a member of a Regensburg Freemason's lodge , in which he was also promoted to master in 1786. During this time he had completely turned away from Protestantism and turned into a supporter of an enlightened deist worldview. Over the years he eventually became a critic of all institutionalized religions. His commercial success did not satisfy him, rather he tried to implement his worldview as a pedagogue. So the Enlightenment gave up the commercial profession completely in order to become a teacher at the Philanthropinum of the reform pedagogue Johann Bernhard Basedow in Dessau in 1779 . Because of his unadjusted views and his internal criticism, he was released after the three-month probationary period.

As a result, Ziegenhagen founded a trading company (cloth and sugar trade) in Hamburg in 1780 and was soon so economically successful again that he acquired a large estate in Billwärder near Hamburg in 1788 , which he extensively redesigned into a model agricultural business based on the English ornamental farm . Here he also wanted to found a teaching institute in which children should be educated freely and naturally with practical training in agriculture and manual skills - a project with which he ultimately failed across the board.

During this time he wrote his monumental textbook Doctrine of the Correct Relationship to the Works of Creation, and the general happiness of people , which can only be achieved through public introduction , which was self-published for the first time in 1792 and (with subsequent editions) reached a total of 5000 copies. In it he described his utopian ideas. The work was illustrated by Daniel Chodowiecki . A hymn-like text in free verse attached to the work was set to music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on behalf of Ziegenhagen in July 1791 at the same time as his work on the Magic Flute . In his personal catalog raisonné Mozart has the work as Eine kleine teutsche Cantata for one voice on the piano. "The you honor, etc." of the immense universe creator entered. The cantata written for a voice with piano accompaniment, which is recorded under KV 619, is close to the Magic Flute . How the commission of the composition came about has not been clarified with certainty, but it must have played a major role that the text, in addition to Ziegenhagen's enlightening thoughts, clearly contains Masonic ideas and that both Ziegenhagen and Mozart were Freemasons. The cantata - contrary to what is generally assumed - is not “Masonic music” in the narrower sense, however, because it was neither written for a lodge nor intended for use in Masonic lodges. The setting of Mozart should rather serve to disseminate Ziegenhagen's fundamental socio-political ideas, which found condensed expression in the text of the cantata.

More than two centuries later, parts of the text of Ziegenhagen's main work (his so-called "ratio theory") were set to music again in a slightly revised form by the Italian composer Fabio Vacchi under the title La giusta armonia and on August 12, 2006 at the Salzburg Festival by the Vienna Philharmonic premiered under Riccardo Muti .

Ziegenhagen sacrificed all of his fortune for the distribution of his work and the implementation of the ideas described therein; Appeals to princes, universities and the French National Convention to adopt the socially utopian ideas of the “relational theory” had no effect. Ziegenhagen neglected his economic ventures so much that he had to sell them, heavily in debt. He returned to Alsace without being able to gain a foothold there again. After he had to admit the failure of his life's work in 1806, Ziegenhagen put an end to his life impoverished and lonely.

literature

• Ziegenhagen (Franz Heinrich) . In: Lexicon of Hamburg writers up to the present . Elaborated by Hans Schröder Vol. 8, Hamburg 1883, No. 4549 digitized
• JJ Moskovskaja: Two forgotten German utopians of the 18th century . In: Journal of History . Berlin 1954, No. 3, pp. 401-427.
• Gerhard Steiner : Franz Heinrich Ziegenhagen and his relationship theory. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1962.
• Walter Grab : The social utopians Franz Heinrich Ziegenhagen and Johann Daniel Lawätz . In: same: Democratic currents in Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein at the time of the first French republic . Hans Christians, Hamburg 1966, pp. 132-139.
• Barbara Richter: Franz Heinrich Ziegenhagen. Life, work and work of a committed businessman and philanthropist in the Age of Enlightenment. Publications of the Hamburg Working Group for Regional History, Volume 15. Hamburg / London 2003.
• Barbara Richter: Ziegenhagen, Franz Heinrich . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 2 . Christians, Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-7672-1366-4 , pp. 453-454 .
• Michael Niedermeier : Franz Heinrich Ziegenhagen's conflicted interlude at the Dessau philanthropist and his educational utopia. In: Jörn Garber (Ed.): The ancestor of all good schools. The Dessau Philanthropinum and German Philanthropism 1774–1793. Tübingen 2008, pp. 229-247.

Web links

• Barbara Richter (Bonn): Franz Heinrich Ziegenhagen - businessman and committed philanthropist in the age of the Late Enlightenment.

Commons : Franz Heinrich Ziegenhagen  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

supporting documents

1. ↑ digitized version