Franz Joseph von Bülow

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Franz Joseph von Bülow

Franz Vollrath Carl Wilhelm Joseph von Bülow (born September 11, 1861 in Frankfurt am Main , † October 18, 1915 in Dresden ) was a German author , first lieutenant and homosexual activist.

Life

His father was the Mecklenburg-Schwerin Chamberlain and envoy to the Bundestag of the German Confederation in Frankfurt am Main Bernhard Vollrath von Bülow ; his mother Paula, née von Linden . Bülow spent his school days at the grammar schools in Schwerin and Waren . Then he graduated from the cadet institutions in Plön and Groß Lichterfelde . By 1890, Bülow was promoted to first lieutenant. In the same year he left the military and went to the German colonial area Deutsch-Südwestafrika to the South West Africa Company . In the following years he wrote a book about his impressions in German South West Africa, about Cecil Rhodes politics and the uprising of the Herero and Nama . Bülow went blind from a gunshot wound and therefore returned to Germany. In 1898 he married the divorced Countess Konstanze Beust , née von Goldacker, but separated from his wife after a year.

According to Magnus Hirschfeld , Bülow was one of the co-founders of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in Berlin, along with Eduard Oberg and Max Spohr . Around 1900 Bülow moved to Venice, since homosexuality was legal there in contrast to the German Empire . He lived in the Palazzo Tiepolo near San Polo on the Grand Canal . After the beginning of the First World War, Bülow left Venice and returned to Germany, where he died on October 18, 1915 in Dresden.

Works (selection)

  • Three years in the country of Hendrik Witboois , descriptions of the country and its people . Berlin, Mittler 1897.

literature

  • Werner Tabel: Descriptions of experiences by soldiers and settlers from the colonial and mandate times of South West Africa. In: Afrikanischer Heimatkalender 1976. pp. 85–120.
  • Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller : Biographical lexicon on the history of love for friends and male-male sexuality in the German-speaking area. Hamburg, MännerschwarmSkript Verlag, 1998. pp. 161–162.
  • Jens Kruse: Travel reports from the German colonies: The image of the "native" in travel reports from the German colonial period 1884-1918. GRIN-Verlag, 2007. ISBN 978-3-638-70704-6 .