Friedrich Arndts

Friedrich Arnold Wilhelm Adolf Carl Arndts (born September 22, 1753 in Arnsberg , † February 8, 1812 in Meschede ) was a German lawyer in the Kurkölner and Hessen-Darmstadt services. As an author he wrote, among other things, a statistically oriented presentation of the Duchy of Westphalia .

Life

He came from an important family of civil servants and lawyers in Arnsberg and was, among other things, the brother of the imperial postmaster Engelbert Arndts . After visiting the school in Arnsberg he studied in Göttingen law . Then he was a lawyer , land clerk and fiscal in the Duchy of Westphalia , most recently in the rank of electoral Cologne Higher Appeal Court and Privy Councilor.

Arndts married Maria Johanna Biegeleben in 1786. With this he had four children. Among them was the later lawyer and member of parliament Carl Ludwig Arndts . One daughter married the historian Johann Suibert Seibertz .

After the Duchy of Westphalia passed to Hessen-Darmstadt, he was a member of the legislative commission in Darmstadt from 1803 and became director of the court in Arnsberg in 1807 .

In an official capacity, he wrote a report in 1802 on the abuses in the mining and metallurgical industry of the Duchy of Westphalia . He also made a short statistical presentation of the Duchy of Westphalia. As an author, he has published mostly anonymously in various magazines, so it is difficult to prove his contributions. In 1808 his work Dialogue about Visions and Prehistory was published in Dortmund .

The Duchy of Westphalia was visited by various travelers towards the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century and mostly described as backward. In response to this, two articles appeared anonymously in the Westfälischer Anzeiger in 1803. One was directed against Justus Gruner's work Pilgrimage to Peace and Hope , the other dealt with Ferdinand Schazmann's contributions to the history and constitution of the Duchy of Westphalia . Because the contributions had evidently met with considerable public interest, they were combined into a book edition and printed together with a short article by Friedrich August Alexander Eversmann about the Westphalian farmhouse in Arnsberg. The book was also published anonymously, but his son-in-law Seibertz named Arndts' authorship of the font as early as 1819. However, another unknown person, whose identity is not known, was also involved.

Arndt's statistical representations are today important contemporary sources on the social and economic history of the Sauerland for the period at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Fonts

• Dialogues about visions and stories. Mallinckrodt Brothers, Dortmund, 1808.
• Some statistical remarks about the Duchy of Westphalia, as a corrective addendum to the "Contributions to the history and constitution of the Duchy of Westphalia". Darmstadt, 1803 and Justus Gruner's pilgrimage to rest and hope or the description of the moral and civil status of Westphalia; at the end of the eighteenth century, Frankfurt, 1802. , Arnsberg, 1804 (printed in the Südwestfalen-Archiv. 3rd year, 2003, pp. 129–166).

literature

• Johann Suibert Seibertz : Westphalian contributions to German history. Volume 1: News about the writers of the Duchy of Westphalia. Georg Friedrich Taschè, Darmstadt 1819, pp. 12–13 .
• Michael Gosmann: “… squeezed in and tied up by prejudices and meandering …” Friedrich Arndts' “Statistical Remarks on the Duchy of Westphalia” as a criticism of the travel descriptions by Justus Gruner (1802/03) and Ferdinand Schazmann (1803). In: Südwestfalen-Archiv. Volume 3, 2003, ISSN  1618-8934 , pp. 125-128.