Friedrich Emil Welti

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Friedrich Emil Welti (born June 15, 1857 in Aarau ; † March 8, 1940 in Kehrsatz ) was a Swiss manager , patron and legal historian .

Friedrich Emil Welti

biography

Welti was born in Aarau and spent the first years of his life there. When his father Emil Welti was elected to the Federal Council in 1867 , the family moved to Bern . Welti studied law at the University of Bern and received his doctorate in 1880. His historical research concerned source collections and city rights.

Welti then moved to Winterthur , where he began to work for the Swiss Accident Insurance Company. In 1884 he took over the management of the company on an interim basis and joined the board of directors , the following year he also joined the board of directors of the Swiss reinsurance company ; he belonged to both of them until his death. He was represented on the board of directors of the Swiss Mobiliar Insurance Company from 1894 to 1937, and from 1904 as its president. Welti was one of the most influential people in the Swiss insurance industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

Welti owed this rapid rise in the insurance industry not only to his skills but also to his marriage to Lydia Escher in 1883 , the only daughter of the influential politician and industrialist Alfred Escher . The couple, who lived in close proximity, shared a common interest in culture, and they became patrons of the artist Karl Stauffer-Bern .

He helped them to choose suitable paintings for the planned art collection. When Stauffer received a letter from Henriette Feuerbach in 1886 , in which she informed Stauffer that the painter Marie Röhrs wanted to sell the painting Das Gastmahl des Agathon by Anselm Feuerbach , he wrote a letter to Röhrs on December 2, 1886 informing her that he wants to buy the painting from her for the intended art collection. However, it was no longer sold and the painting came into the possession of the gallery of the Grand Duke of Baden whose director Wilhelm Lübke was.

Welti's wife and his childhood friend had a secret love affair. Shortly after the couple moved to Florence in 1889, Welti returned to Switzerland alone and left Lydia in Stauffer's care. She then wanted to get a divorce and marry Stauffer. When the lovers fled to Rome, Federal Councilor Emil Welti let his relations play in favor of his son, whereupon Lydia was interned in a madhouse and Stauffer arrested. In 1890 Welti divorced his wife, who committed suicide the following year.

In 1893 Welti married the doctor's daughter Helene Kammerer. His divorce from Lydia Escher made him wealthy and in 1897 bought the Lohn bei Kehrsatz estate , where he spent the rest of his life. Probably out of regret, he donated large sums of money to the Gottfried Keller Foundation , which was founded by his first wife. Welti, whose second marriage also remained childless, founded the Welti Prize named after him in 1891 , which was awarded to a Swiss writer every three years until the 2000s.

The Lohn estate developed into a popular meeting place for artists and scientists. Welti bequeathed his fortune to cultural and scientific purposes. His second wife, Helene Kammer-Welti, died on July 14, 1942. She bequeathed the estate to the Federal Council .

research

Welti did extensive research in the field of legal history in his spare time . He followed the example of his father, which in the 1860s Urbar the city of Baden and the openings had researched 33 Aargauer communities. Welti published his research results at his own expense. As a rule, he limited himself to the pure collection of sources and left their evaluation to other historians. From 1895 he wrote regularly for the Anzeiger für Schweizergeschichte . In 1896 he published the Bern city accounts for the 14th century, eight years later those for the 15th century. In 1912 the oldest surviving Bernese council correspondence from the years 1444 to 1448 was added. In addition, he published the tell books (tax registers) of the city of Bern for the years 1389, 1448 and 1458.

After Welti had published the documents of the Baden City Archives in two volumes up to 1500 in 1896/99, a collaboration with Walther Merz that lasted almost four decades began . Together with him, on behalf of the Legal Sources Foundation of the Swiss Lawyers Association, he developed the medieval city ​​rights of various cities in the cantons of Bern, Friborg and Aargau in the Collection of Swiss Legal Sources . The Friedrich-Emil-Welti-Fonds, Bern, still enables this kind of research to be financed today.

Welti published the following city rights:

In addition, there are sources on the history of the city of Rheinfeld, which appeared in three volumes from 1933 to 1935. They contain the documents of the city archives, the Johanniterkommende and the St. Martin monastery. In 1925 Friedrich Emil Welti edited an original language version of the diary of the Junker Hans von Waldheim from Halle an der Saale on the occasion of his pilgrimage in 1474 ( Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Cod. 17.2. Aug. 4 °). In it, Waldheim tells, among other things, on several pages about his visit to brother Klaus ( Niklaus von Flüe ).

Friedrich Emil Welti's scientific estate is located in the Aargau State Archives and in the Bern Burger Library .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 1886, correspondence between Stauffer, Feuerbach and Röhrs
  2. ↑ On the "wages" in Kehrsatz. In: Die Berner Woche , Vol. 33, 1943, p. 4.
  3. ↑ [1] SSRQ BE I / 1 and 2
  4. ↑ [2] SSRQ FR I / 1/1
  5. ↑ [3] SSRQ AG I / 2
  6. ↑ [4] SSRQ AG I / 3
  7. ↑ [5] SSRQ AG I / 6
  8. ↑ [6] SSRQ AG I / 7
  9. ↑ Travel diary (handwriting) of the Junker Hans von Waltheym from Halle, pages about Brother Klaus
  10. ^ The estate of Friedrich Emil Welti in the catalog of the Burgerbibliothek Bern
personal data
SURNAME Welti, Friedrich Emil
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss manager, patron and legal historian
DATE OF BIRTH June 15, 1857
PLACE OF BIRTH Aarau
DATE OF DEATH March 8, 1940
Place of death Sweeping