Friedrich Heimburg

This article describes the mayor. For the court official, see Friedrich von Heimburg .

Friedrich Heimburg (born July 8, 1831 in Rodheim before the height ; † January 16, 1882 in Worms ) was a German lawyer and from 1874 to 1882 mayor of the city of Worms.

Private

Heimburg was born in 1831 in the village of Rodheim in the Wetterau as the son of forest clerk Ludwig Christian Heimburg and his wife Caroline Wiehl. According to the then common practice, his father was transferred several times, so that he and his family had to move several times. The family moved to Upper Hesse , the Odenwald and Mainz , among other places , where a certain sedentariness set in for the first time . Friedrich Heimburg attended grammar school there and also passed his Abitur in Mainz. In 1858 he married Alexandrine Johanette Luise Mylius, the daughter of the district judge Carl Mylius.

Professional background

After graduating from high school, Heimburg began a commercial apprenticeship, as he briefly showed interest in this industry. However, Heimburg broke off his training shortly after it began, as his interest in law had been aroused in the meantime. So he began to study law in Giessen , which he continued in the university town of Heidelberg . Heimburg again took his first exam in Giessen, and his state legal examination took place in Darmstadt . Following this, he was employed as an assistant in a notary's office in Mainz in 1854, and worked as a notary in Pfeddersheim in Worms until 1861 . Heimburg was secretary of the Chamber of Commerce two years earlier, from 1859. From 1870 Heimburg worked as a supplementary judge in Pfeddersheim.

Term of office as Mayor of Worms

In 1874, a full-time administrative officer had to take over the top of the city in accordance with the then applicable city regulations. The city council elected Friedrich Heimburg on September 17, 1874 as mayor of the city of Worms. A sovereign confirmation followed on October 16 of the same year.

With the evangelical baptized Heimburg the series of Protestant and national liberal mayors of Worms began.

Heimburg quickly succeeded in being valued by the local council and the citizens. As a result, there was a certain uproar both in the population and in the council when it became known in 1877 that Heimburg had received a lucrative offer from elsewhere, with an improved salary. In a hastily convened meeting of the city councilors, a statement was drawn up and signed by all council members present in which it was expressed that Heimburg must continue his mayor's office in Worms under all circumstances. The joint decision was made that this should not fail due to financial reasons: It was decided to raise Heimburg's salary to 8,000 marks with immediate effect in order to beat all rival offers for his person from the field. This sum was very high for the time. As a result, Heimburg decided to stay in Worms. Furthermore, from 1880 Heimburg represented the interests of the city of Worms in the district council together with his alderman, Rittmeister Max Heyl and Kommerzienrat Johann Baptist Doerr .

Heimburg's work as mayor of the city of Worms is particularly marked by a reorganization of the city administration. He only agreed to an increase in the workforce to a moderate extent, but from 1880 onwards he succeeded in having a protection team made up of municipal employees available. Heimburg managed to almost completely reorganize the administration in the outdated and insufficiently spacious building on Hagenstrasse. Heimburg also campaigned for an improvement in poor relief. To this end, he founded the “Association against Poverty and Begging”.

In 1881 Heimburg gave a speech at the city council, in which he emphasized and summarized the most urgent administrative tasks to be carried out. Heimburg led the flood protection urgently needed by the city of Worms on the Rhine and the associated enlargement of the Worms harbor, which he thought was too small. He also mentioned that the sewer in the entire Worms urban area urgently needs to be expanded, the school building needs to be driven forward and the hospital building urgently needs more attention. The background to these demands was, on the one hand, that since the 1860s an increasing number of ship captains had refused to moor in the much too small and overcrowded port of Worms. Another background to his vehemently requested change was that two severe floods had already brought the city of Worms into distress a year earlier, in 1880, when the few, still unsuitable dams broke and the city was partially flooded. The construction of the canal urgently had to be upgraded, as it had been shown that the existing drainage systems could not withstand the forces of nature that had occurred.

Heimburg was also interested in the history of the city of Worms; so he was a founding member of the antiquity society and its first chairman. Also marked by illness, he insisted on leading the opening ceremony of the Paulusmuseum .

death

When Friedrich Heimburg died in Worms in 1882, the Worms city administration had 60 employees, 23 of whom belonged to the protection team. The city's financial dependency increased sharply during Heimburg's tenure, but he was not accused of this either during his lifetime or posthumously . Rather, in an obituary of the Wormser Zeitung in the edition of February 19, 1882, it was praised that Heimburg "avoided the mistake made in earlier times of thrift in the wrong place and at the wrong time, which later took double revenge". Heimburg was buried in the Rheingewannfriedhof, which was located on the east side of Mainzer Straße just before the northern city limits. When the cemetery area was abandoned in the middle of the 20th century to open an industrial site, his grave site was lost.

literature

• Fritz Reuter: Worms between imperial city and industrial city 1800–1882 . Stadtarchiv , Worms 1993, p. 106 f .
• Gerold Bönnen: History of the city of Worms . 2nd Edition. Theiss , Stuttgart 2015, ISBN 978-3-8062-3158-8 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ The (upper) mayor of Worms> Stadt Worms. In: worms.de. Retrieved February 12, 2016 . 
2. ^ Heimburg, Friedrich. Hessian biography. (As of February 15, 2016). In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).
3. ^ ^{A b} Fritz Reuter: History of the City of Worms . Ed .: Gerold Bönnen. 2nd Edition. Theiss , Stuttgart 2015, ISBN 978-3-8062-3158-8 , pp. 480 .
4. ^ Fritz Reuter: History of the City of Worms . Ed .: Gerold Bönnen. 2nd Edition. Theiss , Stuttgart 2015, ISBN 978-3-8062-3158-8 , pp. 466 .