Friedrich Kapp

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Friedrich Kapp

Friedrich Kapp (born April 13, 1824 in Hamm , Westphalia , † October 27, 1884 in Berlin ) was a German-American lawyer , writer and politician .

family

Friedrich Kapp was the son of the high school director Friedrich Kapp (1792–1866) and his wife Amalie Keck (1798–1836). He was also the nephew of the educator and philosopher Ernst Kapp (1801-1896) and the philosopher and Baden politician Christian Kapp (1798-1874).

In New York he married Luise Engels, the daughter of Major General Friedrich Ludwig Engels , who was city ​​commander of Cologne from 1847 to 1855 . The couple's only son was Wolfgang Kapp , who gave the Kapp Putsch its name . The couple had five daughters, including Luise (1852-1908), whom Alfred Friedrich von der Leyen (1844-1934) married, the syndic of the Bremen Chamber of Commerce. She became the mother of the Germanist Friedrich von der Leyen .

Life

Germany 1824-1850

Kapp received his Abitur at Hammonense Grammar School , the educational institute at which his father was director. From 1842 to 1844, Kapp first studied law and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg and became a member of the fraternity of Walhalla Heidelberg in 1842 and of the Corps Suevia Heidelberg in 1843 . There in the house of his uncle Christian Kapp (1798–1874) he met the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach . Feuerbach not only became his close friend, but his criticism of religion , which also had a strong influence on Karl Marx , also shaped his attitude to life. Other acquaintances from Kapp's student days were the later banker Ludwig Bamberger (1823–1899) and the writer Berthold Auerbach (1812–1882) in Heidelberg or the writer Bettina von Arnim (1785–1859) in Berlin, where he worked from 1844 at the University of Berlin studied and did his military service as a one-year volunteer . Even in Berlin he worked as a journalist for the early socialist "Westphalian Steamboat".

In 1845 he returned to his hometown Hamm as a trainee lawyer at the Higher Appeal Court , where he stayed until 1848. In Hamm, Kapp founded a reading club in which " left-wing Hegelian intellectuals [...] read foreign newspapers to make up for the censorship of the Prussian press, as well as the writings of the Young Hegelians, the German and Western European socialists. “(Source: Hans-Ulrich Wehler).

During his time at the Higher Appeal Court in Hamm, Kapp was not necessarily well-liked: The court president was forced to make Kapp's admission to the assessor examination subject to conditions: “ Towards the end of last week, the president asked me to be quoted and reproached me for being royal official (!) dared to deal with a dismissed officer [meaning Fritz Anneke (1818–1872)] I realized too well that the President, such a humane and by no means bureaucratic man, did not go against me on his own initiative occurred, but was prompted to do so. He said u. a. that he had already approached three times to take action against me and to have my discharge from the judicial service, but he always [...] held his hand over my head. In Hamm and the surrounding area I would be seen as the leader of the atheists and communists, and he see himself [...] compelled not to present myself for the third exam until I have decided traces of a change of mind resp. Improvement. “(Source: Hans-Ulrich Wehler).

In April 1848 Kapp went to revolutionary Frankfurt am Main as a journalist , where his uncle Christian Kapp was meanwhile a member of the Frankfurt National Assembly in the Paulskirche . In Frankfurt, however, Kapp was also politically active, working on the side of the democratic-republican left and also becoming the first secretary of the Frankfurt Democratic Congress .

Kapp went to Frankfurt as a political journalist , but had to flee because of his involvement in the September uprising and went to Brussels , where he worked as a tutor in the house of the Russian writer Alexander Herzen and looked after his son. In this position he also lived in Paris and translated two books by his employer.

In July 1849, the French police expelled Herz and Kapp from Paris. Both went to Geneva together , where Kapp met his friend Ludwig Bamberger again. It was there that the decision to emigrate to the USA , first made in 1846, matured , where he arrived in New York in March 1850. There he later married his fiancée Luise Engels, who soon followed him to the USA.

America 1850-1870

As early as 1852, Kapp worked as a journalist on the newly founded "Atlantic Studies", which had the aim of correcting the overly enthusiastic reports about the USA in Germany and also showing the dark side of American reality.

After becoming an American citizen in 1855, he practiced as a lawyer in New York until 1870, worked as a correspondent for the "Kölnische Zeitung", was with others editor of the "New Yorker Abend-Zeitung" from 1855 and wrote numerous books about this emerging country and the life of Germans in the United States. But in contrast to many other German-Americans, he always remained connected to his home country. His loyalty to his home country and his belief in a unified German state continued to determine his own life, but also the upbringing of his son Wolfgang. “In this way the boy who was born abroad developed a heightened sense of nationality; Often enough he returned from school or the street with a bloody head, when he emphasized his Germanness and, following his father's admonition, had fought off every bad thing. "

Since 1856, Kapp owned a house in Mansfield Square that was to become the popular social meeting place for Germans in New York.

After a visit to Florida in 1852 he had become a staunch opponent of slavery and the southern states (see also: Abolitionism ), which is why he not only wrote his book about the " slave question in the United States " in 1854 , but also a member of the Republican Party has been. In both 1856 and 1860 he was actively involved in the presidential election campaign for his party ; In 1860 he was even elected as an elector for Abraham Lincoln - the eventual winner of the election. In 1867 he was appointed immigration commissioner for New York State - an office he held until his return to Germany in 1870.

As a political writer, he can be described as a “pioneer of German-American historical research”: He described the importance of German immigration for both countries, wrote the biographies of Generals Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben (1858) and Johann Baron von Kalb (1862) and highlighted various America issues from a German perspective. As a conscious German, he wanted to show the Americans how important the German influence was to them, but also to show his homeland its ability to become a unified German state based on the achievements of the emigrants. In 1855 he described the very poor living conditions of his German compatriots in the Texan colony of the "Mainzer Adelsverein".

During his stay abroad, the University of Bonn awarded him an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Philosophy on August 4, 1868 .

Germany 1870–1884

After the general amnesty , Kapp returned to Germany at the request of his German friends in April 1870 and took up his Prussian citizenship again on October 21, 1870. In Otto von Bismarck's German Empire , he was able to become a city ​​councilor for Berlin as early as 1871/1872 and was a member of the National Liberal Party in the German Reichstag from 1872 to 1877 and from 1881 until his death . From 1874 to 1877 he was also a member of the Prussian state parliament . In Berlin he also continued his work as a political writer.

Kapp had always advocated a German people's state and now called for an energetic settlement policy in the east to make emigration superfluous. At the same time he endeavored to achieve a uniform imperial regulation of the consular system and the entire emigration.

The party friend and also a member of the Reichstag, Eduard Brockhaus, encouraged him to write the "History of the German Book Trade". This was an extremely difficult task for Kapp, as it was not his area of ​​expertise, and the sources published in the old “Archive for the History of the German Book Trade” were inadequate, so that intensive archive studies were necessary first of all. For this purpose he visited the “Museum Plantin-Moretus” in Antwerp in 1884 , where he was able to see the “ Grand Livre de Francfort ”, an important source for booksellers and the Frankfurt Fair . When Kapp died that same year, he had only completed four chapters and only drafted a few more. Nevertheless, he was later named as the author of the first of a total of four volumes.

Works

literature

  • Theodor Inama von Sternegg:  Kapp, Friedrich . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 51, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1906, pp. 33-36.
  • Horst Dippel :  Kapp, Friedrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 11, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1977, ISBN 3-428-00192-3 , p. 134 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Georg von Bunsen: Friedrich Kapp . Berlin 1885.
  • Edith Lenel: Friedrich Kapp 1824–1884. A picture of life from the German and North American unity struggles . Leipzig 1935.
  • Wolfgang Hinners: Exile and Return. Friedrich Kapp in America and Germany (1824–1884) . In: Cornelius Sommer, William C. McDonald and Ulrich Müller (Eds.): German-American Studies . Volume 4, 1987, ISBN 3-88099-623-7 .
  • Daniel Nagel: From Republican Germans to German-American Republicans. A contribution to the identity change of the German forty-eight in the United States 1850–1861. Röhrig Universitätsverlag, St. Ingbert 2012, ISBN 978-3-86110-504-6 .
  • Hans-Ulrich Wehler (Ed. And Introduction): Friedrich Kapp. From the radical early socialist of the Vormärz to the liberal party politician of the Bismarck Empire, Letters 1843–1884 . Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt (Main) 1969.
  • Friedrich Schütte: Revolutionary Friedrich Kapp from Hamm (Westphalia). First escape to New York, then a member of the Reichstag . In: Westphalia in America . Landwirtschaftsverlag GmbH Münster-Hiltrup 2005, ISBN 3-7843-3356-7 .
  • Hermann von Holst: Friedrich Kapp . In: Prussian year books . Volume 55, 1885.
  • Heinrich Armin Rattermann: Friedrich Kapp . In: German-American magazine . Issue 1, 1887.
  • Julius Rodenberg: Friedrich Kapp . In: The German Rundschau . Issue 41, 1884.
  • Carl Schurz: Friedrich Kapp . In: The Nation . Issue 39, 1884.
  • Simon Stars: Friedrich Kapp . In: Minutes of the Meeting of the Medico-Legal Society . 1884.
  • Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Volume 3: I-L. Winter, Heidelberg 1999, ISBN 3-8253-0865-0 , pp. 63-64.
  • Armin Danco: The Yellow Book of the Corps Suevia zu Heidelberg, 3rd edition (members 1810–1985), Heidelberg 1985, No. 312
  • Kapp, Friedrich . In: James Grant Wilson, John Fiske (Eds.): Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography . tape 3 : Grinnell - Lockwood . D. Appleton and Company, New York 1887, p. 494 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).

Web links

Wikisource: Friedrich Kapp  - Sources and full texts
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personal data
SURNAME Kapp, Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, author and politician (NLP), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH April 13, 1824
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamm , Westphalia
DATE OF DEATH October 27, 1884
Place of death Berlin