Georg von Alten (diplomat)

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Georg Friedrich August von Alten (born September 8, 1815 in Verden ; † on the night of March 31 to April 1, 1882 in Montreux ) was a German diplomat .

Life

origin

Georg was the sixth child and the second son of Viktor von Alten (1755-1820) and his wife Charlotte, born von Kinsky and Tettau (1775-1842).

Career

Alten studied law in Geneva and Berlin from 1834 and completed his studies in Göttingen in 1839 with the legal exam. From 1839 to 1841 he was an official auditor in the Hanoverian civil service . In 1841 he was appointed royal Hanoverian embassy attaché in Berlin and Dresden , in 1843 appointed embassy secretary and in 1846 transferred as chargé d'affaires and legation councilor to The Hague and Brussels . Dismissed in 1849, Alten went to Hanover as director of the court theater in 1850 . In 1859 he acquired the Ahlem estate near Hanover and from then on devoted himself to family research. In October 1863 he became Secretary General in the Foreign Office and Privy Legation Council, and in May 1865 he came to Saint Petersburg as envoy . With the Prussian annexation of Hanover in 1866, he was put into temporary retirement.

On May 3, 1869, Alten entered the service of the North German Confederation and was sent to Jerusalem as consul . With the unification of the empire in 1871 he became Imperial German Privy Legation Councilor and Consul General . During his term of office the visit of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, who later became Emperor Friedrich III. , and with it the transfer of the eastern third of the Muristan property in Jerusalem to the Prussian crown (November 7, 1869) and the establishment of the school of the Evangelical German Language Congregation in Jerusalem (March 17, 1873). Until 1878 children of the Templars from the Tale Rephaim also attended this school. He made a name for himself in particular among the Jewish population, as he extended his protective function to non-German Jews, campaigned for the Bikkur Cholim Jewish hospital and uncovered false accusations against Haim J. Naggiar of child robbery and cannibalism and the punishment of those responsible was able to prevail (1870). In April 1873 he was recalled and, after the sale of the Ahlem property, moved to Montreux for health reasons, where he died in 1882.

Alten was Knight of Honor of the Order of St. John , Grand Officer of the Order of the Oak Crown , holder of the House Order of the Wendish Crown II class and the Order of St. Stanislaus III. Class.

In research on Palestine since 1973 he was confused with his older brother, Count Viktor von Alten , which goes back to a mistake by Mordechai Eliav, which all later historians wrongly followed, including Alex Carmel, Jakob Eisler, Haim Goren, Martin Lückhoff, Zeev W. Sadmon, Abdel-Raouf Sinno.

family

In 1851 he married Karoline von Oheimb (1821-1859) in Enzen , with whom he had two sons:

literature

  • Hanswulf Bloedhorn: Georg Baron von Alten, German consul in Jerusalem. Finding the right first name. ZDPV 134 (2018), 200-204.
  • Yearbook of the German Nobility . Volume 1, 1896, p. 30.
  • Biographical Handbook of the Foreign Office 1871–1945. Volume I (Paderborn 2000) 24–25 with illus.
  • Erwin Roth: Prussia's Gloria in the Holy Land. The Germans and Jerusalem. Munich 1973.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Hans Hermann Frutiger, Ejal Jakob Eisler: Johannes Frutiger (1836-1899): a Swiss banker in Jerusalem. Köln et al .: Böhlau, 2008, ISBN 978-3-412-20133-3 . P. 308.
  2. ^ Mordechai Eliav: The Jews of Palestine in German politics. Documents from the archives of the German Consulate in Jerusalem, 1842–1914. Tel Aviv 1973, pp. 167-173.
  3. ^ Yearbook of the German Nobility . Volume 1, 1896, pp. 30f.
personal data
SURNAME Alten, Georg von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Alten, Georg Friedrich August von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH September 8, 1815
PLACE OF BIRTH Verden
DATE OF DEATH March 31, 1882 or April 1, 1882
Place of death Montreux