Gottlieb Wilhelm Hoffmann

Gottlieb Wilhelm Hoffmann (portrait by an unknown artist, owned by the Korntal Brethren)

Gottlieb Wilhelm Hoffmann ( lithograph by Jacob Kull , 1846)

Gottlieb Wilhelm Hoffmann (born December 19, 1771 in Ostelsheim near Calw , † January 29, 1846 in Korntal ) was a German notary and mayor. He was the founder of the two Württemberg Brethren in Korntal and Wilhelmsdorf .

Life

Hoffmann, who was influenced by Pietism , was an imperial notary and mayor in Leonberg . From 1815 to 1819 Gottlieb Wilhelm Hoffmann was a member of the Württemberg state assemblies as a member of the citizens of the Oberamt Leonberg and from 1819 to 1825 of the second chamber of the Württemberg state estates . In 1817 he voted with the old Württemberg citizens against the adoption of the royal draft constitution.

When the Napoleonic Wars and severe crop failures in the famine years of 1816/17 led to crisis developments in the Kingdom of Württemberg , many Pietists saw it as signs of an “ end time ”, the dawn of the “Thousand Year Reich”. In the autumn of 1816, immediately after taking office, King Wilhelm I had to lift an emigration ban that had existed since 1807. Thousands of Württemberg subjects emigrated by the end of 1817, most of them to southern Russia, where Tsar Alexander I recruited settlers on favorable terms. In this situation, Hoffmann and other leading pietists came up with the idea of ​​curbing the emigration of wealthy and righteous citizens by establishing a pietistic settlement in the Kingdom of Württemberg. These considerations were influenced by the Evangelical Brothers Congregation in Herrnhut , but also by the settlements founded by Württemberg people in the United States, for example the Economy in Pennsylvania founded by Johann Georg Rapp and the Zoar in Ohio, established by separatists from the Rottenacker district .

With royal permission, the Pietists bought the Korntal manor in the immediate vicinity of Stuttgart and founded a Pietist settlement there in 1818. The special rights were not granted to the extent hoped for. The goods were transferred to the common property and placed under a goods buying company, while everything else remained private property of the families.

Gottlieb Wilhelm Hoffmann wanted to establish further settlements based on the Korntal model, but the king refused to give his consent because he feared the establishment of a pietistic parallel community to the Protestant regional church. Only when Hoffmann proposed the establishment of a settlement in Lengenweiler Moosried in 1823, which fulfilled a “national economic purpose” in terms of the royal agricultural policy, namely the draining of the moorland, was the permit granted. The new "colony" was set up as a daughter settlement of Korntal and named after King Wilhelmsdorf .

However, Hoffmann suffered increasingly from the economic difficulties in Wilhelmsdorf, especially as there was no suitable local manager. The fact that the company went bankrupt hit him deeply. Even on his deathbed, he was worried about the settlement.

With his pietistic settlement projects, Gottlieb Wilhelm Hoffmann realized social ideas in the sense of pietism and initiated a pietistic center in Korntal in the middle of Württemberg. He is one of the most important pietists from Württemberg in the early 19th century.

family

Hoffmann was married three times. His first wife was Wilhelmine Flattich (1779–1801), a granddaughter of Johann Friedrich Flattich , who died a year and a half after the wedding. From his second marriage to Friederike Löffler (1779-1810) came Wilhelm Hoffmann , who later became the Berlin court preacher and founder of the Jerusalem Society . A son from the third marriage with Beate Baumann (1774-1852) was Christoph Hoffmann , who founded the Temple Society . Both sons pursued the promotion of Christianity in Palestine. While Wilhelm supported existing churches, Christoph broke away theologically from the Lutheran church, moved to the Holy Land and founded colonies there with the aim of building a new Jerusalem temple .

literature

Literature on Wilhelmsdorf under article Wilhelmsdorf (Württemberg) .

• Julius Ziegler: A king's child. Told for my sons . Verlag der Ziegler'schen Anstalten, Wilhelmsdorf (Württemberg) / Bookshop of the Evangelical Society, Stuttgart 1905 (History of the Wilhelmsdorf Brethren)
• Otto Kübler: Gottlieb Wilhelm Hoffmann, the founder of Korntal and Wilhelmsdorf . Philadelphia bookstore, Reutlingen 1948 (brochure)
• Fritz Grünzweig : Gottlieb Wilhelm Hoffmann. Founder of Korntal and Wilhelmsdorf. 1771-1846. In: Life pictures from Swabia and Franconia. Volume XI. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1969, pp. 150-173.
• Julius August Wagenmann :  Hoffmann, Gottlieb Wilhelm . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1880, pp. 593-595.
• Wilhelm Hoffmann:  Hoffmann, Gottlieb Wilhelm. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 9, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1972, ISBN 3-428-00190-7 , p. 393 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz :  Hoffmann, Gottlieb Wilhelm. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 2, Bautz, Hamm 1990, ISBN 3-88309-032-8 , Sp. 960-963.
• Frank Raberg : Biographical handbook of the Württemberg state parliament members 1815-1933 . On behalf of the Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-17-016604-2 , p. 373 .