Gustav von Rochow

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Gustav von Rochow

Gustav Adolf Rochus von Rochow (born October 1, 1792 at Nennhausen Castle near Rathenow ; † September 11, 1847 at Reckahn Castle , Zauch-Belzig district ) was the royal Prussian interior and state minister . He is considered a reformer of the Prussian prison system , is the author of the Prussian Railway Act and co-initiator of the establishment of the steam boiler monitoring association (a forerunner of the TÜV ).

family

Gustav von Rochow came from a Brandenburg aristocratic family that originally came from Switzerland and moved towards Brandenburg in the 11th century to besiege the Wends resident there . So the noble family got their first property in the Mark, the place Rochow - see also the von Rochow family . He was the son of the landowner Friedrich Heinrich Adolf Ludwig von Rochow (1770–1799), landlord of Jeserig and Neuhaus and canon of Minden , and the writer and poet Caroline , born von Briest (1773–1831). Lieutenant General Theodor von Rochow was his brother. His sister Klara (1796-1865) was married to Lieutenant General Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Pfuel . After the divorce (1798), the mother married the second marriage in 1803 to the “Brandenburg poet prince”, writer and Prussian major Friedrich Baron de la Motte-Fouqué (1777–1843).

Life

After the divorce of his parents and the early death of his father, Rochow grew up until he was 14 years old (1806) with his maternal grandparents, the Prussian Rittmeister August von Briest and his wife Caroline Wilhelmine, née Zinnow, on their Nennhausen estate near Rathenow .

After graduating from the Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster in Berlin , he studied law at the universities of Heidelberg and Göttingen from 1810 . In Göttingen he was a member of the Corps Vandalia. He later took part in the Wars of Liberation , from which he did not return until 1816.

From 1816 he administered his father's property and became chamberlain . In 1818 Rochow married Caroline von der Marwitz (1792-1857), the lady-in-waiting to Princess Marianne of Prussia and daughter of Court Marshal Behrendt von der Marwitz . In 1822 he was elected by his peers in Westhavelland as their district deputy of Neumark and appointed to be the recorder of all other provincial estates.

In 1823 Rochow entered the Prussian civil service and became a member of the Central Administration of State Debt , which had to organize the settlement of debts resulting from the Wars of Liberation. Later Rochow was a lecturing council in the Ministry of the Interior and secretary of the "Royal Immediate Commission of Inquiry into the investigation of treasonous connections and state-dangerous activities". In 1826 he was appointed to the Secret Upper Government Council. From 1831 to 1834 he was finally the district president in Merseburg .

Rochow experienced the high point of his professional career on April 28, 1834, when he was appointed "Minister of the Interior and the Police" with the targeted support of Prince Wilhelm zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein (1770-1851). Wittgenstein had already written to him the day before: “ Everything is in order: the ship will soon be launched. Arrange (you) ..... so that you can sail soon. “ ( Lit .: Acta Borussica) Originally, Rochow was only supposed to become police director and exonerate the incumbent Minister of State Gustav von Brenn . But Rochow thought Brenn was incapable of being police minister and simply refused to serve under him. He also believed of himself that he was better suited to be a minister than a department head. So Brenn was finally relegated to the office of “Minister of the Interior for Business Matters”, which had become vacant when Friedrich von Schuckmann left in early 1834.

Reckahn Castle in Brandenburg

In his position as Minister of the Interior (Police Minister) Rochow became a member of the Prussian state government in 1835. May 1st / 13th June 1842 he resigned from the office of police minister for health reasons and retired to the family castle Reckahn, but he retained the rank of minister of state until his death. From 1844 to 1847 he was President of the Prussian State Council .

The conservative Rochow favored the suppression of opposition movements during his tenure. So in 1837/1838 he aroused the liberal circles in Germany in particular with his statement of “ limited subject understanding ” (for the freedom movement of the 1830s see: Hambacher Fest ) : After the dismissal of the “ Göttinger Sieben ” (seven professors from the University of Göttingen, including the brothers Grimm , who had protested against the constitutional breach of the anti-democratic Hanoverian king Ernst August I ), Rochow issued an "official reprimand" to the citizens of Elbing , who had campaigned for their compatriot, the constitutional lawyer Wilhelm Eduard Albrecht (1800–1876) : “ It is befitting of the subject to obey his kings and sovereigns and to calm himself down with the responsibility which the authority appointed by God assumes when following the orders given to him; but it is not fitting for him to apply the standard of his limited insight to the actions of the head of state and to presume a public judgment as to their legitimacy with arrogant arrogance. “This word of“ limited subject sense ”continued to circulate for a long time in the liberal press and in its reverse (“ limited Gustav ”) was also used against himself.

literature

Web links

Wikiquote: Gustav von Rochow  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Herbert Kater: Pipe bowl of the Vandalia Göttingen 1811-1813. In: then and now. Yearbook of the Association for Corporate Student History Research 31 (1986), p. 210.
  2. ↑ Rochow's complete letter is printed in: Georg Büchmann: Geflügelte Words. The citation treasure of the German people , 5th revised. and verm. ed., Berlin 1868, p. 228.
personal data
SURNAME Rochow, Gustav von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rochow, Gustav Adolf Rochus von (full name); Rochow, Gustav Adolph Rochus von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Prussian Minister of State and Minister of the Interior
DATE OF BIRTH October 1, 1792
PLACE OF BIRTH Well Nennhausen near Rathenow , Brandenburg
DATE OF DEATH September 11, 1847
Place of death Reckahn Castle , Zauch-Belzig district , Brandenburg