Heinrich Carstensen Jensen

Heinrich Carstensen Jensen

Heinrich Carstensen Jensen (born September 24, 1789 in Flensburg ; † July 4, 1860 there ) was a Danish merchant . As a politician, he was a member of the Schleswig State Assembly and the Danish Imperial Council .

Act as an entrepreneur

Heinrich Carstensen Jensen was a son of the Flensburg merchant Christian Jensen (born August 29, 1759 in Nordballig ; † December 15, 1831 in Flensburg) and his first wife Catharina Magdalena Schmid (born April 11, 1770 in Flensburg; † December 13, 1789 ibid ). The father had moved to Flensburg as the son of a farmer and had developed into one of the most important merchants there. In 1804 he commissioned the architect Axel Bundsen to design a classicist house. His mother came from a well-off merchant family that was successful and well-off in Flensburg around 1800. After the death of the first wife, the father married Margaretha Dorothea Rinck (1785-1816) for the second time in 1801.

Jensen himself married Catharina Maria Christiansen on December 5, 1812 in Flensburg (* December 15, 1786 in Flensburg; † June 29, 1829 there). She was a daughter of the Flensburg wholesaler Andreas Christiansen (1743-1811) and the Flensburg native Maria Catharina, née Andresen (1747-1813). Andreas Christiansen, who did business in the Danish West Indies , owned the city's largest trading house. One year after the wedding, Jensen, who had four daughters and three sons, apparently with the help of his wife's dowry, started his own business as a businessman. He initially imported groceries and in 1813 bought a cargo ship for the passage to the West Indies. In 1816 an additional ship was added. From 1817 Jensen and his brother-in-law Peter Petersen traded with Iceland , where they founded their own branches. For the journey to the Mediterranean , Jensen had four ships that sometimes tramped . They also transported goods from the Baltic Sea and the northern region, in particular to Bordeaux and Porto, and from there they took goods back to Flensburg.

In 1818 Jensen started whaling in Greenland and opened his own potion kitchen . Occasionally he let the whalers go to Antarctica and South America . In the merchant shipping he mostly had about ten ships. In addition to the boiling pottery, he tried to process imported raw products. He refined West Indian cane sugar in his own refinery . In addition, he had mills for oilseeds and rice and earned a lot of money leasing oyster beds in North Friesland , the income of which he mainly sold to St. Petersburg .

From 1848 Jensen's company lost its importance and had to file for bankruptcy in 1857.

Honorary positions

At the age of 27, Jensen joined the board of directors of St. Mary's Church in Flensburg as a church jury member . In 1819 he was appointed deputy ( councilor ) and in 1822 senior man in the college of deputies. He was probably the driving force behind the initiative, which in 1833 replaced the Flensburg magistrate's right to supplement and the merchants' monopoly with a normative. From 1833 he was appointed member of the magistrate and senator of the city, making him a member of several city commissions. In 1819 he founded the Sparkasse , around 1825 the widow's pension institution and in 1857 the Rönnekampsche Seemannsstiftung . He was also a member of the board of directors of the infant custody facility and, from 1825, of the board of directors of the St. Marien Free School.

In 1835 Jensen wrote the book "About Commerce and Industry". In it he campaigned for duty-free and trade in order to promote economic liberalism . If economically necessary, however, commercial products should be protected by tariffs. Even after that, he worked to promote trade. So he achieved rewards for whaling and reimbursement of tariffs for the West India trade. He campaigned for new chambers of commerce, a Flensburg branch of the National Bank from Copenhagen and a bill of exchange regulations to simplify payment transactions and better organize trade and to reduce the city's dependence on Hamburg . These measures took place in the spring of 1843. This brought Jensen into conflict with the national movements in the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein . In 1842, the Holstein meeting of the estates approved the proposal to set up a Flensburg branch of a Schleswig-Holstein Landesbank instead of a Danish branch bank, but this did not happen.

In 1831 Jensen founded the " Flensburger Handelsverein " and served as director for it for many years. The Flensburg Chamber of Commerce and Industry emerged from the extensive work in 1871 .

The question of railway construction, however, led to disputes with the national Danish party. The party wanted to create a "cross line" that should lead from Flensburg via Husum to Tönning . Jensen did not support this plan, but instead founded a committee in 1844 for a "longitudinal railway" that was to connect Flensburg with Schleswig and Rendsburg and continue to Hamburg and Bremen . These intentions to connect the Duchy of Schleswig with Holstein and Hamburg, in turn, did not support the Danes, but wanted to set up a trade route that would compete with Hamburg and extend from England to Saint Petersburg . Jensen did not take action against the Danish plans for national reasons, but was of the opinion that a cross-connection would not bring the necessary advantages to the trade and the city of Flensburg was dependent on the markets of Hamburg and Bremen for its imports and exports.

politics

From the 1830s, the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, as well as Denmark, came under the influence of the July Revolution, starting from France . In the duchies, as elsewhere in Europe, the call for a constitution was loud and Jensen could not avoid getting involved politically. However, here, too, he was essentially interested in promoting trade and so he acted independently of national endeavors for the side that in his opinion best promoted trade interests.

In 1831 he met Uwe Jens Lornsen , who wanted to persuade him to petition the Danish King Frederick VI for a constitution in the duchies . to judge. Jensen, who, like other Flensburg personalities, feared a split from Denmark, as this would also mean the loss of the Danish sales areas and colonies for the city's merchants, ultimately refrained from doing so, especially since the king agreed to the formation of provincial class assemblies in the same year .

As a result, Jensen followed a call to the assembly of “experienced men” who were discussing a Schleswig-Holstein assembly of estates. This was founded in 1838. Jensen moved in as a representative of the 1st urban district in the meeting of the estates and appeared as one of the spokesmen. He stood up for the interests of trade, industry and shipping, and therefore especially those of Flensburg. He was a member of the Committee for Urban Planning and several economic policy committees and used extensive contacts to Hamburg and especially Copenhagen for his goals . At first he got on well with Duke Christian August of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg , who like him loved horses and spoke to high officials in the German chancellery . In urgent matters he contacted King Christian VIII himself.

From the 1840s onwards, Jensen struggled to enforce his concerns due to national tensions between the duchies and the Kingdom of Denmark. He was considered liberal, but neither took sides for the national liberal movement of Schleswig-Holstein nor for the Danish movement. It was important to him to revitalize the economy of Flensburg and the Duchy of Schleswig in such a way that the social situation of the population improved, the political problems eliminated and the living conditions he had experienced in his youth. In doing so, he misjudged the economic situation and the national conflicts.

During the Schleswig-Holstein uprising , Jensen followed the king and supported initiatives to preserve the state as a whole . After the end of the war in 1851 he was appointed one of 21 “notables” who dealt with the constitutional situation of the Duchy of Schleswig in Flensburg. In 1854 and 1856/57 the king appointed him to the Danish Imperial Council. Here, however, he then rejected applications from Danish national liberal-minded people who wanted to replace the German with the Danish language in Flensburg . From 1853 he belonged to the magistrate and from 1854 to the assembly of estates. Here he succeeded at least partially in introducing mixed legal and administrative languages ​​in Flensburg. With this he developed into an opponent of the national Danish party and increasingly lost politically like-minded people.

Jensen was royal agent (councilor of commerce) from 1826 and was made a knight of the Dannebrog in 1841 .

literature

• Hans-Friedrich Schütt: Jensen, Heinrich Carsten. In: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Wachholtz, Neumünster 1982–2011. Vol. 11 - 2000. ISBN 3-529-02640-9 , pages 190-194.
• Hans-Friedrich Schütt: HC Jensen - A life fate in the Schleswig border region. Krausskopf-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1956.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hans-Friedrich Schütt: Jensen, Heinrich Carsten. In: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck. Wachholtz, Neumünster 1982–2011. Vol. 11 - 2000. ISBN 3-529-02640-9 , page 190.
2. ^ Hans-Friedrich Schütt: Jensen, Heinrich Carsten . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck. Wachholtz, Neumünster 1982–2011. Vol. 11 - 2000. ISBN 3-529-02640-9 , pages 190-191.
3. ^ ^{A b} Hans-Friedrich Schütt: Jensen, Heinrich Carsten . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Wachholtz, Neumünster 1982–2011. Vol. 11 - 2000. ISBN 3-529-02640-9 , page 191.
4. ↑ ^{a b c d} Hans-Friedrich Schütt: Jensen, Heinrich Carsten . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Wachholtz, Neumünster 1982–2011. Vol. 11 - 2000. ISBN 3-529-02640-9 , page 193.
5. ^ ^{A b c} Hans-Friedrich Schütt: Jensen, Heinrich Carsten. In: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck. Wachholtz, Neumünster 1982–2011. Vol. 11 - 2000. ISBN 3-529-02640-9 , page 192.
6. ^ Hans-Friedrich Schütt: Jensen, Heinrich Carsten. In: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Wachholtz, Neumünster 1982–2011. Vol. 11 - 2000. ISBN 3-529-02640-9 , pages 191-192.
7. ^ Hans-Friedrich Schütt: HC Jensen - A life fate in the Schleswig border region. Krausskopf-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1956. Page 48.
8. ^ Hans-Friedrich Schütt: HC Jensen - A life fate in the Schleswig border region. Krausskopf-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1956. Pages 40 f.