Heinrich Ludwig Czech

Heinrich Ludwig Czech (based on the daguerreotype from the day before the attack)

Heinrich Ludwig Czech (born April 28, 1789 in Klein Kniegnitz , Lower Silesia ; † December 14, 1844 in Spandau ), as the former mayor of Storkow (Mark) , carried out an assassination attempt on the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV on July 26, 1844 .

The assassin

Czech was the son of a superintendent , attended high school, then studied law at the Leopoldina in Breslau and at the Brandenburg University of Frankfurt (on the Oder) . From 1810 he lived in Berlin, where he also met his future wife. There he worked in various commercial professions, such as owner of a paint shop and real estate business. Since 1830 assessor at the calibration office , he was responsible for checking the weights and measures in Berlin shops and companies. He was also involved in poor relief as a member of the poor commission in his neighborhood.

After the death of his wife in 1832 he became mayor of Storkow in Brandenburg . According to his daughter Elisabeth, he is said to have come into conflict there with the citizens and higher authorities because of his active advocacy for administrative reforms. When one of his opponents was elected head of the city council and the district administrator and his secretary joined the party of his opponents because of Tschech's arbitrariness, Czech resigned from his office in 1842.

After he had directed numerous petitions and requests for reinstatement to the Prussian authorities, but had been unsuccessful because of the bad certificates issued in Storkow, and after he had also unsuccessfully appealed to members of the royal family and most recently to the king himself, he took hold finally the decision to kill the king and thereby set a public signal. According to one of his own statements, he was guided not by revenge, but by the conviction that there was no other way out to restore his wounded honor to the world:

“Since I could not claim a higher human power to obtain my rights, the only means left for me was to perhaps maintain and restore my deeply violated right, my trampled honor. Because only in this way could my affair become a general world affair. "

He bought a double-barreled pistol and prepared for his deed with target practice. The day before the crime he had a daguerreotype made of himself, "so that the world can see after his eventual death that his physiognomy is not that of a common villain". He is said to have placed his left hand on his chest, the right hand stretched out wide and shouted “Power from above!” In a loud voice.

The following morning, July 26, 1844, he went to the portal of the Berlin Palace before 8 a.m. and stood on the steps of the palace near the waiting royal coach. When the king and his wife, Elisabeth Ludovika , stepped out of the castle to go on a trip to Erdmannsdorf in Silesia , Czech initially missed the opportunity to assassinate, according to his own statement, because he was the queen and the people in the wake of the did not want to endanger either. Only after the royal couple had settled down in the carriage did he finally fire both barrels of his pistol at the king when the carriage started.

The king and queen were unharmed. One of the two bullets only hit the queen's cloak or, according to the folk song, “the mother of the country / through the skirt into the lining”. Czech was immediately overwhelmed and arrested. The extent of the excitement caused by the historically first assassination attempt on a Prussian king is controversial, but it also had social consequences. The Berlin Zoological Garden z. B. opened quietly a few days later.

This article or section needs to be revised. Details should be given on the talk page. Please help to improve it , and then remove this flag.

In the subsequent trial, Czech was sentenced to death by the Criminal Senate on September 19, 1844. This judgment was upheld by the Court of Appeal on October 26, 1844. On December 10, Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Changed the death penalty by the wheel into beheading, and on December 14, 1844, in Spandau , Czech was " brought from life to death by means of the ax " As stated in the official announcement of the Royal Prussian Court of Justice . He had refused expressions of repentance to the end, as well as a petition for clemency to the king, although Bettina von Arnim , among others , had campaigned for his pardon from the king and two locomotives in Spandau were kept running under steam the night before the execution To bring the petition to the king in Potsdam in good time , who would very likely have answered it positively. According to contemporary newspaper reports, it was only after long reluctance that the king put his signature under the death sentence and cried.

The portrait of the assassin

On the day before his assassination, Czech had a daguerreotype made of himself, which his daughter Elisabeth placed in front of her book as a frontispiece . Tschech's daughter published the portrait in print in 1849. There is also a physiognomic description of Tschech from the pen of the Prenzlau military doctor and coroner Sigismund Eduard Loewenhardt (1794–1875). Apparently he was not officially involved in the legal proceedings against Czech, but rather complained that the death sentence had been passed without a prior psychiatric report from the Royal Scientific Deputation for the Medical System . But he visited the condemned man the day before his execution in the Spandau Citadel and in 1861 he gave a detailed description of his outward appearance in one of his medical writings, with the declared intention, contrary to Tschech's self-assessment, to make the criminality of his physiognomy clear. even if he did not see this as incurable in principle from his "madness":

“Czech was a man of medium stature and fairly stocky build. Thick, black hair covered the skull, which was not in the least noticeably shaped, and in the most strange way he wore a curl hanging straight down on his forehead, which made it appear smaller than it was. The deeply dark eye under the bushy brow shone repulsively wild, and gave a speaking picture of the passions raging inside, especially when he was excited in conversation, which was only too easy, to gloss over his deed, to try to portray himself as a martyr. Then this eye rolled, his gesticulations came to life, he fought around with his arms, spread his fingers, invoked heaven and divine justice, his full and powerful bass voice rose, his mobile features came to life with fear, the otherwise dirty yellowish ones The complexion turned a fleeting dark blush, and one could have thought of a southern bandit (more of a madman! Ref.) In that whole way, if not for the educated language and polite forms that were his own The difference between him and a street robber who made the people's yeast immediately caught the eye. But there was something oppressive about the whole being of this criminal, and he gave a frightening and warning image of a person deeply disturbed by reprehensible, untamed passion. And this passion did not allow him to rest, to contemplate, to repent until the last moment. "

Miss Czech

Czech left two daughters, one of whom is also referred to as a foster daughter and did not attract much attention from contemporaries, while the other, Elisabeth Czech, who turned eighteen in the year of the assassination and the execution of her father, has another one played a more prominent role.

Elisabeth seems to have been particularly close to her father. On the way to the place of execution, Czech is said to have expressed the certainty that she, whom he had brought up in his mind, would avenge his death. Elisabeth is said to have commented on her father's act with the words: "I am proud of my father who shot the king!". On August 21, 1844 entitled appeared Miss Czech , an article in the Paris Forward! who followed up on this saying and praised the daughter's disposition:

“The noble eighteen-year-old girl gives in to her bold, tried-and-tested father in courage and skillful speech. (…) If it is permissible to draw a conclusion from this individual case, we cannot help but be amazed at the upswing which the German consciousness has recently taken in deepest silence. (...) The [d. H. such an attack] has never occurred in Germany; There is unheard of such marble, ancient bloodthat, such short, concise way of providing satisfaction for one's own tortured heart. "

From then on Elisabeth Czech was considered dangerous and was under the guard of the police, who in July 1847 and again in spring 1851 also issued warnings to the Belgian security authorities that Elisabeth intended to come to Belgium .

In the years after the attack, Elisabeth actually had contacts with the German dissident and emigrant scene abroad. She had a close relationship with Karl Heinzen , who on August 12, 1847, announced in the German Brussels newspaper that he intended to go to America, and at the same time called for donations for Elisabeth. Around this time Elisabeth escaped from Prussia and went to France, where she met August Becker in Strasbourg . Becker wrote a letter to seek financial support for the two of them at Bakunin in Paris, who in turn could not help much, but forwarded Becker's request to Luise Vogt, who would later be Hans Kudlich's wife in Bern, and to Emma Herwegh in Paris, Georg Herwegh's wife who was one of Elizabeth's admirers and is said to have written a poem to her. Elisabeth possibly went to Bern with Becker in 1847, at least her biography and justification of her father appeared there in 1849, which stylized him as a political martyr but remained the most important historical source.

Elisabeth returned to Germany for a while and was in Frankfurt am Main in 1850 , from where she wrote to Ferdinand Freiligrath , a close friend of Heinzen's, to ask him for help in collecting donations. In 1851 she finally arrived in Brussels, where her contacts with other refugees were carefully monitored by the Belgian security authorities until she embarked for America in April 1851.

Literary and musical consequences

The assassination gave rise to a petty song that disrespectfully mocked the king , which was included in the songs of the labor movement and was counted by Friedrich Engels in 1887/88 as one of the “two best folk songs since the 16th century”, while the patriotic one Lieutenant Vogelsang in Theodor Fontane's novel Frau Jenny Treibel (1892) remembers it with disgust as a “pathetic street hooter”, “in which it haunted the frivolous spirit that dominated the poetry of those days”. It was sung to the tune of a festival march by conductor Joseph Gung'l (1809–1889), who was very popular in Berlin at the time , and which is also based on Joseph Victor von Scheffel's song As the Romans Got Cheeky .

Even for a king with less exaggerated ideas about his own divine right , the text of this song would have represented an insult to majesty , and in the excited mood of the Vormärz it was also understood as an invitation to regicide. The song was banned, but nonetheless quickly enjoyed great popularity and was soon circulating in different text versions. The four-line closing stanza of one of these versions of the text achieved particular popularity:

Has anyone ever had
such bad luck as Mayor Czech
that he could
n't meet this fat man in two steps!

The author of the lyrics is unknown. After the writer Heinrich Pröhle , the original version, later modified several times, comes from the journalist Friedrich Sass, who was acquainted with Pröhle and who frequented the "Free" group of Max Stirner in Berlin and in the Café Stehely.

More recently, the song has been adapted by the Düsseldorf songwriter Dieter Süverkrüp and the Leipzig group Folkländers Bierfiedler, among others .

In 1846 the democratically minded Albert Dulk from Königsberg began work on a five-act drama about Czech, which, however, remained a fragment. When Dulk, who had been expelled from Saxony in connection with the Leipzig riots in 1845 , visited Tschech's daughter, he caught the attention of the Prussian police and was imprisoned in Halle for six weeks.

The assassination, however, not only stimulated revolutionary minds to artistic processing. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy , who found out about the assassination attempt on a trip to Zweibrücken , composed his eight-part motet in mid-August because he has commanded his angels over you MWV B 53 ( Ps 91 : 11-12  LUT ), which he called “Congratulations “Sent to his salvation and which was performed before the majesties in Königsberg on September 2nd . Two years later, Mendelssohn added the piece, supplemented by orchestral accompaniment, to his oratorio Elias op. 70.

Even Sigismund von Neukomm wrote because of the assassination two choral works for the king. Psalm 91 and Psalm 20 were written in England on August 19 and 20, respectively . The king had it sung to him in Berlin in October.

Contemporary sources

• Anonymous pamphlet: The high traitor Heinrich Ludwig Czech murderous attack on the life of the King of Prussia, which is why he was the 14th Decbr. Was executed near Spandau in 1844. Reproduced in Rudolf Schenda (Ed.): Thousand German popular prints from the nineteenth century . In: Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 11,6-7 (1971), pp. 1466–1651, here p. 1509, p. 1551
• Elisabeth Czech: Life and death of the mayor Czech, who shot the King of Prussia on July 26, 1844 and was executed in Spandau on December 14, 1844. Printed and published by Jenni, Sohn, Bern, 1849 (technically defective digitization in the Munich digitization center)
• Sigismund Eberhard Loewenhardt: Critical illumination of the medical-psychological principles together with the chief expert opinion of the Royal Scientific Deputation for the Medicinal Being in Prussia , Wilhelm Logier, Berlin 1861, pp. 577-580

literature

• Lu Märten : Mayor Czech and his daughter. Memories of the Vormärz (1844) . Altberliner Verlag Groszer, Berlin 1948
• Reinhold Schneider : The assassination . Edited by Wilhelm Grenzmann. Schöningh, Paderborn 1954 (Schöningh's text editions 269)
• David E. Barclay: Frederick William IV and the Prussian Monarchy 1840-1861 . Clarendon Press, Oxford 1995, ISBN 0-19-820430-2 ; German translation by Marion Müller: Anarchy and good will. Friedrich Wilhelm IV. And the Prussian monarchy. Siedler, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-88680-463-1
• Matthias Blazek: "Assassination attempt and punishment - The case of Heinrich Ludwig Czech - The background to the events of July 26, 1844". In: Prussian Communications No. 192 and 193/2009
• Sven Felix Kellerhoff : assassin. Change the world with a ball. Böhlau, Cologne [et al.] 2003, ISBN 3-412-03003-1
• Walter Henry Nelson: The Soldier Kings: The House of Hohenzollern . Dent, London 1971, ISBN 0-460-03997-0 ; German translation by Richard Paul: Die Hohenzollern: Reichsgründer und Soldierkönige , Diederichs, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-424-01340-4

Web links

Commons : Heinrich Ludwig Czech  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Commons : People approach  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• "People step up to you" - petty song about the assassination

Remarks

1. ↑ ^{a b} The Belgian police dossier Elisabeth Tschechs is under number 105.208 in the files of the Public Security Office in the Belgian Ministry of Justice, Jurgen Casteleyn gives a summary: Vreemdelingenbeleid en politieke migratie in België (1848–1851) , Catholic University of Leuven 2001/2002 , Chap. IV. 2 .
2. ↑ So presumably Bakunin's letter of September 6, 1847 to Emma Herwegh, in: Marcel Herwegh (Ed.): Letters from and to Georg Herwegh . 2nd ed., Albert Langen, Munich, pp. 14-17, p. 15, Gian Maria Bravo contradicts this representation, Democrazia, socialismo e partito repubblicano (2002), p. 217.
3. ↑ On the effect on Fontane see Helmuth Nürnberger: Theodor Fontane - a poet in Prussia . In: Berlin Reading Signs 05/2001 at the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein .
4. ↑ In December 1846, a gathering of politically active craftsmen was arrested, during whose subsequent months-long trial of the originally serious allegations ultimately only the singing of Heinrich Heine's Weber song and the Czech song remained, and as a result two of the members of the Berlin criminal court “ were sentenced to fines for knowingly disseminating banned books ”, cf. Wolfgang Büttner: Politics in the features section of the German-Brussels newspaper . In: Contributions to the history of the labor movement 40.2 (1998) (PDF; 688 kB) pp. 16–32, pp. 31f.

Individual evidence

1. ^ SE Loewenhardt, Critical Lighting (1861), p. 578.
2. ↑ ^{a b c} S. E. Loewenhardt, Critical Lighting (1861), p. 577; In this presentation, Loewenhardt refers to a contribution by Johann Ludwig Casper (1796–1864) in his quarterly journal for judicial and public medicine , without precise indication of the source, presumably volume VI, volume 1, p. 35.
3. ↑ Jutta Schneider: August 1, 1844: Opening of the zoological garden . In: Berlin monthly magazine ( Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein ) . Issue 8, 1999, ISSN  0944-5560 , p. 89–93, here p. 89 ( luise-berlin.de ).
4. ↑ opacplus.bsb-muenchen.de
5. ↑ Otto Büsch: Handbuch der Prussischen Geschichte , Volume II, de Gruyter, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-11-008322-1 , p. 210 and note 16.
6. ↑ ^{a b c} S. E. Loewenhardt: Critical Illumination (1861), p. 580.
7. ^ SE Loewenhardt, Critical Illumination (1861), p. 579.
8. ↑ ^{a b} Quoted from Georg Adler: The history of the first social-political workers' movement in Germany . Eduard Trewendt publisher, Breslau 1885, p. 99.
9. ↑ Freiligrath's letter to Heinzen, from London on September 11, 1847, Regestum in Ferdinand Freiligrath's letter repertory (FFB) (No. 2466).
10. ↑ ^{a b} Letter from Andreas Gottschalk from Cologne of September 5, 1847 to Moses Hess , in: Edmund Silberner / Werner Blumenberg (ed.), Moses Hess, Briefwechsel , Mouton, 's-Gravenhage 1959 (= sources and studies on the history of the German and Austrian labor movement, 2), p. 174: “We have also received Miss Czech's report about her flight. Herwegh is said to have written a poem to her; send it to me. "
11. ^ Gian Maria Bravo: Democrazia, socialismo e partito repubblicano: il tedesco-americano August Becker (1814–1871) , Carocci, Rome 2002 (= Studi storici Carocci, 29), p. 216 ff., On this Becker's letter of 11. August 1847 to Georg Schirges in Ernest Barnikol (ed.), August Becker: History of religious and atheistic early socialism . Mühlau, Kiel 1932, p. XIII.
12. ^ ^{A b} Gian Maria Bravo, Democrazia, socialismo e partito repubblicano (2002), p. 217.
13. ↑ Freiligrath's letter to Hoffmann von Fallersleben from 1850, Regestum in the FFB (No. 4959).
14. ^ Letter by Freiligrath to his sisters Karoline and Gisbertine, from Cologne, March 18, 1850, Regestum im FFB (No. 2945).
15. ↑ Friedrich Engels: The role of violence in history (1887/88); see. also Karl Kautsky (ed.): From the early days of Marxism: Engels correspondence with Kautsky , Orbis Verlag, Prague 1935, p. 42.
16. ↑ Joseph Gung'l: Kriegers Lust: Fest-Marsch for Pianoforte in B major, Op. 26. Bote & Bock, Berlin undated, around 1842.
17. ^ HC Grünefeld: The revolution is marching. Battle songs of the oppressed and persecuted , Vol. 2: 1806–1930, Welz Vermittler Verlag, Mannheim 2006, pp. 120–146, here p. 139 books.google.de
18. ^ Heinrich Pröhle (Ed.): Pictures from German history, culture and local history . First volume. Oswald Seehagen, Berlin 1861, p. 237 books.google.de