Heinrich Scheffer

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Heinrich Scheffer

WA Heinrich Scheffer (born December 6, 1808 in Kirchhain ; † May 9, 1846 in Kassel ) was a German writer and political activist .

Life

Scheffer was the son of the Austrian officer Carl Conrad Scheffer. He studied law at the Philipps University of Marburg and was one of the founders of the Corps Teutonia Marburg in 1825 .

As a Philhellene , he went to the Greek Revolution in the spring of 1827 . After uneasy years of wandering and further trips (1827–1831) he returned to Hesse at the end of 1831; between May and September 1832 a trip to France followed. His two-volume years of traveling (Marburg 1834, see below) provide information about his travels, and we can reconstruct his whereabouts according to Scheffer's information as follows: Greece (spring 1827), eastern Mediterranean region (summer 1827), Italy and Switzerland (October-December 1827 ), Germany (July – August 1828), Italy (October – November 1828), Attica (January 1829), Western Turkey and Constantinople (February – March 1829), Bulgaria and Serbia (April – May 1829), Wallachia (May – July 1829 ), Hungary (summer 1831) and Austria (winter 1831). Scheffer traveled under great strain at times because he was on foot for lack of money.

After his return to Kirchhain, Scheffer wrote, in addition to his travelogue, novellas and poems. In 1832 he took part in the Hambach Festival . He did not complete his law studies, but did his doctorate at the University of Jena as Dr. phil. Mayor of his hometown since 1838 , he was appointed to the Kurhessische Estates assembly in 1839 . In November 1839 a correspondent from Marburg wrote the following about Scheffer: "Our fiction writer Heinrich Scheffer still lives two hours from here, in the town of Kirchhain, and mainly deals with agriculture. He also writes books on the side." Another observer, who reported a few months later from Kassel about the meeting of the estates, considered Scheffer to be a "literary celebrity".

During the trial of Sylvester Jordan in 1843, he was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment and impeachment for high treason . After three years, he committed suicide while in custody.

He left behind his wife Julie Georgine and a child.

Themes and style

Years of Wandering (1834)

Scheffer's detailed and vividly written account of his years of travel deals with his travels in Germany (Munich in particular), Switzerland, Italy (Tuscany, Ancona), Greece, Turkey ( Smyrna , Constantinople), Bulgaria, Serbia, Wallachia (modern Romania ), Hungary and France (1827 to 1832). The narrative part is interrupted by a total of four insertions that have a historical or cultural-historical character. The first part focuses on the latest history of Greece: "Compact overview of the Greek Revolution" (I, p. 87 ff.), "Consideration and description of the situation in Greece ... until the reign of the new king" (I, p. 213 ff.). The second volume offers a long description of Constantinople ("Die Bilder der Türkenstadt": II, p. 297 ff.) And southern Romania ("Die Wallachei": II, p. 493 ff.). Curiously, he called his trip across the Balkans a "Russian trip" (because he originally intended to travel to Russia via Odessa ); for a similar reason he called his trip through Hungary and his return home as "Poland trip".

Of particular importance are the statements about his trip to the Balkans (II, p. 372 ff.), Which he started from Edirne (Adrianople) in Turkey , as well as his news about Wallachia . With regard to Southeastern Europe , Scheffer's travelogue is one of the less well-known works by German authors who stayed for a long time in " European Turkey " and the Danube principalities and has not yet been evaluated or examined in detail. It is a contemporary source of extraordinary value, especially since Scheffer had a keen sense, which is clearly shown in his writing. It is also worth mentioning that despite strong personal convictions regarding the cultural and political conditions in the Ottoman Empire and Wallachia, he nevertheless retained the openness to put what he had experienced on paper without exaggerated evaluation. However, Scheffer was always convinced that Turkish rule in the Balkans would end in the near future, after which new Christian states would arise. With this stance, Scheffer stood in the 1830s in contrast to many other Western observers who did not share this opinion at the time. Due to their late romantic character, some passages in his descriptions remind us of the travelogue of the much more famous poet Alphonse de Lamartine , who was also traveling in European Turkey just a few years after Scheffer (1833) and whose travelogue appeared only one year after Scheffer's years of traveling .

Unframed Pictures (1836)

The two parts contain the following three stories: (I) "The Outcast" (II) "Il Carbonaro", "The Cosmopolitan. A Fragment".

A contemporary reviewer was of the opinion that Scheffer's stories "get lost in political and cosmopolitan considerations" that seem "to be arbitrarily and yet not voluntarily broken off and shortened"; Nevertheless, his overall impression "of the book, which was kept warm and lively in its warlike details, individual descriptions and political reflections" was positive. The critic of the journal Europa believed that he recognized in the author "a depressed" one who has disintegrated with much in the present ".

Crayon sketches (1839)

The first volume of Scheffer's Crayonskizzen - a second volume has never been published - contains two short stories, "Die Chiotin" and "Boyarenleben". As the title suggests, Scheffer processed impressions in them that he had received during his travels in Southeast Europe (namely with reference to the island of Chios and the boyars of Wallachia ). The Chiotin is "a modern Greek story, like so many of which have already been told in prose and verse after Byron's models"; Boyar life is "a picture from Wallachia, in the center again a well-known romantic main character, the beautiful gypsy who has been there so often since Cervantes".

Another contemporary reviewer found that both stories were "full of peculiar freshness and liveliness," and went on: "The descriptions of the manners and customs of foreign, distant peoples, their peculiarities and habits, their domestic and public life, are well suited to the reader captivate, especially since the author knows how to capture the depth, truth and intimacy of the feeling ". Another reviewer praised: "Everything Mark, everything sprouting life, everything clear, calm outlook! ... Scheffer's style is also beautiful and noble". In particular the novel "The Chiotin" appeared to him as "a painting of Asian and European-Greek life". In Scheffer's novellas, the critic of the newspapers for literary entertainment encountered "witty ideas, a fantasy that tends towards the dark, a lively gift for representation".

Fonts

  • Wandering years . 2 volumes. Marburg: NG Elwert 1834. Volume I: Google . Volume II: Google . Paginated throughout. A digital version was released on DVD in 2010 by Hildesheimer Olms Verlag.
  • Pictures without a frame. 2 parts. Marburg: NG Elwert 1836
  • Crayon sketches . Volume I. Marburg: NG Elwert 1839 (no longer published)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kösener Corps Lists 1910, 166 , 12.
  2. ↑ Kirchhain
  3. ↑ a b Blue Book of the Corps Teutonia Marburg 1825 to 2000, p. 11.
  4. ↑ a b c "Correspondence. From Marburg." In: Newspaper for the elegant world . No. 224 , November 15, 1839, pp. 896 .
  5. ^ "Correspondence. From Kassel" . In: Newspaper for the elegant world . No. 34 , February 17, 1840, p. 136 .
  6. ^ Judgment in the investigation against the mayor Dr. Scheffer von Kirchhain ... because of attempted treason, or aiding and abetting in highly treasonable undertakings and other offenses along with the reasons for the decision . Kassel, Marburg 1843
  7. ^ Corps newspaper of Teutonia Marburg 1/1932, p. 25
  8. ↑ "Beautiful Literature. 2736" . In: literary newspaper . No. 41 , October 5, 1836, p. 787 f .
  9. ↑ "Literary Overviews" . In: August Lewald (Ed.): Europe. Chronicle of the educated world (feature section) . tape 1 . Leipzig and Stuttgart 1836, p. 475 .
  10. ↑ "Review of the Crayonskizzen of Henry Scheffer . In: Wolfgang Menzel (ed.): Literaturblatt . No. 37 , April 8, 1840, p. 148 .
  11. ↑ Review of the Crayonskizzen. From Heinrich Scheffer . In: Extra supplement to the newspaper for the German nobility . No. 1 , 1841, p. 2 (not paged) .
  12. ↑ "fiction" . In: Sheets for literary entertainment . No. 13 , January 13, 1840, pp. 52 .
personal data
SURNAME Scheffer, Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Writer; Mayor of Kirchhain
DATE OF BIRTH December 6, 1808
PLACE OF BIRTH Kirchhain
DATE OF DEATH May 9, 1846
Place of death kassel