Heinrich Siegmund

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Heinrich Siegmund (born September 30, 1867 in Mediasch ; † July 22, 1937 in Mediasch) was a Transylvanian-Saxon doctor, racial researcher, state consistorial advisor and publicist.

Life

Heinrich Siegmund was born as the son of the pharmacist Dr. chem. Albert Heinrich Siegmund (1845–1872) and the youngest daughter of Stephan Ludwig Roth , Carolina Maria (1848–1937), were born. Due to the early death of the father, the grandfather Andreas Siegmund (1815-1891), who as a soap maker , landowner and trader was one of the wealthiest citizens of Medias , gained special importance for the financing of the entire education of the grandson. The inherited fortune allowed him an economically independent life.

After graduating from high school in 1886 at Mediascher Gymnasium , Siegmund studied medicine in Graz and became a member of the Styria fraternity and spokesman for the Transylvanian-Saxon country team, but then moved to Vienna . Towards the end of 1893 he returned to Medias and established himself as a general practitioner. In 1895 he married a daughter of the Medias high school director Gustav Friedrich Schuller. The only child from this marriage - a daughter - died at the age of 19.

In 1895 Siegmund was elected city ​​physician of Mediasch, and in 1920 was promoted to senior physician . In 1924 he retired because of a kidney disease.

The special importance of the man arises from his public work and his numerous writings. In 1904 he joined the Order of the Good Templars and, as a staunch anti-alcoholic, became the Great Temple of Romania in 1920 . He fought against alcoholism verbally and in writing and not only made friends with it. His excessive zeal for the use of foreign words even made him at times ridiculous and made his writings difficult to understand.

In 1920 Siegmund was appointed as a medical member of the regional consistory of the Evangelical Church in Transylvania . On his initiative was z. B. the recruitment of school doctors at the Protestant schools and grammar schools since 1908. At his instigation, a regional church welfare office was founded. In 1924 he created a mouthpiece for himself in the “Evangelical Welfare Organization” as a supplement to the “ Kirchliche Blätterofficial journal , through which he could address a wide range of church workers. In 1937 he was in Sibiu a permanent national church welfare exhibition "Public Health" along the lines of Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden open.

In 1902 he founded the magazine “Volksgesundheit, common monthly for German-Hungarian cultural policy” with his own resources. Already in the first year of this magazine he foresaw the "downfall of the Transylvanian Saxons " if a change did not occur. Oskar von Meltzl (1843–1905), at that time professor of economics and finance at the Hermannstädter Rechtsakademie, had published in 1884 "Statistics on the Saxon rural population in Transylvania". In it he had taken the view "that there is no need to have any serious concerns about the future of the Saxon peasantry." Meltzl had come to this view because he had achieved a higher increase in the Saxon rural population compared to others. However, this only applied to the period before 1852 or much earlier, but no longer in the second half of the 19th century. However, Meltzl's statement was accepted uncritically by the leadership of the Transylvanian Saxons and only questioned after the First World War . Siegmund, on the other hand, on the basis of his analysis of the statistical data, was of the opinion that the decline of the Saxon settlement area, which Meltzl also undisputed, would lead to the complete displacement of the Saxons. While Meltzl, the historians of his time and the political leaders of the Transylvanian Saxons unanimously believed that Hungarians and Romanians had only filled the gaps that wars and epidemics had once torn within the German settlements, according to Siegmund, internal causes led to a decrease in power and the decline of the Transylvanian Saxons . His lecture “Destruction and displacement in the life course of the Saxon people”, given in 1912 at the annual meeting of the Association for Transylvanian Cultural Studies , met with sharp criticism, but was nevertheless accepted for printing by Adolf Meschendörfer .

In his main work " German Twilight in Transylvania (Displacement or Annihilation?)", 1931 summarized all the arguments that pointed to the impending demise of the Transylvanian Saxons. During the discussion of the book between Karl Kurt Klein , who doubted the scientific nature of Siegmund's data and described his work as a "pseudo-history", and Hermann Oberth , who spoke in favor of the scientific nature of the book, a methodological dispute arose from which posterity can still learn may, although the book had no immediate political impact in the decade after its publication. In 1983, however, one could read in retrospect in the “Zeitschrift für Siebenbürgische Landeskunde”: “With the gap of two generations and after events that fundamentally changed the face of Transylvania, it can be stated ... that Meltzl made a dangerous error and Siegmund was basically right . ... Since the birth surpluses can be calculated with some reliability, they are considerably higher for the Romanians than for the Saxons. "

Racial hygienist

In 1911, Siegmund was accepted into Alfred Ploetz 's Society for Racial Hygiene as a founding member in return for his promotion of his agenda in Transylvania.

In the second edition of the book Sächsisches Wehr- und Mehrbuch. He introduced a new chapter of a people's book, The Tasks of Saxon Racial Hygiene .

Fonts

  • Saxon Defense and Multiple Book. A folk book . Mediasch 1914, 2nd edition 1922
  • Heinrich Siegmund: German twilight in Transylvania (displacement or annihilation?) . Sibiu: Honterus 1931

literature

  • Tudor Georgescu: In pursuit of a purged eugenic fortress: Alfred Csallner and the Transylvanian Saxon Eugenic Discourse in Interwar Romania. In: Turda, Marius, Trubeta, Sevasti and Christian Promnitzer: Hygiene, Health and Eugenics in Southeast Europe to 1945. Central European University Press, Budapest 2011, pp. 351–384; ISBN 978-963-9776-82-1 , on Heinrich Siegmund p. 353f.


Individual evidence

  1. ^ Johann Rehner: In memory of Dr. Heinrich Siegmund's late grand templar from Romania, Großlaube 2 (German) of the IOGT Mediasch 1939, p. 25: Pedigree
  2. Fritz Berweth: Dr. Heinrich Siegmund. Südostdeutsche Vierteljahresblätter 2 (1970), pp. 164–168
  3. Julius Ernst Gyurgeyevich: preliminary work on a list of publications Landeskonsistorialrates Dr. med. Heinrich Siegmund. Medical Journal 11 (1937), pp. 315-326
  4. ^ Heinrich Siegmund: The fall of the Transylvanian Saxons. In: Volksgesundheit 1 (1902/03) pp. 150–155, 169ff., 180–187; 2 (1903/04), pp. 25-32, 41-44, 57-60, 73-80, 121-127. 144-149, 153-167
  5. ^ Oskar von Meltzl: Statistics of the Saxon rural population in Transylvania. Archive of the Verein für Siebenbürgische Landeskunde 20 (1885), pp. 215–502, cited here p. 274
  6. Heinrich Siegmund: Destruction and repression in the life struggle of the Saxon people. Die Karpathen 6 (1912), pp. 167-182
  7. Transylvania Quarterly Journal 54 (1931), pp. 327–332
  8. Karl-Kurt Klein: History and natural scientific pseudo-history. Siebenbürgische Vierteljahresschrift 55 (1932), pp. 315–328
  9. ^ Hermann Oberth: Is Siegmund's Deutschendämmerung unscientific? Transylvania quarterly journal 55 (1932), pp. 302-315
  10. Ernst Wagner : Heinrich Siegmund and folk biological research in the interwar period. Zeitschrift für Siebenbürgische Landeskunde 6 (1983), pp. 177-186, cited here pp. 181f.
  11. ^ A b Marius Turda: The History of East-Central European Eugenics, 1900-1945: Sources and Commentaries . First edition. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, ISBN 978-1-350-03880-6 , pp. 561 (English). ...