Johann Friedrich Butenschoen

Johann Friedrich Butenschoen (born June 14, 1764 in Bramstedt (Holstein) , † May 16, 1842 in Speyer ) was a German educator and journalist and one of the fathers of the Palatinate Church Union.

Life

Youth and Studies

Butenschoen grew up in Bramstedt; that he was even allowed to attend secondary school, he had to enforce against the will of his father, who had to help Butenschoen up to the age of 17 both on the parents' farm and in his office as parish bailiff and customs collector. Relatives finally made it possible for Butenschoen to attend the Academic High School Christianeum in Altona from 1782 . In 1785 Butenschoen graduated from high school with distinction.

Qualified in this way, Butenschoen began his studies at the University of Jena in the summer semester of 1785 . However, he did not enroll in theology, as was customary for less well-off students at the time, but in the philosophical faculty. The relatives who tried to enable him to study then withdrew all financial support.

In the summer semester of 1786 Butenschoen moved to the University of Kiel . His university lecturers there included a number of representatives of the Late Enlightenment , such as the pedagogue and philosophy professor Martin Ehlers , Wilhelm Ernst Christiani , the zoologist and economist Johann Christian Fabricius , the historian Dietrich Hermann Hegewisch and the philosopher Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld . Butenschoen earned his living by giving lessons in Latin and Greek. However, financial difficulties forced him to give up his studies in Kiel at the end of 1786.

Colmar, Heidelberg and Strasbourg: teacher and author

Butenschoen then accompanied a young Holstein nobleman to Alsace, where he found a job in Colmar in 1787 as a teacher of Latin and Greek at the Académie Militaire of the German writer, military scientist and educator Gottlieb Konrad Pfeffel , a school for Protestant nobles.

In the same year Butenschoen went to Heidelberg. It is not certain whether he also attended university there; It is certain that a number of occasional publications were produced during this time, in particular Butenschoen's historical reading book about Caesar , Cato and Frederick the Great . During this time, too, a significant part of Butenschoen's income was likely to have come from teaching language lessons.

While working on his historical reader Butenschoen had entered into a correspondence with the Swiss historian, publicist and statesman Johannes von Müller ; In 1789 he set out from Heidelberg to visit his new mentor. A stopover in Strasbourg allowed him to experience the French Revolution up close before traveling on to Zurich in August of the same year. There he wrote more headlines for teaching younger readers, a novel-like biography of Alexander the Great and a published 1791 Volume Romantic, funny, touching and moral conversations .

In the summer of 1790 Butenschoen returned to Strasbourg, where he enrolled at the university in the autumn of the same year. However, after less than a month, he took the opportunity to take up a position as court master with Baroness von Holland in Stuttgart  , which he held until September 1792.

Then Butenschoen went back to Jena to finish his studies. There he made the acquaintance of Friedrich Schiller , who in turn put him in contact with his publisher Georg Joachim Göschen . At Göschen, a few smaller writings were subsequently published by Butenschoen. In Jena Butenschoen studied with Carl Christian Erhard Schmid , who introduced him to the works of Immanuel Kant , and with Carl Leonhard Reinhold . Due to financial difficulties Butenschoen had to leave Jena again without a degree.

Strasbourg and Paris: Journalism and Prosecution

At the beginning of 1793 Butenschoen returned to Strasbourg and became editor of the journal Argos for the Jacobin Eulogius Schneider . He also began to be politically active: he wrote political texts and became city secretary in Strasbourg. On December 15 of the same year, Schneider was arrested at the behest of Louis Antoine de Saint-Just and Philippe-François-Joseph Le Bas , transferred to Paris and guillotine on April 1, 1794. Butenschoen criticized the actions of Saint-Just and, more generally, the excesses of the French Revolution, was arrested on January 10, 1794 for his critical statements and in turn brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris  . However, there was no death sentence against him, but he remained in custody and was released in July 1794 after the fall of Robespierre and his supporters.

Disappointed by the French Revolution, Butenschoen then went to Zurich, and in 1796 back to Colmar, where (thanks to Pfeffel's influence) he was able to take up a position as professor of history and geography. On September 26, 1797, Butenschön married Catharina Elisabetha Nagel (née Barbe, 1772-1819), who bore him a total of eight children.

School system and church organization: Mainz and Speyer

In 1803 he received a call to the newly founded lyceum in Mainz (French at the time) , where he initially worked as a professor. In 1809 he was promoted to inspector of the school system for the entire Département du Mont-Tonnerre and in 1812 was rector of the Mainz Academy. When Mainz and the surrounding area returned to Germany after the fall of Napoleon , Butenschoen remained inspector of public education under the head of education in the newly created Central Rhine Generalgouvernement under Joseph Görres .

In the summer of 1816 Butenschoen moved to Speyer , where he worked as a government and school councilor for the Rhine District, which was part of the Kingdom of Bavaria  , and made a name for himself as a liberal innovator of the Palatinate school system. At the same time he was active in the Lutheran Church, was he in 1815 Churches in Worms been, he was in 1818 (secular) in Speyer consistory. As such, he participated in the Palatinate Church Union , in which Lutheran and Reformed congregations were united - as a Protestant union, a characteristic development for large parts of Germany at that time. Butenschoen was also involved in drafting the Palatinate Catechism, which was used from 1822 to 1854.

From July 1816 Butenschoen was the editor of the Neue Speyerer Zeitung , in which he represented radical liberalism. Under Butenschoen's direction, the newspaper developed from a provincial newspaper to the official gazette of the district government. Here Butenschoen worked, among other things, as a sponsor of Adam von Itzstein , the organizer of the Vormärz , to whom he offered a forum in his newspaper. After a political change in Bavaria, in which the progressive Maximilian von Montgelas had to give up his ministerial post, the Neue Speyerer Zeitung came increasingly into the opposition. The negative consequences from the government side were inevitable: official communications were only allowed to be published by the rival intelligence paper of the Rhine district ; From the beginning of 1819, it was forbidden for Palatinate communities to subscribe to the newspaper. Due to frequent conflicts both with the censors and in his dual role as editor and official, Butenschoen resigned from the newspaper's editorial office in early 1821.

The Protestant education center Butenschoen-Haus in Landau (Palatinate) is  named after Butenschoen .

Fonts

• Suffering two noble lovers after d. Spanish d. Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, together with d. This famous Spaniard & strange life an experiment on d. Spanish beautiful literature . Heidelberg 1789.
• Caesar, Cato and Friedrich von Preussen: a historical reading book . Pfähler, Heidelberg 1789.
• Alexander the Conqueror, Part 1 [no other parts published]. Zurich and Leipzig 1791.
• Romantic, funny, touching u. moral conversations, part 1 [no other parts published]. St. Gallen 1791.
• Call to the citizens of the Ober- u. Lower Rhine department, on the occasion of the second crusade against the Franks . In: Argos 1793, 2nd half year, pp. 105-109 and 113-118.
• Petrarka, a monument to noble love and Humanity, 1 [no further parts published]. Leipzig 1796
• My experiences in the most terrible days of the Frankish revolution . In: Klio Vol. 1 (1769), pp. 10-35 and 334-349.
• Fragments about the life and execution of the revolutionary Eulogius Schneider . In: Klio Vol. 1 (1769), pp. 270-333, Vol. 2, pp. 89-106.
• The old golden age on the Rhine . In: Rheinisches Archiv 1 (1810), pp. 75–78.
• Strange scenes from the Peasants' War of 1525 . In: Rheinisches Archiv 1 (1810), pp. 357–389.
• Catechism of Christian religious doctrine, for use in religious teaching . Speyer 1823

literature

• Klaus Bümlein: Johann Friedrich Butenschoen - a champion for Protestant freedom. Evang. Church of the Palatinate, Speyer 2009.

Web links

• Literature by and about Johann Friedrich Butenschoen in the catalog of the German National Library
• Website of the Butenschoen House in Landau

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j} Hartwig Molzow: BUTENSCHÖN, Johann Friedrich . In: Biographisches Lexikon für Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck Volume 8. Wachholtz, Neumünster 1987. Online reprint of the article ( Memento from January 23, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) (last accessed: January 19, 2015)
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Helmut von Jan: Butenschön, Johann Friedrich . In: Neue Deutsche Biographie 3 (1957), p. 78 [online version]; URL: http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/ppn117184187.html (last accessed January 17, 2015)
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} Hermann Kern: Butenschön, Johann Friedrich . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, published by the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Volume 3 (1876), pp. 650–651, digital full-text edition in Wikisource, URL: http://de.wikisource.org/w /index.php?title=ADB:Butensch%C3%B6n,_Friedrich&oldid=2191756 (Version from January 17, 2015, 18:13 UTC)
4. ↑ ^{a b} Personality of the reformer met in the Schwetzinger Zeitung on November 7, 2013.
5. ↑ ^{a b} Hannes Ziegler, Speyerer Zeitung / Neue Speyerer Zeitung, in: Historisches Lexikon Bayerns, URL: < http://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/artikel/artikel_45017 > (December 8, 2011)
6. ↑ Jörg Schweigard: Itzstein, our star. In: The time. July 27, 2012, accessed January 16, 2020 . 
7. ^ Palatine church president Schad re-elected in Die Welt on November 20, 2014
8. ^ Friedrich Herbert Müller: Johann Friedrich Butenschoen and the "Neue Speyerer Zeitung" (1816-1821): on German journalism between the French Revolution and the Restoration in Germany . Publishing house of the Palatinate Society for the Advancement of Science, 1986.