Johann Georg Kerner

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Johann Georg Kerner

Johann Georg Kerner (born April 9, 1770 in Ludwigsburg , † April 7, 1812 in Hamburg ), older brother of the German romantic Justinus Kerner , was a doctor , political publicist and critical chronicler of the French Revolution .

Life

The Kerners family enjoyed a high reputation in Württemberg . The father was the Ludwigsburg chief bailiff and councilor Christoph Ludwig Kerner , a loyal subject of Duke Carl Eugen . Through his maternal grandmother, Wilhelmine Luise geb. Herpfer (1730–1788), daughter of Veit Philipp Herpfer and Johanna Katharina Bacmeister, include the physicians Johann Bacmeister (1624–1686), his father Matthäus Bacmeister (1580–1626) and the grandfather, the Lutheran theologian Lucas Bacmeister (1530–1608 ), to his ancestors. The mother gave birth to twelve children, of whom only two daughters (including the mother of Ferdinand von Steinbeis ) and four sons survived. Johann Georg was the oldest, Justinus (Andreas), the well-known poet and doctor, the youngest of the children. Another brother, Karl Friedrich Freiherr von Kerner , served in the Württemberg army and later became Minister of the Interior in Württemberg, in which capacity he contributed to the modernization of the iron and steel industry.

During his school days, Kerner suffered from the severity of his father and the teasing of his classmates, who made life difficult for the short and weak boy. Kerner's spirit of contradiction remained unbroken as a result, even when Kerner's father obtained his admission to the High Charles School in Stuttgart . This elite school established by Duke Karl Eugen, whose drill Friedrich Schiller had already fled in 1782 , was unable to break the revolutionary spirit of the young Kerner. In a speech on the Duke's name day , he advocated the establishment of a state welfare system . In the same year he also founded a political club of enthusiastic supporters of the French revolutionary ideas (including Christoph Heinrich Pfaff , Ernst Franz Ludwig Marschall von Bieberstein , Joseph Anton Koch ) on the premises of the school . They secretly celebrated the first anniversary of the storm on the Bastille . These and similar actions, in which Kerner and his friends provoked the feudal society and the French emigrants courted by it with slogans for freedom, made staying in Stuttgart not advisable. After he had hastily finished his medical studies with a dissertation with the help of his friends , Kerner moved to where many German friends of freedom were already staying at that time. He jeopardized his newly engaged engagement to a woman from Stuttgart and went to Strasbourg in 1791 under the pretext of wanting to improve his medical knowledge .

He then lost his scholarship at the Hohen Karlsschule and the right to return to Württemberg with impunity. His active activity as a revolutionary in the country of the revolution itself began in Strasbourg. He joined the Society of Friends of the Revolution , was a speaker in French and wrote for journals . In the same year he went - on foot and without money - to Paris , to the center of revolutionary events. For his living he worked as a reporter for a Hamburg newspaper and as a doctor in a hospital . In Paris, too, like in Strasbourg, numerous young Germans gathered who campaigned for the realization of freedom, equality and brotherhood and with whom he was friendly (e.g. Adam Lux , Gustav Graf von Schlabrendorf , Konrad Engelbert Oelsner , Johann Georg Adam Forster and Karl Friedrich Reinhard ). Like many of his friends, Kerner mistrusted the radicalization of the revolution as a loss of freedom and therefore tended, out of an opposition spirit, to political currents whose interests were not always his. This explains the closeness of many sobered German revolutionary friends to the Girondists . There was no complete turning away from the revolutionary ideas, which Kerner still considered more humane than life “ under the atrocities of anarchy ” that feudalism in Austria , Prussia and Russia represented for him.

In 1794, Kerner fled like Konrad Engelbert Oelsner and other German revolutionaries to Switzerland, from where he was sent on a secret mission by the French embassy there to his home in Württemberg in order to bring about a separate peace between the Duke and France for the French Republic. He returned to Paris in 1795 without success. He wrote a series of articles for Paul Usteri's Klio magazine , his letters from Paris . In it he described as an eyewitness the events in which he was always involved. Again and again he came under threat and suspicion through his moderate demeanor. B. when he tried to appease the sans-culottes during the Germinal and Prairial uprisings . He was in close contact with politically like-minded people such as Konrad Engelbert Oelsner, Karl Friedrich Reinhard, Gustav Graf von Schlabrendorf, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès and the German-Dane Jens Immanuel Baggesen .

When Karl Friedrich Reinhards, the private secretary of the French Republic, had become the envoy to the German Hanseatic cities , Kerner traveled to Hamburg in 1795 , where new political challenges awaited him. He still defended the expansion policy of revolutionary France and promoted its policy in the liberal and democratic circles of Hamburg, where he met the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, among others . He was often on special assignments, often on horseback, between Germany, the Netherlands and France, but had little diplomatic success, not least because of his brusque way of standing up for the revolutionary cause. As a spy at the Hildesheim Congress, he was exposed as a party member of the revolution, as well as in Berlin, where he was on a mission to St. Petersburg.

Kerner was in correspondence around 1796 with important contemporaries such as Adolph Freiherr Knigge , Charles Maurice de Talleyrand , Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès and the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling . He founded a political club in Altona, Denmark , which disguised itself as a philanthropic society , but served revolutionary gatherings and was banned in 1797. During a short stay in Paris, Kerner witnessed the coup d'état of the 18th Fructidor V (September 4, 1797) and was delighted with the victories of General Bonaparte, whom he initially admired .

In May 1798 Kerner accompanied Karl Friedrich Reinhard, who had meanwhile been appointed French envoy in Florence , to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany . It was characteristic of Kerner's temperament that he also got involved in the political unrest in Italy and acted for France. With a vigilante set up by him, he went into action against insurgent residents of Arezzo and was wounded in the process, which did not prevent him from rushing to the Netherlands soon afterwards on Reinhard's behalf, where he took part in a battle as a pioneer officer against the coalition forces .

After Napoléon's coup d'état at the end of 1799, Reinhard was replaced in Italy and sent to Switzerland, where the Helvetic Republic was now established . Kerner followed him there in the official function of a French legation secretary. In view of Napoleonic politics in the occupied countries, Kerner's criticism and rejection of Napoleon grew.

After Kerner's attempts to bring about a "peace uprising" in his home town of Württemberg failed during a trip to Germany, his political disappointment and disenchantment grew. In Switzerland he met Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and from then on became enthusiastic about his pedagogy . Education, which promoted intellectual, psychological and practical skills in equal measure, seemed to him a way out of the political dilemma.

In 1801 Kerner, whose journalistic efforts were unsuccessful in Switzerland, traveled to Hamburg to build up a new life as a businessman. However, his political past made him suspicious of the conservative Hanseatic merchants, so that he tried to make his fortune as the publisher of a political journal Nordstern . In the articles written by Kerner himself, he criticized the politics of the French Republic and Napoleon and developed a clever form of "covert spelling" by quoting negative comments from other critics without comment. Reinhard, of all people, who was returning from Switzerland, now felt compelled to ban the magazine.

Kerner's decision was now clear: “ I wanted to dedicate my life to fighting the spiritual ailments of mankind, but I didn't succeed. Now I am returning to the determination of my youth, to combat physical ailments in people . ”In 1803 he settled in Hamburg as a doctor. He introduced the vaccination against smallpox , which he had got to know on a trip to Sweden ("Journey across the Sound"), and in 1804 he was named "Doctor for the Barracks" by the Senate (meaning the slums on the Hamburger Berg, today's St. Pauli ). In addition to the introduction of vaccinations, he built up the maternity services in the city and worked tirelessly for poor relief and social services.

The political journalist was by no means silenced. He regularly wrote articles for the Hamburger Wochenblatt Nordische Miszellen , in which he expressed his political dissatisfaction. When the French occupied Hamburg and Bremen in 1806 , Kerner once again made himself available to active politics. Bremen and Lübeck made him the representative of the French authorities in Hamburg because of his contacts with the new rulers.

In 1806 the Senate also appointed him to be a doctor for the poor. In the spring of 1812, during his self-sacrificing activity in the course of an epidemic, he became infected with “nerve fever”, probably with typhus . Johann Georg Kerner was buried in the St. Petri churchyard in Hamburg, with great sympathy from the population . In an obituary it says: “A self-forgetting altruism, a rare genius and an unconcealed openness made him particularly dear to his friends. In a short but substantial life he seems to have exhausted the sum of a longer existence and fulfilled its purpose. "

Fonts

  • General positive state cooperative law of the immediate free imperial knighthood in Swabia, Franconia and on the Rhine . Lemgo 1788, online
  • About the important influence of well-established hospitals and poor houses on the welfare of a state. Speech on the name day of Duke Karl Eugen . Stuttgart 1790
  • A few remarks about daughter tumors . Doctoral thesis Stuttgart 1791
  • Letters from Paris . In: Klio . Volume 1, Issue 2-4, 1705, pp. 245-261, 310-379 and 424-506 and Volume 2, Issue 5, 1795, pp. 90-126
  • The North Star. A weekly political paper . 1st - 19th Piece, 1802
  • Journey across the sound . Cotta, Tübingen 1803
  • The blue fever (poem against Napoleon), 1806 at the earliest, online
  • About the Hamburg maternity hospital and the maternity services of the poor institution . Hamburg 1810

literature

  • Adolf Wohlwill :  Kerner, Georg . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 15, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1882, pp. 640-643.
  • Adolf Wohlwill: Georg Kerner. A German image of life from the age of the French Revolution. Hamburg / Leipzig 1886.
  • Hedwig Voegt (Ed.): Georg Kerner. Jacobin and poor doctor. Travel letters, reports, life testimonies . Rütten and Loening, Berlin (East) 1978.
  • Hellmut G. Haasis : Give wings to freedom. The time of the German Jacobins 1789–1805. 2 volumes. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-499-18363-3 , ( rororo-Sachbuch 8363).
  • Andreas Fritz: Georg Kerner (1770-1812). Prince enemy and philanthropist. A political biography . 4th expanded edition. Liberté! -Verlag, Ludwigsburg 2003, ISBN 3-00-010372-4 , (also: Stuttgart, Univ., Diss., 1998/99).
  • Andreas Fritz: KERNER, Johann Georg . In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon . Volume 23 (Supplements X). Verlag Traugott Bautz, Nordhausen 2004, ISBN 3-88309-155-3 , columns 786-800 ( freely accessible Internet edition ).
  • Andreas Fritz: Georg Kerner: Freedom, freedom above everything. DIE ZEIT, April 4, 2012 No. 15, p. 20 ( digitized version )

Web links

Commons : Johann Georg Kerner  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bacmeister family tree
personal data
SURNAME Kerner, Johann Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Doctor, political publicist and critical chronicler of the French Revolution
DATE OF BIRTH April 9, 1770
PLACE OF BIRTH Ludwigsburg
DATE OF DEATH April 7, 1812
Place of death Hamburg