Johann Georg Tinius

Johann Georg Tinius (born October 22, 1764 in Staakow , Niederlausitz ; † September 24, 1846 in Gräbendorf near Königs Wusterhausen ) was a German theologian and bibliomaniac who committed robbery and two murders, which he committed in addition to embezzling church funds to finance his addiction to collecting supposedly, was sentenced to twelve years in prison in 1823 after more than ten years of circumstantial trial.

Life

Tinius was the son of a shepherd and attended school in Luckau . Due to his talent, he found sponsors and was able to visit the University of Wittenberg from 1789 to study theology. After completing his master's degree in theology, he worked as a Tertius at the grammar school in Schleusingen from 1795 to 1798 , before being appointed pastor of Heinrichs near Suhl in 1798 . Since he had several influential advocates in the citizenship of Suhl, he was temporarily appointed to the office of the deceased pastor of the local Kreuzkirche by the Dresden Consistory in 1801. On the other hand, the mayor and council of the city of Suhl complained, who feared a political division of the citizenry by Tinius. They attested to his poor lifestyle and judged him to be stubborn and contentious. Tinius was particularly accused of deviating from the pure teaching of Christianity in his sermons. As a pastor he is not a role model because he left his own child unbaptized for five days, expanded the parish meadow to the detriment of the parish grounds and even sold a stone for the corpse . The Schleusingen consistory was then commissioned by the senior consistory to investigate the allegations against Tinius. The report from Schleusingen was to the disadvantage of Tinius, whereupon his appointment as pastor of the Kreuzkirche in Suhl was withdrawn in October 1802.

Tinius appealed against this decision. He accused the consistory of partiality for the mayor and city council in Suhl and demanded, among other things, financial compensation for the financial loss that he urgently needed to care for his six children. The investigation process that developed from this lasted several years and was not yet completed when Tinius went to Poserna in the Saxon office of Weißenfels as a pastor at the end of February 1810 . The proceedings were only discontinued after Tinius had been removed from office as pastor of Poserna in spring 1814 due to the seriousness of the other allegations against him.

When the pastor of Goldlauter died and the position was kept free for his son Ernst Anschütz , he took over the vicariate of the local pastor from October 1806 to April 1807. During this time he complained to the Schleusingen consistory that despite the long, arduous journey from Heinrichs and Albrechts to Goldlauter, even in bad weather, a horse was never sent to be picked up and he always had to set out on foot.

At the express request of Tinius, the Schleusingen consistory attested to him on December 12, 1808 that he had “administered his parish office with skill, loyalty and morality” and that he had increased the church treasury by over 300 guilders during his service.

His passion for books began during his time in Schleusingen, and in Suhl he found the first opportunity to display his growing number of books in a dignified manner. His two wives brought a certain fortune into the marriage, from which Tinius drew for further book acquisitions. His main focus was on exegetical science, but also on philosophy, history and ancient languages. The bibliomaniac hoarded 50,000 to 60,000 books in Poserna, some of them even in a barn. While his family lived on the ground floor of the rectory in Poserna, Tinius himself preferred to live upstairs amid his books. He often visited Leipzig to buy new books - and he got hopelessly into debt. Among other things, he acquired the estate of the theologian Johann August Nösselt with various rare Bible editions and autographs by Luther, Melanchthon and other reformers. In Paris he acquired the estate of Friedrich Bast , in Frankfurt an der Oder he acquired the estate of Johann Friedrich Heynatz . With the accumulated books, Tinius planned his own scientific publications, including a work on the relationship between the Chaldean paraphrases of the Pentateuch and the Samaritan translation. However, he was always busy getting new books, so that he hardly got any scientific work of his own with his library.

When the businessman Schmidt and the wealthy widow Kunhardt were murdered in Leipzig in 1812, he was suspected of being a long-sought robber and murderer. The testimony of a maid and his attempts to have compromising material removed (he wanted to cover up his debts as a possible motive) led to his arrest in 1813. Due to the division of Saxony, the process dragged on over several years. In 1820 he was sentenced to 18 years in prison for the murder of the widow Kunhardt. In the case of the murder of Kaufmann Schmidt, Tinius was acquitted for lack of evidence. He was sentenced to another two years in prison for misappropriating church funds. During the process, his second wife divorced him. The valuable library was auctioned off at Weigel in Leipzig in 1821 and even Goethe probably acquired some works, at least for the library in Jena . Tinius appealed in 1823, whereby his total sentence was reduced by a few years, taking into account the long pre-trial detention and his advanced age. Tinius himself protested his innocence all his life. In 1835 he was released from prison and was 71 years old and penniless, so that he lived temporarily in the poor house in Zeitz. In 1840 he moved to Gräbendorf, where he had relatives who looked after him until his death.

Tinius went down in history as the prototype of the bibliomaniac. Several writers dealt with his person. In the fourth volume of the New Pitaval from 1843 the case was presented, Paul Gurk wrote a play in 1936 with the title Magister Tinius , the theologian Klaas Huizing wrote the novel The Book Drinker in 1994 , which, using the usual clichés, is vaguely oriented towards Tinius' fate . In 2005 the novel Der Büchermörder by Detlef Opitz was published , which undertook the daring attempt to completely correct the Tinius picture, whereby the author claims to use sources that were previously inaccessible or thought to be lost, such as the original trial files from 1813. Opitz has doubts about the bibliomaniac's perpetration; what he leaves no doubt about is the accused's passion for books. The first biography was published by Klaus Seehafer . Magister Tinius. Life picture of a criminal out of greed for books (2013) represents the thesis “In dubio pro reo”.

Works

• Strange and instructive life of M. Johann Georg Tinius, pastor of Poserna in the Weissenfels inspection, designed by himself (1813)
• Biblical examination of Brennecke's proof that Jesus lived on earth for about 27 years after his resurrection (1820)
• Judgment Day; whether, how and when it will come (1836)
• Six alarming harbingers of a great world change, visible in the sun and earth (1837)
• The Revelation of St. John (1839, created in custody)

literature

• Mitzschke:  Tinius, Johann Georg . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 38, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1894, pp. 357-359.
• Paul Gurk : Magister Tinius: A drama of conscience. Schlüssel, Bremen 1946 (before: "Donated to all participants at the conference of the Society of Bibliophiles in May 1936 in Chemnitz" 1936)
• Directory of the library of M. Johann Georg Tinius, former preacher at Poserna . Kell, Weißenfels 1821
• Klaas Huizing : The Book Drinker: two novels and nine carpets. Knaus, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-8135-1976-7 (new edition: Der Buchtrinker. Verl. Fränkischer Tag, Bamberg 2004, ISBN 3-936897-06-9 ).
• Jörg Kowalski: Tinius or the library in your head. Ed. Augenweide, Dobis / Bernburg 1998.
• Detlef Opitz : The book killer: a criminal. Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-8218-5763-3 . (Reviews in the FAZ and NZZ 2005).
• Michael Köhlmeier: Turning the pages and other obsessions, narration. Edition 5Plus, 2005. (without ISBN) (Edition 5Plus books are published in a cooperation of five literary bookstores: Klaus Bittner Cologne, Buchhandlung Felix Jud Hamburg, Buchhandlung Lehmkuhl Munich, Buchhandlung Leporello Vienna and Buchhandlung zum Wetzstein Freiburg; there are now eight Bookstores. Added are: Buchhandlung Dombrowsky Regensburg, Buchhandlung Librium Baden and Schleichers Buchhandlung; Kohlhaas & Company Berlin (as of 2019))

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Herbert Heckmann (Ed.): Magister Tinius . Friedenauer Presse, Berlin undated [1989], ISBN 3-921592-53-4 , pp. 17-22.
2. ↑ Euphoria of the quarterly writer. October 30, 2006
3. ↑ https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/rezensions/belletristik/tinius-kom-1282957.html

Web links

• Literature by and about Johann Georg Tinius in the catalog of the German National Library