Johann Heinrich David von Hennenhofer

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Heinrich von Hennenhofer

Johann Heinrich David von Hennenhofer (born March 12, 1793 in Gernsbach , † January 20, 1850 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a Baden wing adjutant and director of the diplomatic section in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who was associated with the alleged murder of Kaspar Hauser .

Life

The son of a Rhine shipper came to the court chancellery of the Baden court in Karlsruhe in 1812 after a commercial apprenticeship and brief activity as a clerk in a Mannheim bookshop because of his extraordinarily beautiful handwriting . At first he was cabinet courier and secretary, but in the following years worked his way up to the position of inspection adjudicant. With the later Foreign Minister Ludwig Freiherr von Berstett , he accompanied the Grand Duke Karl of Baden on his trip to the Congress of Vienna in 1815 . As a favorite of Grand Duke Ludwig, who had ruled since 1818, he took care of his private correspondence. Ludwig raised Hennenhofer to the nobility in 1828. Under Berstett, Hennenhofer was appointed to the diplomatic section of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he was subsequently often entrusted with secret missions. Politically, he was guided by the monarchical and authoritarian principle. This was shown in the state elections of 1824/25, manipulated by ministerial influence, with the aim of converting the most representative, most bourgeois and most modern of the new German constitutions, the Baden Constitution of 1818, into an old-fashioned one under the dictates of the government. Hennenhofer was on the side of the "Baden reactionaries" (W. v. Hippel) and when the impetus for an address movement against the constitution came from the Berstett area, Hennenhofer tried to influence the civil service in this sense on his travels through Baden. The publication of two poems of praise attributed to Hennenhofer for the Portuguese King Dom Miguel, who ruled with great severity, caused additional hatred among supporters of the constitution . Under the initially liberal government of Grand Duke Leopold from 1830, some fell out of favor, although not all supporters of highly conservative politics, and Hennenhofer was retired in 1831 as a major and adjutant. He then lived at Mahlberg Castle and moved to Freiburg im Breisgau around 1841 , where he died in 1850.

The Kaspar Hauser case

On December 17, 1833, Kaspar Hauser died of the consequences of a stab wound which, according to the judgment of specialist historians, he had inflicted on himself in a (→ faked assassination attempt ). After his death, however, the belief was widespread that the incident was an assassination attempt, especially since the rumor that had been circulating since 1830 about Hauser's hereditary princehood of Baden seemed to confirm this assumption. Joseph Heinrich Garnier , a liberal democrat oppositionist from Baden, published a pamphlet in Strasbourg in March 1834 with the title “Some contributions to the history of Caspar Hauser, plus a dramaturgical introduction.” Garnier lived as a language teacher and journalist in Paris since 1828 and was after the July Revolution of 1830 to a leading speaker and organizer of political refugees from Germany. On April 5, 1833, he was arrested in Karlsruhe, two days after the so-called Frankfurt Wachensturm . His months of isolation, during which the next of kin was neither given a reason for arrest nor granted the right to speak to him, led to a fundamental debate in the Second Chamber about the personal freedom of the citizen and about the separation of judicial and executive branches. In his Kaspar Hauser brochure, Garnier specifically attacked people from the Baden ministerial bureaucracy, including a. the privy councilor Johann Evangelist Engesser , responsible for the school system , who had rejected Garnier's state employment as a teacher. He wrote about Hennenhofer that “ some people wanted to see Hauser's murderer in him . "

In fact, Hennenhofer was denounced as early as January 1834. A game and innkeeper by the name of Becht from Römershag near Bad Brückenau had turned to the government in Munich, which contacted him through the Würzburg District President August von Rechberg: “ Becht's suspicions against Hennenhofer are based on the latter's notoriously bad character close connection with Grand Duke Ludwig, on various suspicious statements made by Grand Duke Carl's allegedly already deceased chamberlaughters [...] finally on the rumor that went through Carlsruhe and the whole of Baden when Kaspar Hauser had happily escaped the danger of the first murder attempt in Nuremberg that namely that this Hauser is the alleged Prince Alexander [sic!] who died in Heidelberg. This Bechtian personality, his aventurier-like behavior, the constant self-praise, the repeated assurances of his unselfishness, his exaggeration about his connections with influential people in Carlsruhe, made such a disgusting impression on me [...] Becht's unsolicited repeated offers of his services to investigate the murderer as he said, on his deepest conviction that Hauser was Prince Alexander and Hennenhofer was his murderer [...]. "Becht offered to research where Hennenhofer was" at the critical time ", but gave no more news. For this, the bailiff Lichtenauer and the senior bailiff Lang investigated in Lahr / Black Forest , where Hennenhofer had been on the day of the suspected attack on Kaspar Hauser. According to her inquiries, " Hennenhofer was in Mahlberg at that time and on the evening of Hauser's wounding with several people in the Post zur Sonne in Lahr ."

The fact that the social climber Hennenhofer belonged to the group around ministers Berstett and Blittersdorf that rejected the constitution , his servility towards the Baden ruling house and his allegedly morally questionable lifestyle made him the ideal target for suspicions in the Kaspar Hauser case: “ Hennenhofer was the liberals of the Vormärz as a favorite and absolutely devoted servant of the autocrat Ludwig hated. In attaching this murder to him, one also discredited the hated political system ”.

Hennenhofer reacted to the serious accusation by blackmailing a pharmacist's assistant who frequented opposition student circles and hiring him as an informant in order to obtain clues about the people behind the murder who denounced him. In connection with the contemporary journalistic reappraisal of the so-called student murder in Zurich, letters from Hennenhofer on the Kaspar Hauser case, which had a very different position, were also made public through the involvement of his informant. But it was precisely this involvement that the Bavarian Minister of the Interior, von Oettingen-Wallerstein , was referring to when, in a communication to King Ludwig I in April 1836, he openly accused Baden of being the mastermind behind Hauser's murder. But “ despite the interior minister's optimism, solid evidence of Hauser's murder on behalf of Baden was not found. "

Diatribes, novels, plagiarism, alleged factual reports, fictitious and real letters as well as alleged memoirs of Hennenhofer created a barely manageable web of general suspicion in the following decades. Regardless of this, at least since the investigations by Antonius van der Linde, historians have agreed that Kaspar Hauser was not an Hereditary Prince of Baden. Nevertheless, Hennenhofer's grave in Freiburg's old cemetery was labeled with the word “murderer” and the like for decades. smeared until the tombstone was removed in 1917 and made into flooring panels a few years later. With these the fountain in the inner courtyard of the newly established Augustinermuseum was moved .

literature

  • Friedrich von Weech (Ed.): Badische Biographien , Vol. 1, Karlsruhe 1875, pp. 360–363 ( online ).
  • Josef Holler: The regulation of the estate of Major Heinrich von Hennenhofer in Freiburg in 1850 . In: Schau-ins-Land 72 (1954), pp. 126-137.
  • Hadwig Hoffmann-Buser: Major Johann Heinrich David von Hennenhofer (1793-1850) and his origins. In the vicinity of Kaspar Hauser. In: Archive for family research and all related areas 53 (1987), pp. 345–373.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolfgang v. Hippel: Friedrich Landolin Karl von Blittersdorf 1792–1861. A contribution to the Baden state parliament and federal politics in Vormärz. W. Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart 1967.
  2. ^ Ernst Münch: General history of the latest time. Sixth volume. Second and last department, Leipzig and Stuttgart 1835, p. 90 ( online ).
  3. ^ Antje Gerlach: German Literature in Swiss Exile , Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 1975, ISBN 978-3-465-01042-5 , p. 257 ( online ).
  4. ^ Inge Rippmann: Börne Index. 1st half volume, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, New York 1985, pp. 211f.
  5. ↑ Negotiations of the assembly of estates of the Grand Duchy of Baden in 1833. Containing the minutes of the second chamber with their annexes, officially published by the chamber itself. Third booklet. Karlsruhe 1833 ( online ).
  6. ^ Antonius van der Linde: Kaspar Hauser. A new historical legend, second volume, published by Chr. Limbarth, Wiesbaden 1887, p. 95 ff.
  7. ^ Lore Schwarzmaier: The Baden court under Grand Duke Leopold and the Kaspar Hauser affair: A new source in the records of Margrave Wilhelm von Baden. In: Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins 134 (1986), pp. 245–262, here p. 250.
  8. ↑ Lukas Gschwend : The student murder of Zurich. A criminal history and criminal process analytical investigation into the unexplained killing of the student Ludwig Lessing from Freienwalde (Prussia) on November 4, 1835. At the same time, a contribution to research into political crime in Vormärz. Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich 2002, pp. 117 ff. ISBN 3-85823-933-X .
  9. ↑ Reinhard Heydenreuter : King Ludwig I and the case of Kaspar Hauser , in: State and administration in Bavaria. Festschrift for Wilhelm Volkert on his 75th birthday, Munich 2003, p. 476.
  10. ↑ Reinhard Heydenreuter: King Ludwig I and the case of Kaspar Hauser , in: State and administration in Bavaria. Festschrift for Wilhelm Volkert on his 75th birthday, Munich 2003, p. 465.
  11. ↑ letter d. Director d. City Freiburg Collections from December 18, 1923, Freiburg City Archives D.Ho.25.
personal data
SURNAME Hennenhofer, Johann Heinrich David from
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat and alleged murderer of Kaspar Hauser
DATE OF BIRTH March 12, 1793
PLACE OF BIRTH Gernsbach
DATE OF DEATH January 20, 1850
Place of death Freiburg in Breisgau