Johann Jakob Höfler

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Johann Jakob Höfler (born February 22, 1714 in Betzenstein ; † February 22, 1781 in Helmstedt ) was a German lawyer and ambassador from Brunswick to the Imperial Court of Justice in Wetzlar .

Its lasting importance results primarily from the bad relationship with his secretary Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem , who committed suicide in October 1772. The event attracted attention beyond Wetzlar and formed the material for the successful epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther , with which the young Johann Wolfgang Goethe achieved fame throughout Europe. Höfler appears in the novel as a never named "envoy" for whom Werther works. The suicide was preceded by months of friction between Höfler and Jerusalem, during which Höfler repeatedly denounced his secretary to the Brunswick court with exaggerated and sometimes inaccurate accusations in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to have his recall . The unjust accusations and the resulting censure from the court, which sought to find a balance between the quarreling, seriously offended and saddened Jerusalem and contributed to its generally poor mental health.

Life

Lawyer in Nuremberg and Helmstedt

Höfler's father was the Protestant clergyman Wilhelm Höfler (1668–1746), who was born in Nuremberg and worked as a pastor and deacon in various parishes on the territory of the imperial city of Nuremberg . Höfler studied law at the University of Altdorf, which belongs to Nuremberg, and in Leipzig , received his master's degree in Leipzig in 1740 and a doctorate in Altdorf in 1742, and then went to Nuremberg as a lawyer.

In the summer of 1858 he accepted a professorship at the law faculty of the Braunschweig University of Helmstedt , which he hoped would be a more pleasant job than a lawyer, and also the financial security of a regular income and a lower tax burden than in Nuremberg. But already in the spring of 1759 he had a violent clash with the dean of the law faculty, Gottfried Ludwig Mencke (1712–1762), whom he was supposed to exonerate as a member of the Schöppenstuhl in the preparation of legal reports. Instead, he worked slowly on the files Mencke gave him and was angry about them. Already at this point, Höfler's tendency to make excessive written complaints about his opponents was evident. He complained about the workload, questioned Mencke's legal abilities, and wished he'd gotten rid of it because it made life sour for him and others. The government took no sides, but only issued a general request to get along and to accelerate the processing of the cases, which is in fact too slow.

As a sub-delegate in Wetzlar

Then he understood how to ingratiate himself with the city counsel Cellarius (the later mayor of the city of Helmstedt). He received a good certificate from him, so that he was appointed to the Imperial Court of Justice in Wetzlar in the summer of 1767. On March 24, 1768 he was raised to imperial nobility. He received the appointment after he had voted in a vote against the Protestant parliamentary group to which he belonged and for the Catholic parliamentary group. In a letter to the Duke of Braunschweig, he affirmed that the appointment had been made without his suspicion. This earned him the reputation of a selfish, quarrelsome, devious, representational and hierarchical person. With the legation secretary assigned to him, the nobleman August Siegfried von Goué , Höfler did not get along and operated and achieved his removal.

Conflict with Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem

Soon after Goué's successor Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem took office, there was also a dispute between him and Höfler. He complained in a long letter to the Duke of Braunschweig about his new secretary: He reported on the alleged rejection of Jerusalem by the President of the Supreme Court, Johann Maria Rudolf Count Waldbott von Bassenheim . The Brunswick chronicler Schrader (1952) was able to refute this account, which is widely used in research based on Kestner's report to Goethe, on the basis of the files and letters from the Ministry. When Jerusalem was expelled from the house by Elisabeth Herd, whom he loved but married, Herd provided Höfler's rumors with social evidence.

Höfler's hostility is definitely related to Jerusalem's suicide, but cannot be seen as the only cause. Goethe sees the concrete reason in the hopeless love of stove when he writes in his memoirs: "Jerusalem's death, which was caused by the unfortunate inclination to the wife of a friend [...]" Correspondingly, in Werther Höfler's literary correspondence only plays a secondary role . Jerusalem's biographer Jakob Minor (1881) assumes that in addition to the rift with his superior, the "inner dissatisfaction with himself, an overly anxious striving for truth and goodness, finally an unhappy love" urged him to decide to end his life . Elschenbroich (1974) sees unrequited love as the decisive motivation of a man who, along with other factors, had become tired of life due to “professional dissatisfaction”.

death

Höfler died on his 67th birthday on February 22, 1781 in Helmstedt with no heirs. He bequeathed his fortune to relatives, his neighbor Prof. Carpzow and his housekeeper.

literature

  • Roger Paulin: The Wilhelm Jerusalem Case. On the suicide problem between education and sensitivity. Wallstein, Göttingen 1999, ISBN 3-89244-044-1 .
  • Isa Schikorsky: Jerusalem, Karl Wilhelm . In: Horst-Rüdiger Jarck, Dieter Lent u. a. (Ed.): Braunschweigisches Biographisches Lexikon: 8th to 18th century . Appelhans Verlag, Braunschweig 2006, ISBN 3-937664-46-7 , p. 376f.
  • Johann Christian Kestner: No clergyman accompanied him - About the suicide of Carl Wilhelm Jerusalem . Ed .: Manfred Wenzel. Imhofverlag 2015, ISBN 978-3-7319-0218-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Erich Schrader: Johann Jakob Höfler, the archetype of the ambassador in Goethe's Werther . In: Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch . tape 33 , 1952 ( digitized version at the University Library of Braunschweig ).
  2. ^ Johann Christoph Adelung : von Höfler, Johann Jacob . In: General Scholar Lexicon . Supplementary Volume 2, C – J. Leipzig 1787, p.  2036–2037 ( full text in Google Book Search). See also the following article on Höfler's father.
  3. ^ A b Ernst Heinrich Kneschke: New general German nobility lexicon . tape 4 , 1863, p. 396 ( full text in Google Book Search).
  4. ↑ Erich Schrader: Johann Jakob Höfler, the archetype of the ambassador in Gothes Werther . In: Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch , 33, 1952, p. 125
  5. ^ Roger Paulin: The case of Wilhelm Jerusalem: to the suicide problem between enlightenment and sensitivity . Göttingen 1999, p. 20
  6. ↑ Johann Christian Kestner: No clergyman accompanied him - About the suicide of Carl Wilhelm Jerusalem . Ed .: Manfred Wenzel. Imhofverlag 2015, p. 10, 47
  7. ↑ Erich Schrader: Johann Jakob Höfler, the archetype of the ambassador in Gothes Werther . In: Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch , 33, 1952, 136.
  8. ↑ Johann Christian Kestner: No clergyman accompanied him - About the suicide of Carl Wilhelm Jerusalem . Ed .: Manfred Wenzel. Imhofverlag 2015, p. 13
  9. ↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: From my life. Poetry and truth . In: Goethe's works. Hamburg edition in 14 volumes . tape 9 . Hamburg, Thirteenth Book, pp. 586 ( zeno.org - 1948 ff.).
  10. ↑ Jakob Minor:  Jerusalem, Karl Wilhelm . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1881, pp. 783-785.
  11. ^ Adalbert Elschenbroich:  Jerusalem, Karl Wilhelm. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 10, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1974, ISBN 3-428-00191-5 , pp. 416-418 ( digitized version ).
  12. ↑ Erich Schrader: Johann Jakob Höfler, the archetype of the ambassador in Gothes Werther . In: Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch , 33, 1952, p. 153
personal data
SURNAME Höfler, Johann Jakob
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH February 22, 1714
PLACE OF BIRTH Betzenstein
DATE OF DEATH February 22, 1781
Place of death Helmstedt