Johann Klör

Johann Klör (copper engraving by J. Bitthäuser )

Johann Klör , also Johann Kloer , (born April 16, 1751 in Leutershausen , † March 18, 1818 in Würzburg ) was a fruit grower , beekeeper , linen weaver and smallholder . He was of the lower class within the society of that time, managed to achieve low prosperity through diligence and ambition and achieved lasting fame through his biography, which Franz Oberthür wrote about him in the context of educational literature.

Life

Childhood and wandering years

Klör was born in Leutershausen in what was then the Würzburg monastery near Bad Neustadt an der Saale . His father was Leineweber and the local community Shepherd . From childhood Klör had to support his father in these activities. He has been involved with bees since his youth. His mother's brother was a beekeeper and taught him. At nineteen he went on a journey as a weaver journeyman. His aim was to learn how to make weaver blades . In the first year of his wandering life, after he and six comrades had left the first master craftsman because he no longer had a job, bread became so expensive and scarce that, on the way with some comrades on the way down the Spessart to Aschaffenburg , he often paid for money couldn't buy any and had to starve. Often they had to feed on raw grains and leave several sick and exhausted companions behind. In Neuwied they lost another comrade to a soul seller , as people traffickers were called at the time. With his last remaining comrade, Klör hired on a ship to come to Holland and perhaps become a seaman there. In Linz am Rhein their ship had to lend due to a storm. Klör only owed it to his captain that he did not get into the hands of human traffickers there. He did not want to go any further to sea with his comrade and the two hiked via Cologne to Elberfeld , where they found work in an art weaving mill. Klör liked the work, in which he learned a lot. He had to end it because of the employment in a cellar, to his chagrin for health reasons. They migrated back to Cologne, where his fellow journeyman was kidnapped by human traffickers. Klör went back to Neuwied via Trier and Koblenz, where he found work as a rower on a hunting ship that went to Mainz and Frankfurt. From Mainz he went to Herchsheim (today Giebelstadt ) and hired himself as a thresher because there was no employment for Weber. By chance he met his last comrade there, who had managed to escape his captors. He stayed with him for the next time. In November Klör fell ill and they could not find a place to stay, although he owned 40 guilders at the time . He suffered frostbite on his feet during unprotected overnight stays outdoors . After he was able to walk in pain again, they migrated to Mainz , where he could look after himself in the house of the weavers' guild . Over a period of several weeks, sometimes with breaks of several weeks, he managed to walk home painfully. After seven weeks he set off again. Because of a fever, he had to return to his homeland after a short time. It took him half a year to recover. He learned to play the harp before setting off again, this time with the instrument. If he found no employment as a weaver in the following period of wandering, he played the harp at dance events. Once he was the victim of false suspicions in Miltenberg that he was a "stray" and a deserter. Although the masters of the local weavers' guild believed him that the accusations were false, he obtained certificates of repute in order to convince all doubters, including the journeymen and villagers, of his innocence.

In the last year of his wandering, the "Harfenhannes", as he was called because of his instrument, was beaten on the open road by Würzburg hussars on the way from Miltenberg to the parish fair in Marktheidenfeld , where he was supposed to play, on the instructions of the son from the Miltenberg office vogt and mistreated. After there was no more work for his master in Miltenberg, he moved with musicians to the Netherlands. From there he went to Strasbourg , from where he moved home at the age of 27, repeatedly looking for employment as a weaver. During his hikes, he was also employed as a knife and scissors grinder for a while , which was helpful to him later, as he was able to take over this work himself and the machines he later designed himself.

Later years

The church built in 1803 (today rebuilt in the Fladungen open air museum )

Back in Leutershausen, Klör married Margaretha Feller (1751–1816) and had two sons and a daughter. Klör continued to play the harp in the following decades. During his travels, Klör had already tried to acquire as much knowledge as possible in pruning and grafting fruit trees. After his return home as a respected citizen and master craftsman, he considered himself suitable to spread this knowledge among his fellow citizens and to put it into practice. His sons later worked as weavers and made weaver blades like their father. They also shared his enthusiasm for fruit growing and beekeeping. Klör had taken them with him early on on his travels. On these trips, Klör himself often accepted detours lasting several days if he believed he could learn something new somewhere by exchanging knowledge. From 1791 he visited Johann Ludwig Christ every two years , sometimes accompanied by his sons .

Klör was often out and about, both to buy aids for his weaver leaf production and to sell the finished leaves and his woven fabrics. He made these trips on foot mainly in Thuringia , Saxony and the Rhineland . On one of these trips he visited in 1791 under the mediation of Louis Gessner , then pastor of Brend , was associated with the Leutershausen, which even as beekeepers and pomologist worked, Johann Ludwig Christ in Kronberg. He met Christ in his tree nursery and stayed in Kronberg for eight days. Together they grafted young trees and exchanged views on pomological questions, while Klör learned the grafting pruning process from Christ. Since Klör had seen in Kronberg that almost every citizen had planted an orchard there, he did so, reinforced in the decision by a circular from the government that industrial gardens ( school gardens ) must be laid out in every place . Against the resistance of unpopular neighbors, who repeatedly destroyed trees and the fence surrounding the property in the following years, he had established a long-term successful line of business. He expanded his garden area several times by buying neighboring properties.

His skills were also heard in the state capital Würzburg and the state school commission commissioned him to instruct the school teachers in the villages in the creation and maintenance of the school gardens and to report on the condition of the gardens. He traveled to fifteen regional courts in Franconia. While some teachers received him kindly and were happy to receive further education, others let him feel that they were ashamed to be taught by a man of low rank who could only travel on foot. He found school gardens in most of the places where Klör came to act as a representative. However, these were mostly in a neglected condition and very few teachers had heard of the benefits of fruit trees. Where he did not find any gardens, he helped measure and prepare them with reference to the order for the facility by Franz Ludwig von Erthal . At the same time he sold self-grown fruit trees and vines on these trips. After Klör had toured the fifteen districts, he was a government representative in Randersacker . After he had reprimanded a few things there, he was locked in prison by the local council because he did not have the government credentials with him and therefore could not identify himself. After this episode, his state mandate was ended by the school commission. Even without this legitimation, in the following years, when asked, he was happy to help everyone, especially those known from his inspection trips, with advice and action.

When a law was passed in neighboring Saxony, after tree nurseries had to be set up and tree keepers had to be hired, Klör was asked by the municipality of Rohr (today Thuringia) whether he could support the elected but inexperienced tree keeper . Klör agreed to do so. After eight years, during which either Klör or one of his sons had helped at least once in the spring, there were 1422 grafted fruit trees in Rohr. On his way there he had also instructed the tree keeper in Dietzhausen without asking for any remuneration there.

Klör laid gardens and beehives for the brothers Sigismund and Christian Ernst von Rotenhan in Rentweinsdorf and instructed the workers there on how to look after them.

Leutershausen was a Ganerbendorf , in which the jurisdiction was divided between the wealthy nobleman and the Hochstift Würzburg. Around 1800 there was neither a school nor a church in the village, which belonged to the parish of Brend . Klör was selected in 1802 to collect donations to finance a church. The two buildings were built with the 2000 guilders collected by Klör . In addition to his work, which was not limited to collecting during the construction period, but also consisted of bringing in construction timber himself, he had spent another 108 guilders from his private property. At the end of the construction period there was anger and quarrel in the village because Klör had obtained uniform hymn books and a black board made of wood to write down the songs on the instructions of the pastor . Klör was accused of being used as a tool to make the Catholic community Lutheran . In the ensuing riot, he was arrested and spent three days in the jail of the ganerbe who exercised the lower jurisdiction and had to pay an additional 7 guilders fine to be released. This happened after the mayor, on behalf of the community members , had unsuccessfully filed a lawsuit with the regional court as the holder of the jurisdiction of the Grand Duchy of Würzburg and the regional court had spoken out against the removal of the boards. The dispute occupied the community, Klör and the district court until 1808. After the plaque had been removed twice and the perpetrators, including Klör's son, were punished, it disappeared in autumn 1808 and could not be found again. As a result of this dispute, Klör's permission to collect donations was withdrawn. After this was not given to him after several requests, he sued the community in order to have outstanding costs covered on his part.

A short time after the church was built, he built a new house for himself and his family in his orchard. It was built next to the communal brewery at the time and subsequently there were border disputes with the community, which Oberthür commented in such a way that Klör was too good-natured.

Klör's resolution not only to work as a master weaver, but also to produce the necessary weaver blades himself, kept him busy for a long time on his travels in search of a solution to produce better and more regular blades. For fifteen years he had pondered how these could be made by machine. After learning on a business trip to Rheine that there was such a machine in Krefeld , he made his way there. A colleague in the Worms area told him that he could find such a machine near Frankenthal . He inspected this and, with the help of a master locksmith from Gersfeld and a master watchmaker, rebuilt it in an improved manner. He and each of his sons later operated one of these machines. His younger son Johann had improved this to such an extent that he could also produce weaver blades from steel for cloth and silk weaving and not just for linen weaving. Overall, the machine-made sheets accelerated weaving for him and his customers by around a third, because the sheets were made more evenly and there were fewer interruptions to work than those previously made by hand.

In his biography there is a very serious account that Klör healed a passing Saxon soldier from frostbite by laying on a raw herring during the Fourth Coalition War . This remedy would have worked for him during his journeyman journey. Even if the effectiveness of this treatment was confirmed several times at that time, allegedly by the highest military authorities, from today's perspective it is more of a contribution to cultural history.

Klör himself kept around 100 bee colonies. He later shared beehives with other beekeepers, including those in Kaltennordheim, 40 kilometers away . He was known far beyond the local borders as an expert in beekeeping , was often asked for advice and gave lectures on his travels. Because of his skills, his queen bees were popular with other beekeepers. The trust of the other beekeepers found its expression in the fact that they called him “father of the bees”. At times he was a state-appointed beekeeping inspector in the Grand Duchy of Würzburg.

At a later age he wanted to dictate his life experiences and also his knowledge of pomology and beekeeping to a journeyman he employed. Therefore, there was a major argument with his wife for the first time. As a master weaver, he had the right to employ a journeyman, but his wife did not understand that he was engaged in what she saw as useless activities. After she had already burned some written leaves, she turned to the local mayor for help , who initially supported her in trying to drive the "stranger" out of the village. Klör obtained a ruling from the regional court that he could keep his clerk. One of the reasons why Klör had his experiences written down was that the state school commission wanted to distribute his instructions on fruit and beekeeping as a manual. He was also asked by "respected men from the capital (Würzburg)" to write down his memoirs. Because of the creation of the copperplate for the biography created by Franz Oberthür , he was ridiculed as vain.

In the first months of 1818 Klör fell into a moat during one of his business hikes in Thuringia at night, from which he was only freed after hours. After that he was forced to walk through slush for two more hours to get to the messenger car to Würzburg. There he fell ill and died of pneumonia at the age of 67 after bloodletting and receiving the Last Ointment . At the time, his son Andreas was a citizen and beekeeper in Reyersbach and his second son, Johann Bürger, was a leaf binder and tree planter in his native Leutershausen.

Prizes and awards

• At the Agricultural Festival in the Grand Duchy of Würzburg in 1814, he received gold medals for fruit growing and beekeeping.
• At the annual meeting of the Lower Franconian beekeeping association in Würzburg in September 1898, the then regional chairman of the beekeepers, Johann Georg Beringer, gave a lecture on the life and work of Klör. Thereupon those present dedicated to him, financed by collected donations after the lecture, a plaque with the inscription:

"Here lived the benefactor of the community weaver master Johann Klör known as the bee king and district pomologist."

- From the magazine Münchener Bienen-Zeitung , Volume 28, 1906

• A Johann-Klöhr-Strasse in Leutershausen is named after him today.

Voices on Johann Klör and on the biography of Franz Oberthür

• Johann Ludwig Christ wrote about Klör:

“When I got to know him personally and in writing, I dedicate all my respect and affection to a man of such kind heart and curiosity, and his honest and amicable memory is basically more treasured and amusing to me than prince favor and world compliments. If I had him around me, he should be the most familiar in my heart, and real friendship should sweeten our days. "

- Johann Ludwig Christ in a letter

• At the end of the biography he had written about Klör, Franz Oberthür himself summed up that it was a matter of concern to him to introduce the educated reader to a well-deserved fellow citizen of low status, who never received the recognition he deserved. This also as thanks and recognition for Klör himself and as an encouragement for others to emulate him.

• In the Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung Johann Klör was discussed based on the Oberthür biography in 1825. While Klör, despite his low status, was considered worthy of the highest medals and honors because of his knowledge and skills, in which he also allowed others to participate against all odds, the contribution there is then lost in complaints that a passage of the book contributed to it could, "to further upset the already unfriendly mood against the nobility."

• In 1850, Klör was named in the communications of the historical association for Lower Franconia as the most important among the private supporters of arboriculture. Not only did he set up an “excellent” tree nursery, but he also shared his knowledge with others in an unselfish way.

• Heinz Haushofer wrote in his entry in the New German Biography that Oberthür wanted to create a Franconian counterpart to the "philosophical farmer" Jakob Gujer with the biography . Klör would be one of the few examples in which the educational literature would have made the life of a small farmer tangible.

literature

• Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , Hartmann, Sondheim vor der Rhön, reprint 1992, ISBN 3-926523-31-X

See also

• List of pomologists

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b c} Heinz Haushofer :  Klör, Johann. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-428-00193-1 , p. 113 f. ( Digitized version ).
2. ↑ ^{a b} Franz Oberthür : Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia: In addition to Klör's portrait , Sulzbach, 1818, p. 5 ( online )
3. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , p. 101 ( online )
4. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , p. 6/7 ( online )
5. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , p. 7 ( online )
6. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , p. 8 ( online )
7. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , p. 9 ( online )
8. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , pp. 10/11 ( online )
9. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , pp. 12-14 ( online )
10. ^ ^{A b} Franz Oberthür: Philipp Adam Ulrichs Lebensgeschichte , Sulzbach, 2nd supplemented edition 1824, p. 238/239 ( limited preview in the Google book search)
11. ^ ^{A b} Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , p. 15 ( online )
12. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , p. 23 ( online )
13. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , p. 38/39 ( online )
14. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , p. 18 ( online )
15. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , p. 47 ( online )
16. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , pp. 39–41 ( online )
17. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , pp. 45–47 ( online )
18. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , p. 48/49 ( online )
19. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , p. 51 ( online )
20. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , p. 55. ( online )
21. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , pp. 56–58 ( online )
22. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , p. 93/94 ( online )
23. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , pp. 25–31 ( online )
24. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , pp. 32–34 ( online )
25. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , pp. 115–119 ( online )
26. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , pp. 20–24 ( online )
27. ↑ ^{a b} Die Biene , Verlag die Biene, Volume 103, 1967, p. 79
28. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , pp. 101–114 ( online )
29. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , p. 16/17 ( online )
30. ↑ Obituary in Unter-Mainkreis: Intelligence sheet for the Unter-Mainkreis of the Kingdom of Bavaria , 1818, p. 805/806 ( limited preview in the Google book search)
31. ^ Agricultural Association in Bavaria: Wochenblatt , Volume 7, 1815, pp. 212/213 ( limited preview in the Google book search)
32. ↑ Bulletin de la Societe D'Apiculture D'Alsace-Lorraine: Johann Klör , Edition 4, 1998, p. 40
33. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , p. 42 ( online )
34. ^ Franz Oberthür: Johann Klör, a strange farmer in Franconia , p. 120 ( online )
35. ↑ Supplementary sheets for the Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung: 13th year, 1st volume, p. 559/560 ( limited preview in the Google book search)
36. ^ Historical Association of Lower Franconia and Aschaffenburg: Archive of the Historical Association of Lower Franconia and Aschaffenburg , Volume 10, 1850, p. 263 ( limited preview in the Google book search)