Karl August von Wangenheim

Karl August Freiherr von Wangenheim, 1819

Karl August Freiherr von Wangenheim (born March 14, 1773 in Gotha ; † July 19, 1850 in Coburg ) was a German lawyer, diplomat and politician and briefly Minister of Culture of the Kingdom of Württemberg .

Life

Karl August von Wangenheim came from an old Thuringian noble family . He was born as the son of General Karl Bernhard Heinrich von Wangenheim , who served in the Duchy of Saxony-Gotha-Altenburg, and attended high school in the residential city of Gotha. He studied law in Jena and Erlangen . In addition, he was very open to other areas of spiritual life. After completing his studies, he joined the government of the Duchy of Saxony-Coburg-Saalfeld as a councilor . After Wangenheim was promoted to Vice President of the government, he got into a technical dispute with the leading minister Theodor von Kretschmann . As a result of this conflict, Wangenheim was dismissed from service by Duke Franz . Wangenheim sued the Reichshofrat against this impeachment and published the dispute in a two-volume work published in Coburg in 1805. Although the Reichshofrat decided in favor of Wangenheim, the judgment had no practical consequences because of the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. An assignment in private matters from the Duchess of Saxony-Hildburghausen took Wangenheim to Stuttgart .

Career

In 1806 he entered the service of the new King Friedrich as President of the Württemberg Upper Finance Chamber . In 1811 Wangenheim was appointed President of the Upper Tribunal and Curator of the University of Tübingen . Under the influence of Professor Eschenmayer , Wangenheim wanted to realize a political system influenced by ideas of natural philosophy. In the spring of 1815, the dispute over the constitution broke out in Württemberg. Wangenheim was in the summer of 1815, a document entitled The idea of the Constitution with special attention to old Wuerttemberg state constitution etc. out. He tried to mediate between the views of the king and those of the estates . This prompted King Friedrich to appoint Wangenheim as a member of a commission that was supposed to create a good understanding between the crown and the estates. In the autumn of 1815 Wangenheim submitted 14 articles to the meeting of the estates as the basis for their deliberations, which he wanted to see as an important concession to the estates. Nevertheless, Wangenheim was only able to gain political support and personal trust from a few members. These few members included the lawyer Griesinger and the publisher Cotta . Despite the king's increasing concerns about the constitutional struggles, Wangenheim stuck to its goal of getting the constitution through. In 1816 he published a report to the king in which he praised a constitution as the only remedy against secret societies. Hegel supported Wangenheim's ideas in the Heidelberg Literature Yearbooks (1817, No. 66 ff.), But Wangenheim's understanding with the Württemberg estates suffered noticeably.

King Friedrich died on October 30, 1816. The new King Wilhelm began a series of reforms in different areas. Wangenheim took over the Ministry of Culture in the so-called "Reform Ministry Wangenheim-Kerner". But he made no headway on the constitutional matter. Wangenheim came under increasing pressure and in November 1817 he took his leave. King Wilhelm appointed him envoy to the Bundestag . There he was an advocate of the so-called triad idea , which also corresponded to his natural-philosophical principle of unity in the trinity. With a changing number of like-minded colleagues, he resisted Metternich's policies in Frankfurt for several years , which at times even contradicted the will of the government in Stuttgart. Wangenheim's relationship with the Württemberg Foreign Minister, Wintzingerode, suffered from this in particular . Wangenheim wrote about the Karlovy Vary resolutions that “in the end disaster and revolutions” can be expected. Outside the Bundestag, Wangenheim took part in the conferences of the states of the Upper Rhine ecclesiastical province , which he opened in Frankfurt on March 24, 1818. He was also interested in the affairs of the customs union . He was the focus of the Darmstadt trade conference of 1820, where he tried to mediate between the Rhenish free traders and the Bavarian protective customs officers. At the end of the conference, however, no tangible result could be achieved. At the Bundestag Wangenheim and his partisans seemed increasingly intolerable to Prince Metternich. In the spring of 1823 Austria and Prussia demanded that Wangenheim be recalled by the Bundestag, which then took place in July 1823.

Wangenheim now devoted himself to his social and scientific interests in Dresden and then in Coburg. He was a promoter of Friedrich List's ideas . In 1833 he won a mandate for the second chamber of the Württemberg state estates in the Oberamt Ehingen . The election of Wangenheim was, however, declared invalid by the members of the Chamber, as Wangenheim was domiciled outside of Württemberg. Until the end of his life, Wangenheim remained dominated by the thought of the triad idea. Also worth mentioning are his son, the Prussian government councilor Karl Hermann von Wangenheim (1807–1890) and his wife Marie (1814–1891), b. Aichner Freiin von Heppenstein, who lived in Berlin from 1853 and became friends with the writer Theodor Fontane . Some Catholic motifs in Fontane's novels can be traced back to the von Wangenheim family and especially to the Catholic Marie.

Honors

• 1818 Grand Cross of the Order of the Württemberg Crown
• 1830 Dr. hc from the State Economics Faculty at the University of Tübingen

Works

• Also a contribution to the history of the organization of the coburg-saalfeldischen lands by the minister Th. Kretzschmann , Coburg 1805
• On the separation of the representative body into two sections and on landscape committees , September 1816
• The election of Baron v. Wangenheim, K. Württ. Minister of State a. D., in the Württemb. Estates meeting , 1832
• Austria, Prussia and pure Germany organically united to form the German federal state on the basis of the German confederation , Weimar 1849
• The Three Kings Alliance and Radowitz's Policy , 1851

literature

• Friedrich Wintterlin :  Wangenheim, Karl August Freiherr von . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 41, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1896, pp. 153-155.
• Karl Moersch: Bulky compatriots. DRW-Verlag, Leinfelden-Echterdingen 1996, pp. 102 to 104
• Frank Raberg : Biographical handbook of the Württemberg state parliament members 1815-1933 . On behalf of the Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-17-016604-2 , p. 987 f .
• Theodor Fontane: The Wangenheim chapter. In: TF: works, writings and letters. Abt. III, 4th vol. Munich 1973, pp. 1049-1061
• Martin Lowsky: Marie von Wangenheim, the friend from Upper Swabia. In: Communications from the Theodor Fontane Society. 14/1998, pp. 30-35

Web links

• Works by and about Karl August von Wangenheim  in the German Digital Library

predecessor	Office	successor
Karl August von Mandelsloh	Württemberg envoy to the German Confederation 1818–1823	August Heinrich von Trott zu Solz (from 1824)