Karl Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach

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Duke Karl Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach
Karl Bernhard 1812, portrait by Rudolph Suhrlandt
Bernhard as Dutch lieutenant general
Bernhard - Monument in The Hague, Lange Voorhout
Approximate construction of the regular 7-corner after Karl Bernhard
Coffins of Karl Bernhard (front right) and his wife Ida (front left)

Karl Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach , called Bernhard, (born May 30, 1792 in Weimar ; † July 31, 1862 in Liebenstein ) was prince and duke of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach as well as a travel writer and mathematician .

Life

Origin and family

Bernhard comes from the house of the Ernestine Wettins . He was the second son of Grand Duke Karl August von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach (1757-1828) from his marriage to Luise (1757-1830), daughter of Landgrave Ludwig IX. from Hessen-Darmstadt . His older brother Karl Friedrich became Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in 1828, his sister Karoline had been Hereditary Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Schwerin since 1810 . Bernhard had been baptized and carefully trained by Johann Gottfried Herder .

Military career

As the younger son of the house, Bernhard was destined for a military career and was trained in the Saxon Guard Grenadier Regiment in Dresden . With the Saxon army , which belonged to the Rhine Confederation , Bernhard fought at the age of 17 in the Battle of Wagram and was subsequently awarded the Legion of Honor by Napoleon for his bravery . After his family intervened, he did not take part in the Russian campaign , but was sent on a gentlemanly journey that took him to Italy and Paris .

After the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig he went back to the Saxon military service, which he left after the Congress of Vienna because the strength of the Saxon army had been halved there. Instead, he entered the service of the newly established Kingdom of the United Netherlands . As a colonel of the Nassau-Orange regiment and from June 15, 1815 as commander of the 2nd Brigade, he fought in the battle of Quatre-Bras .

With his troops from the 2nd Dutch Infantry Regiment, he was the first to reach Quatre-Bras , an intersection of two streets, and recognized their strategic importance. Addressing his officers, he remarked: “Gentlemen, I have never heard of a campaign begin with a retreat. Hold the crossroads! ”( Karl Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach : Article“ Waterloo - a European victory ”in the FAZ from June 17, 2015).

His troops managed to repel the vanguard of the French, from which the battle developed. He later fought in the Battle of Waterloo . Then he moved with his troops to Paris. After the peace he was commander of an infantry brigade in Ghent and promoted to major general. He became military commander of the East Flanders Province and later inspector of the third naval command and an infantry division . In 1825 and especially in 1828, when he was proposed by Russia at the London Conference , Bernhard was a candidate for the newly created throne of Greece , which he firmly refused.

In 1830 the Belgian Revolution took place . Bernhard was initially used as the commander of the first Dutch division in the fortress of Antwerp and near Breda and Maastricht . Later, at the head of the 2nd Dutch division, he was able to destroy a fleeing Belgian corps near Hasselt and conquer Tirlemont . After the armistice in August 1832, he was separated from his family and commanded the Observation Corps in Noord-Brabant .

Freemasonry

Bernhard was a freemason . After the Battle of Wagram he was introduced to the Weimar Lodge Amalia by his father. During his military service in Ghent, where he founded a military lodge with like-minded people, he tried Freemasonry to influence the moral lifestyle of his soldiers, but also to increase the Protestant influence of the Netherlands in French-dominated Catholic Belgium.

Travel and math

At a young age, Bernhard made several trips with his father. In 1811 he traveled to Vienna , Graz , Bologna and visited antique collections in Rome in early 1812 . Bernhard began his own study trips from 1823. He first went to England , Ireland and Scotland for several months to visit commercial and military institutions as well as natural history and art collections. In April 1825 he traveled to North America; For 11 months, from July 26, 1825 to June 16, 1826, he traveled to the United States and Canada , also with the idea of ​​settling there permanently. He wrote very detailed travel memories about his trip to America.

After the end of the Belgian Revolution, Bernhard traveled with his eldest son Prince Wilhelm (1819–1839) at the invitation of Tsar Nicholas I through Russia and visited St. Petersburg , Novgorod , Moscow , Tula and Kiev , where the Duke met the prince Met Paskevich . The trip then continued to Voznesensk in the Ukraine , where Bernhard observed Russian military maneuvers . From Voznesensk he turned south to Odessa and the Crimea . Then Bernhard left Russia and traveled to Constantinople , Sicily , Naples and Rome. There his son fell ill with typhus , but was able to return home. After his return, however, he died in Holland as a result of pneumonia .

After the death of his eldest son Prince Wilhelm and the reduction of the Dutch army, Bernhard initially left military service and lived as a private citizen. He and his family first moved to Mannheim , where he joined a group of scholars from Heidelberg at the court of Grand Duchess Stephanie . In 1847 he traveled with his family to Madeira at the invitation of his sister-in-law, the widowed Queen Adelaide of Great Britain and Ireland .

Shortly after his return he took over command of the Dutch-East Indian army on Java . After three years he returned to Germany for health reasons. In the meantime his wife had also died and Bernhard finally withdrew into private life. He lived partly in Weimar and in Liebenstein. In 1861 he fell seriously ill and died a year later.

Bernhard also dealt with mathematics . He is known to have found an approximate construction of the side of a regular polygon , published in a textbook on geometry in 2 volumes that was published in Jena in 1842 .

His coffin is in the Princely Crypt of the Weimar Historical Cemetery .

Marriage and offspring

Bernhard married Ida (1794-1852) in Meiningen on May 30, 1816 , daughter of Duke Georg I of Saxe-Meiningen and sister of Adelheid , the future British Queen Adelaide, with whom he had the following children:

  • Luise (1817-1832)
  • Wilhelm (1819–1839)
  • Amalie (* / † 1822)
  • Eduard (1823–1902) ⚭ 1851 Lady Augusta Gordon-Lennox (1827–1904), "Countess von Dornburg"
  • Hermann (1825–1901) ⚭ 1851 Princess Auguste of Württemberg (1826–1898)
  • Gustav (1827–1892) ⚭ 1870 Pierina Marocchia di Marcaini (1845–1879), "Freiin von Neiperg"
  • Anna (1828–1864)
  • Amalia (1830–1872) ⚭ 1853 Prince Heinrich of the Netherlands (1820–1879)

plant

  • Duke Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach: The diary of the journey through North America in the years 1825 and 1826. (= Foundation for Romantic Research. Volume 60). Edited by Walter Hinderer and Alexander Rosenbaum. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-8260-6051-9 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Karl Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Waterloo - a European victory? , FAZ from June 17, 2015.
  2. Gustav Seibt: Where freedom lives . In: sueddeutsche.de . August 27, 2017, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed August 29, 2017]).
  3. Duke Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach: The diary of the trip through North America in the years 1825 and 1826 (= Foundation for Romantic Research. Volume 60). Edited by Walter Hinderer and Alexander Rosenbaum. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2017.