Karl Löning (assassin)

This article deals with the pharmacist Karl Löning. For more people with this name, see the disambiguation page Karl Löning .

Karl Löning (also Carl Löning ; * 1791 in Idstein ; † July 18, 1819 in Wiesbaden ) was a German pharmacist and assassin .

Life

Karl Löning attended high school in Idstein and trained as a pharmacist in Aschaffenburg and Nuremberg. From 1814 he was a pharmacist in the Lindenapotheke Idstein , which belonged to his father Clamor Philipp Lönig.

On July 1, 1819, Löning committed an assassination attempt on the Nassau district president Carl Friedrich Emil von Ibell in Bad Schwalbach . The attack failed, Ibell survived and Löning was arrested. In prison, he inflicted such serious injuries from swallowing broken glass that he died on July 18.

Due to the temporal proximity and the similar approach, Löning's assassination is probably an act of imitation of the attack by Karl Ludwig Sand on the writer August von Kotzebue . The journalistic distribution and on the part of the national also the glorification of Sand's deed certainly contributed to this .

The two attacks were the trigger and pretext for the so-called Karlovy Vary resolutions . The ruling dynasties and governments saw in the attempted assassination further evidence of further conspiracies against the established order and thus a threat scenario to be combated. National and liberals, on the other hand, tried to portray Löning's act as that of a psychopathic loner.

Löning was a member of the Idstein German Society, founded in 1814, and was in contact with Fritz and Wilhelm Snell as well as with the " Blacks of Giessen ". Involvement or conspiracy of a larger group was suspected but could never be proven. The possible reasons for the act were the ban on the German societies in Nassau imposed by Ibell in 1815 and Löning's experience during his botanical studies. He was directly confronted with complaints from the rural population about the Nassau government and administration. Immediate trigger could have been Ibell's dismissal of Löning's friend Snell because of a pamphlet presumably written by him in May 1818 and the similar case of the Wiesbaden official Bergmann in March 1819.

literature

• Adolf Genth: Carl Löning's murderous attack on the district president Ibell from Wiesbaden (July 1, 1819). In: Nassauische Annalen 13 (1874), pp. 1-18.
• Wilhelm Sauer: The Duchy of Nassau in the years 1813-1820. Wiesbaden 1893, pp. 100-149.
• Wilfried Schüler: The Duchy of Nassau 1806–1866. German history in miniature. Wiesbaden 2006, pp. 96-101.
• Wolf-Heino Struck : The pursuit of civil liberty and national unity from the point of view of the Duchy of Nassau . In: Nassauische Annalen , 77th Volume, 1966. pp. 142-216.

Web link

• Note in the chronology of Idstein ( Memento from April 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive )