Karl Mathy

Karl Mathy. Lithograph after a drawing by Valentin Schertle, 1846.

Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Mathy (born March 17, 1807 in Mannheim ; † February 3, 1868 in Karlsruhe ) was a journalist and politician from Baden . After he had to emigrate to Switzerland at a young age for political reasons and after his return to Baden in 1840 he still belonged to the left opposition, shortly before the outbreak of the March Revolution he became one of the leading representatives of moderate southern German liberalism .

Among other things, he was the editor of the Deutsche Zeitung , co-organizer of the Heppenheim conference , member of the Fifties Committee and leading representative of the casino parliamentary group in the Frankfurt National Assembly . After the suppression of the revolution, he began a career as a banker, later switched back to the Baden civil service and finally became head of government in Baden in 1866 as President of the State Ministry .

Origin and education

Mathy was the son of the high school professor Johann Peter Arnold Mathy. After studying at the Jesuit College in Heidelberg, he was originally a Catholic clergyman, before he switched to teaching after disputes with the Lazarist movement, converted to Protestantism in 1805 and, at an advanced age, founded a family with his long-time housekeeper, Anna-Maria Joerg, with eight children.

After graduating from the Lyceum, Mathy studied law and camera science at the University of Heidelberg from 1824 to 1828 . There he became a member of the Old Heidelberg Burschenschaft in 1824 . After completing his studies, he traveled to Paris for study purposes, but also for political reasons . Enthusiastic about philhellenism , Mathy hoped to receive funds from the Philhellenistic Committee for a trip to Greece in order to actively support the local freedom movement. However, after he was not accepted into Count Harcourt's volunteer association, he returned to Heidelberg and passed the entrance examination into the civil service with "very good". In 1829 he joined the Baden state service as a camera intern in Mannheim. In 1832 he moved to the tax office in Karlsruhe. Well judged by his superiors, Mathy seemed to have a swift career in civil service, especially since the new Grand Duke Leopold pursued a comparatively liberal course.

Opposition journalist in the pre-March period

In Karlsruhe, Mathy regularly took part in the debates in the Second Chamber of the Estates Assembly as a spectator and began to report for several local newspapers on the debates that had become more controversial in France after the July Revolution . In 1831 he published the text "Proposals for the introduction of a wealth tax in Baden" , with which he drew the attention of Karl von Rotteck . Rotteck then mediated Mathy as a reporter on the Baden chamber negotiations to the renowned Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung . At the same time Mathy wrote articles for other newspapers. In 1832 Mathy founded his own political publication, the magazine “ Der Zeitgeist ”, in which he advocated German unification and political reforms.

During this time of material security, Mathy announced the wedding with Anna Maria Franziska Stromeyer. The wedding planned for 1833 initially failed due to the consequences of his political commitment, before it could take place in Schwetzingen on July 17th that same year . Mathy had attended the Hambach Festival as a spectator . In the subsequent persecution of leading participants, he helped acquaintances and friends, such as his brother-in-law Franz Stromeyer , to escape the arrests. This and the suppressive measures taken by the German Confederation after the Frankfurt Wachensturm led to his being removed from office. In 1833 Mathy was released from civil service and taken into custody for four weeks. Afterwards he earned his living rather meagerly with articles for the Rotteck-Welcker State Lexicon and occasional journalistic work.

When the Mainz Central Investigation Commission demanded his arrest for the third time from the Baden government in 1835 due to his diverse contacts with the political opposition, he fled with his family via Strasbourg to Switzerland, where he was supported by Johann Rudolf Schneider and as a teacher and journalist in Biel and Bienne Aarau worked. As a colleague of Mazzini , he wrote articles for the Konstanzer Seeblätter and La jeune Suisse, among others . After he was taken into custody in Switzerland on suspicion of belonging to Mazzini's secret society Young Europe , he escaped access by the Swiss authorities in 1836 and moved to Grenchen in 1837 . In October 1837, the investigation against Mathy was stopped and he was no longer threatened with expulsion. In the following years Mathy lived as a teacher in Grenchen. He returned to Karlsruhe in 1840 after being acquitted of the political allegations there. He earned his living as a distinguished journalist and wrote for the local Badische Zeitung , the Kölnische Zeitung and the Mannheimer Journal , among others . From 1842 he was editor of the state parliament newspaper . In addition to daily political contributions, he made a name for himself above all in questions of financial policy. As early as 1835, Mathy had published a paper about Baden's accession to the German Customs Union . In 1837 a work by him about the replacement of tithe in the canton of Bern was awarded a prize.

Turn towards the moderate liberal

Contemporary representation of a meeting of the Second Chamber of the Baden Estates Assembly in 1845.

Mathy speaks from the balcony of the Mannheim town hall, protected by the Mannheim vigilante from protesting supporters of Hecker .

In 1842 Mathy became a member of the second chamber of the Baden Estates Assembly and in 1846 also a member of the Mannheim municipal council. Since 1844 he took part in the meeting known as the Hallgarten Circle at Adam von Itzstein's estate in Hallgarten . Due to his political past and his journalistic activities, Mathy quickly became one of the most influential members of the opposition in the assembly of estates.

After the end of the conservative era of Blittersdorf , Baden, under the governments of Boeckh and in particular Bekk, relied on a liberal reform program that at least partially addressed the long-term demands of the liberal opposition in the meeting of the estates, which was traditionally characterized by civil servants and professors. Not least because of the opportunities this opened up, for example the comparatively freer press, a more radical wing of politicians such as Friedrich Hecker , Lorenz Brentano and Joseph Ignatz Peter formed in the meeting of the estates at the end of 1846 , who considered the previous policy of the liberal opposition to be too willing to compromise and not looked decidedly enough. For a long time Mathy was one of the connecting elements between these wings and was increasingly popular with both sides, both the pejorative moderates around Georg Gottfried Gervinus and Carl Theodor Welcker , as well as the more radical politicians who call themselves “the whole” made revolutionary demands, recognized as one of their own. The unifying element was in particular the struggle for the granting of further civil rights, in which Mathy often pointed out the still existing censorship. Despite all the criticism, Mathy was ready to support the government on factual issues. He was particularly considered a specialist in economic issues and "embodied [...] to a large extent the forerunner of a real politician" . During the economic crisis of 1847, he agreed to a government proposal to support some of the country's larger factories with state funds in order to prevent the rise in unemployment. This moderate stance made the political differences between Mathy and more radical oppositionists such as Friedrich Hecker, Gustav Struve , Joseph Fickler and Lorenz Brentano stronger.

When the left wing became more radicalized in the spring of 1848 and the "whole" more and more called for open violence and the overthrow of social conditions, Mathys broke with the left after a meeting of the estates meeting at the end of 1847 The appointment of a duel between Hecker and Mathy that was not carried out had come.

From 1848 at the latest, Mathy represented a moderate liberal program aimed at a united Germany in the form of a constitutional monarchy. In addition, in contrast to the radical democrats, he advocated trade and business freedom and the lifting of customs borders . However, he was by no means the representative of unlimited economic liberalism in the wake of Adam Smith . Rather, Mathy called for government action in the economic field to compensate for the “ disparity between capital and labor ”. So he pleaded for the creation of a bank in Baden or the expansion of the railway network. In addition, there were calls for a tax reform that was supposed to balance out all too large differences in ownership, improvement of educational opportunities for the lower classes and an active social policy. These included, among other things, the demand for shorter working hours, insurance institutions and the creation of new earning opportunities. According to Mathy, it was not a question of “ feeding idlers with monastery soup ” as before , but a liberal social policy should serve to “create work - the best poor relief that at the same time makes the poor intelligent while they would deteriorate in another way . “In the long term, social policy should serve to implement the model of southern German liberalism, a middle-class civil society ( Lothar Gall ). The desired economic upswing should serve to support and expand the middle class. Such a society is better suited to guarantee an appropriate distribution of the national income than “ large entrepreneurs with many day workers. "

Liberal Journalism and March Revolution

First edition of the Deutsche Zeitung on July 1, 1847 with Mathy mentioned in the editor's line.

The meeting place of the Heppenheimer assembly: The half moon in Heppenheim. Original steel engraving by Grünewald / Lambert, 1840.

In 1843 Mathy founded the Bassermann'sche Verlagbuchhandlung together with Friedrich Daniel Bassermann in Mannheim , which relied on a political publishing program in the spirit of liberalism from the start. The liberal-intellectual Deutsche Zeitung , which appeared in Heidelberg from July 1, 1847, became the publisher's journalistic flagship . Bassermann and Mathy, together with liberals from all over the German Confederation , saw the Deutsche Zeitung as a political gathering movement that was supposed to bring together the political lines of action in the individual states of the German Confederation and to help develop a common liberal opinion and give it political support. Together with Gervinus, Gustav Höfken , Karl Mittermaier and Ludwig Häusser , Mathy was also on the editorial board of the newspaper and particularly wrote articles on economic policy. After the newspaper was sold to the Weidmannsche Buchhandlung on October 1, 1848, Mathy became a freelancer for the Deutsche Zeitung.

During a visit by David Hansemann in 1847, who served the organization of the Deutsche Zeitung, the idea was born in Mathys' office that the liberal chamber representatives in the German states should coordinate with one another in order to put pressure on the to raise conservative governments of the German Confederation. Together with Bassermann and Hansemann, Mathy was then the organizer of the Heppenheim conference on October 10, 1847, which was supposed to implement these goals. The political program largely formulated there by Hansemann, which envisaged the unification of Germany through the expansion of the German Customs Union into a political institution with an executive and customs parliament, was made available to the public through a Mathys report in the Deutsche Zeitung and led to a lively discussion in the German Confederation. Likewise, in February 1848, Mathy supported Bassermann's proposal, based on the Heppenheim discussions, in the second chamber of the Estates Assembly, to set up a representative body in the German Confederation. This motion is widely considered to be one of the milestones of the March Revolution .

Frankfurt National Assembly and Small German Solution

The moderate reformist attitude and rejection of republicanism and radicalism determined Mathys actions during the revolution of 1848/49. On February 27, 1848 he was President of the Mannheim People's Assembly and became a captain in the Mannheim People's Army. In March of the same year he was a participant in the Heidelberg assembly , which issued the invitations to the pre-parliament , to which Mathy also belonged. Then Mathy was a member of the Fifties Committee and its authorized representative on the Schleswig-Holstein question . In this committee he continued to plead not for a revolutionary solution, but for a reform of the German Confederation.

His anti-radical stance was evident on April 8, 1848, when he illegally ordered the arrest of the chief editor of the radical Seeblätter , Joseph Fickler , at the Karlsruhe train station . This action was one of the immediate triggers for the Hecker uprising , with which Hecker also wanted to forestall his feared arrest. The anti-radical stance led Mathy to join the Baden government in March and belong to it from April 1848 to May 1849 as a less influential minister with no portfolio. At the same time he became a member of the Baden State Council.

From May 18, 1848, Mathy was a member of the Calw parliament in the Frankfurt National Assembly , where he was one of the leading members of the casino parliamentary group from the start . Although Mathy actually rejected the establishment of a provisional central authority by Heinrich von Gagern without the consent of the national governments , he nevertheless joined the new central government as Undersecretary of State in the Reich Ministry of Finance. He held this post from August 1848 to May 1849. Mathy played an important role in the internal deliberations of the central authority, but also as a member of the National Assembly. On May 21, 1849, together with other members of the Casino faction, he resigned his mandate due to the radicalization of the National Assembly. During the subsequent imperial constitution campaign , which led to the expulsion of the Grand Duke in Baden as part of the Baden Revolution , Mathy stuck to his line of government loyal to the government and from May to June 1849 took over the Finance Ministry as President of Grand Duke Leopold's government in exile for a few weeks.

Mathy then lived briefly as a journalist in Frankfurt. He continued to try to achieve the unification of Germany in the sense of a small German solution and supported the Union policy of Prussia as the leading protagonist of the Gotha party, as conceived by Joseph von Radowitz . In addition to participating in the Gotha post-parliament , he was one of the liberals who repurchased the Deutsche Zeitung from the Weidmannsche Buchhandlung in order to convert it into a party organ of the small German liberals. In 1850 Mathy was a member of the Erfurt Union Parliament . After the financial failure of the Deutsche Zeitung and the foreseeable end of union politics, Mathy lost his seat on the Mannheim municipal council. As a result, Mathy temporarily withdrew from politics and worked again as a journalist in Mannheim, including for the Weser newspaper , the Leipziger Grenzbote and the Mannheimer Journal .

Career as a banker

In August 1854 Mathy also left the Bassermann'sche publishing bookstore and, on the mediation of Gustav Mevissen , went to the Schaaffhausen'schen Bankverein in Cologne as a manager . In 1855 he became director of David Hansemann's direction of Disconto-Gesellschaft in Berlin , where he was involved in the transformation of the cooperative bank into a share-based credit institution. Originally intended by Disconto-Gesellschaft as a long-term investment, Mathy had negotiated in Gotha to found a bank for Coburg-Gotha . For this reason he became the first director of Gothaer Privatbank in Gotha in 1857 and 1858 respectively . This appointment came about against the resistance of Hansemann, because at that time both were quarreling and only later reconciled. Mathy could not play a lasting role in the development of the bank, as he soon left the institute and instead became the first director of the Allgemeine Deutsche Credit-Anstalt in Leipzig in 1859 .

Re-entry into the Baden civil service

With the reaction time running out, Mathy began to speak up again in political pamphlets in Gotha. In 1862 Mathy was appointed to the Baden government of Anton von Stabel as a supporter of the small German solution . He took over the position of the chairman council in the Ministry of Finance and the management of the court domain chamber. In 1864 he became the first president of the newly created Ministry of Commerce. In addition, since 1863 he was the country's representative at the German Customs Union. Above all, as Minister of Commerce, Mathy played an important role in the expansion of the railways and transport system, including the establishment of the Black Forest Railway and the Badische Odenwald Railway .

After the resignation of Foreign Minister Franz von Roggenbach , he continued to advocate, ultimately in vain, the small German solution. After he could not prevent Baden from entering the war on the part of Austria in the war of 1866 , Mathy resigned from his government offices.

After the Prussian victory and the subsequent resignation of Anton von Stabel's government, Grand Duke Friedrich I. appointed Mathy as President of the State Ministry on July 27, 1866. In addition, he again took over the Ministry of Finance and Trade, where he continued to strive to improve the transport infrastructure, for example by preparing for the conclusion of the Mannheim Act on navigation on the Rhine. His most important political goal as head of government was Baden's connection to the North German Confederation . Last but not least, this included preventing a southern alliance , as provided for in the Peace of Prague . In addition, he tried to bring Baden's military structures into line with those of the North German Confederation and influenced the reorganization of the German Customs Union, which now also received parliamentary representation.

Domestically, the Mathys government meant a cooling of relations with the Second Chamber. In contrast to the previous Stabel government, Mathy and his interior minister Julius Jolly governed without regard to parliamentary majorities. Although the government upheld the rule of law, it did not involve the Chamber in the government process. Accordingly, the Second Chamber vehemently and ultimately successfully demanded the codification of all those rights that it had de facto possessed under Stabel, in particular laws on freedom of the press and ministerial responsibility. The constitutional amendments of the Mathy government in 1867 and 1868 gave the Assembly of Estates the right to initiate legislation and the right to prosecute ministers. The Second Chamber was also given the right to choose its own President.

Mathy died on the night of February 2 to 3, 1868 of a heart condition.

Fonts

• Proposals for the introduction of a wealth tax in Baden. 1831.
• Considerations about Baden's accession to the German customs union . Self-published by the author, Karlsruhe 1834.

literature

• Erich Angermann : Karl Mathy as a social and economic politician (1842–48) . In: ZGO 1955, pp. 499-622.
• Friedrich Daniel Bassermann : Memories. Edited by Ernst von Bassermann-Jordan and Friedrich von Bassermann-Jordan. Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, Frankfurt 1926.
• Heinrich Best , Wilhelm Weege: Biographical manual of the members of the Frankfurt National Assembly 1848/49. Droste, Düsseldorf 1998, ISBN 3-7700-0919-3 , pp. 230-231.
• Alden Frank Briscoe: The liberalism of Karl Mathy . Diss., Harvard 1963.
• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Sub-Volume 4: M-Q. Winter, Heidelberg 2000, ISBN 3-8253-1118-X , pp. 48-51.
• Gustav Freytag : Karl Mathy . 1870.
• Lothar Gall : middle class in Germany . Siedler, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-88680-259-0 .
• Wolfgang von Hippel : Revolution in the German Southwest . (= Writings on political regional studies of Baden-Württemberg , Volume 26), Verlag W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1998.
• Ulrike von Hirschhausen : Liberalism and Nation. The Deutsche Zeitung 1847–1850 . (= Contributions to the history of parliamentarism and political parties, vol. 115), Droste, Düsseldorf 1998, ISBN 3-7700-5215-3 .
• Roland Hoede: The Heppenheimer Assembly of October 10, 1847 . W. Kramer, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-7829-0471-0 .
• Dieter Langewiesche : Liberalism in Germany . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-518-11286-4 .
• Hildegard Müller: Liberal press in the Baden region of Vormärz. The Chamber Liberals' press and its central figure, Karl Mathy, 1840–1848 . Heidelberg 1986.
• Friedrich von Weech :  Mathy, Karl . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 20, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1884, pp. 595-600.
• Roots in Thuringia. The private bank in Gotha . In: Bank und Geschichte , No. 12, December 2006.
• Gustav Tobler: Karl Mathys letters to Johann Rudolf Schneider. In: Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde , Vol. 6, 1907, pp. 1–95. ( Digitized version )
• Gustav Tobler: Letters from Johann Rudolf Schneider to Karl Mathy . In: Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde , Vol. 15, 1916, pp. 215–230. ( Digitized version )

Web links

Commons : Karl Mathy  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Karl Mathy in the catalog of the German National Library
• Loyd E. Lee: Karl Mathy (English).
• Erich Angermann:  Mathy, Karl. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 16, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-428-00197-4 , p. 380 f. ( Digitized version ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Gall, Bürgerertum , p. 261.
2. ↑ Gall, Bürgerertum , p. 263 f.
3. ↑ von Hippel, Revolution , p. 54.
4. ↑ ^{a b} scan of reflections on Baden's entry into the German customs union on Google Books.
5. ↑ von Hippel, Revolution , p. 47 ff. And p. 54.
6. ↑ Hirschhausen, p. 38.
7. ^ Bassermann, Memoirs , p. 26.
8. ↑ ^{a b} Langewiesche, Liberalismus , p. 30.
9. ↑ Hirschhausen, p. 45.
10. ^ Bassermann, Memoirs, p. 13.
11. ^ See Karl Mathy: Assembly of chamber members from various German states; [...] . In: German newspaper . Heidelberg 1847, No. 17 (October 15), p. 1. Online version also at germanhistorydocs .
12. ↑ Hirschhausen, p. 85 f.
13. ↑ Roots in Thuringia: Die Privatbank zu Gotha, p. 2.
14. ^ Gustav Freytag: Karl Mathy. Story of his life . Second edition, Leipzig 1872, pp. 396–400.
15. ^ Gustav Freytag: From my life ( Memento from September 4, 2007 in the Internet Archive ). Chapter 11: Under King Wilhelm.
16. ↑ Hans Fenske: The liberal southwest. Freedom and democratic traditions in Baden-Württemberg (= writings on political regional studies of Baden-Württemberg , Volume 5), Verlag W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1981, pp. 128–130.