Konrad Engelbert Oelsner

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Konrad Engelbert Oelsner (born May 11, 1764 in Goldberg in Silesia , † October 18, 1828 in Paris ) was a German political publicist at the time of the French Revolution .

The enlightened and politically interested public in Germany owed a large part of their knowledge of the revolutionary events in the neighboring country to his critical chronicler activity on site. Oelsner had, in part friendly, contact with many intellectuals and politically active contemporaries in France , Germany and Switzerland .

Life

Oelsner grew up as the son of a merchant in an educated middle-class family that was shaped by the spirit of the late Enlightenment . After finishing school in Liegnitz , he began studying law in Frankfurt (Oder) in 1781 . However, he soon discovered his interest in historical and philosophical questions. In addition, he also studied mathematics and medicine. After a short activity as a private tutor , he broke off his studies in 1787. He traveled via Vienna to Switzerland, where he learned of the beginning of the French Revolution. In July 1790 he arrived in Paris and soon he was in the circles of the German revolutionary supporters staying there and also cultivated contacts with the French revolutionaries. The events meant that from now on he worked intensively as a political writer and saw his main task in conveying as authentic a picture of the events as possible to his German-speaking compatriots.

Oelsner attended political meetings and even became a "étranger" (foreigner) member of the Jacobin Club , at whose meetings he regularly took part until 1792. Through the mediation of the Oldenburg lawyer and writer Gerhard Anton von Halem , who was also in Paris in 1790 , a report in Wieland's New German Mercury was supposed to come about, but this failed because Oelsner was not prepared to give in to the growing pressure of German censorship. With the help of the acquaintances he had made with the activists of the revolution, he tried to form his own opinion of the political situation, which he assessed and commented on in his reports and notes from the perspective of the critical sympathizer. He always stuck to the ideas of the Enlightenment, but took a more liberal than radical position on most issues. This brought him politically close to the Girondins . He soon felt the consequences of his critical distance from the Jacobin dictatorship and the reign of terror when he was arrested several times on short notice in 1793. However, he initially managed to get to safety in Switzerland with friends.

During his stay in Switzerland, Oelsner kept in close contact with circles of liberal-minded people. There he also met the young philosopher Hegel , who made his knowledge of the revolution in France essentially Oelsner's articles in the magazine Minerva. A journal of history, politics and literature owed. Even in Switzerland, however, Oelsner was exposed to spying, this time by the Prussian secret police, because he traveled several times to France, where the Jacobin dictatorship had meanwhile been overthrown and leading revolutionaries from the circle of Maximilien de Robespierre and Antoine de Saint-Just had been executed. Oelsner stayed in Paris from May to August 1795. After various trips, including again to Switzerland, he returned to Paris in 1796 together with the publicist Heinrich Zschokke . In the meantime, Oelsner wrote for Paul Usteri's political magazine Klio and for Ludwig Ferdinand Huber's magazine Friedenspräliminari (Peace Preliminary) and dealt with the biography and the editing and translation of the works of his friend Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès , the author of the famous battle pamphlet What is the Third Estate? . Sieyès tried in vain to get Oelsner to work in the political administration of France. Instead, he entered the diplomatic service of the Free Imperial City of Frankfurt am Main and Bremen for a short time in 1796 , representing their interests at the French Directory .

Oelsner was a thorn in the side of the secret police in Prussia because of his clear partisanship for the political objectives of the French Revolution, despite all his critical distance, and because of his "Jacobin philosophy" . After a long and extensive spying, he was arrested on a trip to his Silesian homeland in 1798 in Goldberg , part of Prussia . Only through the mediation of Sieyès, who had meanwhile become the French envoy in Berlin , and the French government in Paris, he was released again at the end of 1798 on the condition that he never set foot on Prussian soil again. In 1799 he applied for French citizenship and went into exile in Paris.

This created a paradoxical situation for Oelsner. The desire to become a citizen of a country in which the ideas of the Enlightenment were to be realized was fulfilled at a moment when he had already realized, with no illusions, that these efforts had failed in his sense. He retired from politics under Napoleon's rule and wrote award-winning historical treatises on the Crusades and the rise of Islam ( Mahomed ). When the political climate in connection with the reforms of Stein and Hardenberg had changed in the course of the wars of liberation in Prussia , Oelsner was still involved in the project of a German federal newspaper ( Die Bundeslade ) until 1817 , which, however, had to cease publication after two issues. Oelsner was accepted into the Prussian civil service, but until his early retirement in 1824 he lived as a legation counselor at the Prussian embassy in Paris, where he felt like the “fifth wheel on the wagon”. Depressed by the death of his wife and daughter, he also withdrew from social life, resigned and ill, and until his death in 1828 only maintained correspondence with a few like-minded people (including Rahel Varnhagen ).

Oelsner's lasting merit was to have served his contemporaries as a reporter striving for objectivity at a decisive point in world history. His fate as politically homeless and driven by the events for a free and just society should have been representative for not a few of his contemporaries.

Works

  • Lucifer or Purified Contributions to the History of the French Revolution (1797-1799) . Newly edited by Werner Greiling in a selection under the original title. Reclam, Leipzig 1987 and Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1988.
  • Fragments from the papers of an eyewitness and impartial observer of the French Revolution. Reprint of the edition from 1794. Hansebooks, Norderstedt 2016. ISBN 978-3-7428-9620-9
  • Des Effets de la Religion de Mahomet, pendant les trois premiers siècles de sa fondation, sur l'esprit, les moeurs et le gouvernement des peuples chez lesquels cette religion s'est établie. Schoell, Paris 1810. ( Digitaäliat )
    • German edition: Mahomed. Presentation of the influence of his doctrine of the faith on the peoples of the Middle Ages. A price publication (...) , Frankfurt am Main 1810

As editor and translator:

  • Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès : Political Writings . 2 volumes, Leipzig 1796
  • Die Bundeslade (magazine), Frankfurt 1817 - Oelsner's contributions appeared anonymously

There are also numerous letters from the author to well-known contemporaries (for example to Rahel Varnhagen).

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Konrad Engelbert Oelsner  - Sources and full texts
personal data
SURNAME Oelsner, Konrad Engelbert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German political publicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 11, 1764
PLACE OF BIRTH Goldberg , Silesia
DATE OF DEATH October 18, 1828
Place of death Paris