Laichinger Hunger Chronicle

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The so-called Laichinger Hunger Chronicle on the rise in prices and famine in 1816/17 consists of 40 handwritten pages. The from Laichingen originating elementary school teacher and later principal Christian August Schnerring (1870-1951), she published in the years 1913 to 1917 several times in macro- and area studies journals. According to him, he had received the text in 1898 by inheritance from an uncle. For decades, these records have been cited as a prime source in scientific publications . It was not until May 25, 1987, after several months of studying the sources, that the Münsingen city ​​archivist Günter Randecker exposed the Laichinger Hunger Chronicle as an anti-Jewish forgery written by Schnerring himself .

The historical background

In 1816/17, triggered by the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia , there was a year without a summer . The resulting poor harvests led to a great famine in large parts of Europe. For the region around Münsingen it has been handed down that initially 8,000 and later even 12,000 of the approximately 18,000 inhabitants were in need of help because they were without food.

The alleged hunger chronicle was first published in 1913 under the title Manuscript from Laichingen . In 1917 it was published as a handwritten note by an elder about the dearth of prices and famine in 1816/17 . In 1916, exactly one hundred years after the historical events, its supposed discoverer and editor Christian Schnerring was able to publish it as a special edition of the Royal Statistical Office and reports that he discovered around 40 heavily yellowed sheets during his folklore studies on the Alb:

"The handwritten messages are conclusive because they were written by contemporaries and by people whose other handwritten statements fully stand up to any critical historical investigation, and in special cases they name the traders and negotiators by name and also name their hometowns."

Content and effect of the hunger chronicle

The main content of these "handwritten records" was the assertion that certain grain wholesalers at that time were supposed to have bought their grain from the farmers in batches and then sold them twice and many times over. These usurers were referred to as "Abraham", "the Jew", "the Jews" or "the Corn Jews" :

“May 1816 - Many traders also go to von Buttenhausen and Abraham buys all the grain together. June 1816 - Today four trucks have left for Abraham [...] Would have been wiser, they stayed there and the Jew away [...] October 1816 - No bread, the Jew has gone. "

Apparently the hunger chronicle was not subjected to a critical examination by any historian until the mid-1980s, but it was repeatedly cited as a historical document for the famine. An example of this is a scientific work from 1966 for the German Bread Museum , a source collection from 1979 on German emigrants to America and a social science study from 1985 on hunger crises in historical research. However, the basic anti-Semitic statement was not necessarily adopted; In 1985, Hans Medick said that “grain Jews” were generally used to refer to usurers, not just Jews.

Proof of forgery

It was only during his research into the 650th anniversary of Münsingen's town charter that the town archivist Günter Randecker, who was working on a fixed-term contract, became aware of discrepancies on the basis of a text-critical analysis, which he had at a press conference in May 1987 and at an academic in March 1988 Conference published. The alleged history of the find published by Christian Schnerring in 1916 contradicted his handwritten note on the cover of the 40 sheets, according to which he received them from his uncle, who in turn had received them from a Laichingen glazier named Peter Bürkle. Such a glazier was not detectable in the place.

The weather observations noted in the manuscript also do not match the events that can be reconstructed from reliable chronicles. For example, the harvest festival of 1817 was dated August 18th instead of August 12th, which is the correct one. And the psalm assigned to this day was also incorrect: the text named the 126th and not the 50th.

City archivist Günter Randecker also investigated the alleged bulk purchases of grain and found various entries relating to people with the first name Abraham in the tax documents of the municipality of Buttenhausen: Their tax payments for 1816/1817 were less than one guilder each. For comparison: the Christian painter Philipp Griesinger paid 15 guilders 50 kreuzers, other craftsmen around 30 guilders. Randecker writes:

"In 1816/17 the Jews of Buttenhausen were poor, righteously poor, because according to the Jewish protection letter of 1787 they were not allowed to own any land, they did the traveling trade, not with grain, but with haberdashery, household items."

It was only after 1848 that the Jewish inhabitants of Buttenhausen became more prosperous and then provided 70 percent of the tax force.

Living on in TV programs 2017/2018 and in texts

At the end of 2017 the broadcaster Arte and in February 2018 the SWR television showed the film »The volcano that changed the world«. It was about a volcanic eruption in Indonesia in 1815, the ejection of which darkened the sun, and the resulting famine in various regions around the world. The film quotes several sequences from the falsified "Hunger Chronicle", including the anti-Semitic story of the wealthy Jewish grain usurers. The film acted as if the text had not been exposed as a forgery 30 years ago.

The SWR film "The year without a summer - how the Cannstatter Volksfest came about", which was broadcast at the beginning of October 2018, also provides the inciting forgery as a valid historical source.

Furthermore, the alleged »first publication of the› Hunger Chronicle ‹in the› Württembergische Jahrbuch für Statistik und Landeskunde ‹« is used as an "original document" in books. "30 years after my discovery of this forgery of the century, with which innocent Buttenhauser Jews are defamed (alleged quote: 'You should whip them out to the spot ..."), the uncritical quotation of the Schnerring texts is incomprehensible and it is irresponsible, "wrote Randecker on October 3, 2018 in an article in the weekly newspaper Context (supplement of the taz ) about the »Judenschmäh-Revival«.

See also

literature

  • Günter Randecker: The “Laichinger Hunger Chronicle” - a web of lies. In: Karl Corino (Ed.): Forged! Fraud in literature, art, music, science and politics. Greno Verlag, Nördlingen 1988, ISBN 3-89190-525-4 , pp. 74-90
  • Hans Medick : The so-called »Laichinger Hunger Chronicle«. An example of the "fiction of the factual" and the verifiability in the representation of history. In: Swiss Journal for History 44 (1994), pp. 105–119 ( online at E-Periodica )
  • Hans Medick: Weaving and survival in Laichingen 1650-1900. Local history as general history. Second revised edition, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1997, ISBN 3-525-35443-6
  • Hans Dieter Haller: Christian A. Schnerring (1870 to 1951). In: Pegasus in the country - writers in Hohenlohe. Baier-Verlag, 2006, pp. 214-219
  • Günter edge Ecker: The Kirchheim millennium forgery , in Working Group local history (AKS) Metzingen, Hg .: tracks , # 19, 2016 943.7388005  in the DDC S. 75-86

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Report of the senior management of the Münsingen charity dated February 4, 1817, § 25 (kept in the Münsingen deanery archive)
  2. ↑ Württemberg Yearbooks for Statistics and Regional Studies, year 1916 (Stuttgart 1917), p. 72
  3. ↑ Quoted from Günter Randecker: The Laichinger Hunger Chronicle - a web of lies. In: Corino, fake! P. 77.
  4. ↑ Quoted from Günter Randecker: The Laichinger Hunger Chronicle - a web of lies. In: Corino, fake! Pp. 81-83.
  5. ↑ quoted from Günter Randecker: The Laichinger Hunger Chronicle - a tissue of lies. In: Corino, fake! P. 78
  6. ↑ context ; see also From because of fact check , jungle world , October 25, 2018