Ludwig Walesrode

Ludwig Walesrode

Ludwig Reinhold Walesrode (* as Ludwig Isaak Cohen on April 14, 1810 in Altona ; † March 20, 1889 in Ludwigsburg ) was a German writer, journalist and publicist.

Live and act

Ludwig Walesrode was a son of the musician and later businessman JC Cohen from Walsrode . From 1830 to 1832 he attended the Christianeum in Altona , which was administered in Denmark, and it also accepted students from Jewish families. In 1832 he began studying philology at the University of Munich ; but he increasingly delved into philosophical and art history studies and wrote articles for Johann Friedrich Cottas Morgenblatt for educated classes . From 1835 he was a private tutor in Danzig before he moved to Königsberg in 1837 and gave private lessons in English and literature. He wrote a brochure about the Königsberg art exhibition in 1838 and a humorous tour guide through Königsberg . In 1840, under the pseudonym Emil Wagner, he translated all of William Shakespeare's sonnets . At that time he became a member of the Pappenhemia .

After a three-year residence permit valid for visiting the Albertus University had expired , he converted to Christianity in October 1841 and took the name Ludwig Reinhold Walesrode. A year later he received city citizenship. In 1841 he anonymously published the brochure Illumination of a Dark Ballroom. A word from the time of Wse , in which he criticized the anti-Jewish prejudices of the clerks.

At the end of 1841 he began his public satirical and regime-critical lectures, which made him one of the leading figures in Königsberg liberalism. The first sensation was his letter to the truly liberals , published in the summer of 1842 , which polemicized against the anti-constitutional and conservative movement in the district of Prussian Holland and sided with Theodor von Schön , the liberal chief president of the province of Prussia. He published his lectures under the titles Glosses and Marginal Drawings on Texts from Our Time (1842) and Unterthänige Reden (1843), which made him known beyond Prussia. In the summer of 1843 he visited the Baden liberals around Johann Adam von Itzstein and the old republican Andreas Joseph Hofmann, whom he admired . He was sentenced to one year imprisonment in the fortress of Graudenz because of the latter document, which was published in Switzerland, circumventing the Prussian censorship . Like Johann Jacoby , Walesrode also addressed the public with his defense under the title The Humor on the Bank of the Defendants . After his release he took part in 1846 as co-editor of the Königsberg paperback .

During the German Revolution of 1848/49 Walesrode joined the left-liberal Democratic Club in Königsberg with Albert Dulk , Ferdinand Falkson and Julius Rupp . His folklore and eloquence were important, among other things, at the turbulent founding meeting of the Königsberg workers' association. The publication of his pamphlet What will the new times bring to the people? however, brought him violent attacks on the part of the reactionary Prussian Union.

After the failure of the revolution, Walesrode was elected to the city council of Königsberg in 1850. His Die Glocke , published in the same year . A weekly paper for those who are not deaf was banned immediately and resulted in an additional nine-month prison sentence. Tired of the police measures in Königsberg, he moved to Hamburg in 1854 , where he and Carl Volckhausen briefly edited the compass , a weekly for instruction and entertainment that was one of the most sophisticated literary magazines in Hamburg. In 1856 and 1858 he accompanied the Hamburg art exhibitions critically with the Cicerone . In 1857 Der Storch von Nordenthal appeared. A true fairy tale that was published several times until 1881. With his writing Einepolitische Todtenschau. On the history of the state anarchy in Prussia , he commented “ the years of reaction in the province of Prussia both knowledgeably and bitterly. "

As initiator and editor, he published the two anthologies, Democratic Studies , in 1860 and 1861 , which in addition to his own also contain contributions by Ferdinand Lassalle , Carl Vogt , Friedrich Kapp , Moritz Hartmann , Arnold Ruge , Karl Grün , Ludwig Bamberger and others. In 1862 he edited the weekly newspaper Der Progress in Berlin before moving to Gotha in 1863 . There he wrote freedom of the press and justice in Prussia . The postscript of the book is dated January 1866 from Stuttgart , where he moved to finally escape Prussian influence.

In Stuttgart he joined the Württemberg People's Party . His friend Ferdinand Freiligrath belonged to the literary circle in which he now frequented . In 1868 he reported journalistically under the title Eine Heimstätte in Schwaben on the model settlement of the cake cotton spinning mill . In 1869 the loose leaves appeared , a selection of his humoresques. He wrote the Swabian industrial exhibition of 1871 in Ulm in 1872. The book is not only a detailed and humorous description in letter form, but also testifies to Walesrode's critical view of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 and of the cosmopolitan sense of Industrial and world exhibitions. As his foreword to the second edition of 1873 shows, the title he has now chosen is German diligence and German work. Cultural historical sketches and pictures cannot be read without an ironic refraction.

In the last years of his life he wrote for the observer , the journalistic organ of the Württemberg People's Party. At the end of 1888 Walesrode moved to the Salon men's hospital near Ludwigsburg. There he died of a stroke .

Appreciations

Relief on the tomb

Walesrode's grave is in the Uff churchyard in Bad Cannstatt . The granite obelisk is adorned with a bronze relief by Adolf von Donndorf . The sculptor sent the medallion "of the noble Walesrodes" in January 1895 to Conrad Haußmann .

The literary historian Rudolf von Gottschall not only wrote an obituary, but also gave a detailed account of their time together in Königsberg in his childhood memories published in 1898. The social democrat Wilhelm Blos saw in the young Walesrode the "Nestor of the German bourgeois democracy". The Cannstatter-Zeitung dedicated a short obituary to him for his 200th birthday.

Rudi Schweikert tried to show that Karl May had in mind the figure of Count Walesrode in the story Waldröschen Ludwig Walesrode, which was "another example of May's secret subversiveness" .

Works

• William Shakspeare's complete poems. Translated in the meter of the original by Emil Wagner [di Walesrode], JH Born, Königsberg 1840 ( [6] )
• Glosses and marginal drawings on texts from our time , HL Voigt, Königsberg 1842 ( [7] )
• Submissive speeches , Literarisches Comptoir, Winterthur / Zurich, 1843 ( [8] )
• The humor on the bank of the accused or my defense before the Criminal Senate of the Higher Regional Court in Königsberg [...] , Friedrich Bassermann , Mannheim 1844 ( [9] )
• (Ed.) Königsberger Taschenbuch , HL Voigt, Königsberg 1846 ( [10] )
• The stork of Nordenthal. A true fairy tale , Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1857
• A political death inspection. On the history of the state-supporting anarchy in Prussia , Academische Buchhandlung, Kiel 1859 ( [11] )
• (Ed.) Democratic Studies , Otto Meißner, Hamburg 1860 ( [12] )
• (Ed.) Democratic Studies , second volume, Otto Meißner, Hamburg 1861
• Freedom of the press and justice in Prussia , O. Wigand, Leipzig 1866 ( [13] )
• German hard work and German work. Cultural historical sketches and pictures , Carl Grüninger, Stuttgart 1873

literature

• August Wintterlin :  Walesrode, Ludwig Reinhold . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 40, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1896, p. 729 f.
• Jacob Toury: The political orientations of the Jews in Germany. From Jena to Weimar (= series of scientific treatises of the Leo Baeck Institute. Vol. 15, ISSN  0459-097X ). Mohr, Tübingen 1966.
• Edmund Silberner : Johann Jacoby. Politician and man. Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, Bonn-Bad Godesberg 1976, ISBN 3-87831-213-X .
• Jacob Toury: Jewish civil rights fighters in the pre-March Königsberg. In: Yearbook for the history of Central and Eastern Germany. Volume 32, 1983, ISSN  0075-2614 , pp. 175-218.
• Christian Pletzing: From Spring of Nations to National Conflict. German and Polish nationalism in East and West Prussia 1830–1871 (= German Historical Institute (Warsaw). Sources and Studies. Vol. 13). Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2003, ISBN 3-447-04657-0 (also: Berlin, Humboldt-Univ., Diss., 2001/2002).

Web links

Wikisource: Ludwig Reinhold Walesrode  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Der Orient , No. 7, February 13, 1841 ( [1] )
2. ↑ Jacob Toury: Jewish civil rights fighters in the pre-March Königsberg , in: Yearbook for the history of Central and East Germany, Volume 32, 1983, p. 195
3. ↑ Gustav Mayer: The beginnings of political radicalism in pre- March Prussia , in: Zeitschrift für Politik, Berlin 1913, p. 24. Compare also Robert Prutz: Ten Years. Recent history. 1840-1850 , Volume 2, Leipzig 1856, p. 371 ( [2] )
4. ^ Arnold Schütz: Königsberg in the March Revolution of 1848 , in: Yearbook of the Albertus University, Volume 26/27, Berlin 1986, p. 95
5. ^ Jacob Toury: The political orientations of the Jews in Germany , Tübingen 1966, p. 53f
6. ^ Edmund Silberner: Johann Jacoby Briefwechsel 1816-1849 , Hannover 1974, p. 438f
7. ↑ Ulrike Renz: "... expanding the ennobling influence of art to ever larger circles ...", bourgeoisie and fine arts in Hamburg in the late 18th and 19th centuries , dissertation Bielefeld University, 2001 ( available online) , page 153
8. ^ Christian Pletzing: From the spring of nations to the national conflict. German and Polish nationalism in East and West Prussia 1830-1871 , Wiesbaden 2003, p. 192
9. ↑ Ferdinand Lassalle. Postponed letters and writings , digitized edition, Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences ( [3] )
10. ↑ Across Land and Sea , 1868, booklet 35; 36; 44 and 45
11. ↑ Main State Archives Stuttgart, holdings Q 1/2: estate of Dr. Conrad Haußmann , Bü 86, Art and Literature. ( [4] )
12. ↑ Rudolf von Gottschall: From my youth , Berlin 1898
13. ^ Wilhelm Blos: Memoirs of a Social Democrats , Volume 2, Munich 1919, p. 187
14. ↑ Iris Frey: Ludwig Walesrode was born 200 years ago , in: Cannstatter-Zeitung ONLINE [5] . The photo shows F. Freiligrath by mistake
15. ↑ Rudi Schweikert: "You know my name, sir?" Studies on naming with Karl May . Special issue of the Karl May Society No. 134, Hamburg 2006, pp. 22-25