Max Honsell

Max Honsell, Minister of Finance of Baden 1906–1910

Max Honsell, from the obituary of the Badische Presse of July 2, 1910

Max Honsell (born November 10, 1843 in Konstanz , † July 1, 1910 in Karlsruhe ) was a German hydraulic engineer , professor at the Technical University of Karlsruhe and a member of the parliament and finance minister of the Grand Duchy of Baden .

Life

House of the Honsell family, Reichenau Island, approx. 1940

Max Honsell spent his childhood and youth with three brothers and a sister as the son of court judge Carl Honsell in Konstanz or on the weekends on the nearby island of Reichenau , where the family had a large house right on the lake. His professional place of activity was the Baden capital and residence city of Karlsruhe . There he died at the age of only 66 as a result of a long-lasting, painful sarcoma disease .

His wife, Sophie Honsell, was the daughter of district and court judge Bernhard August Prestinari . The Reichenau writer Lilly Braumann-Honsell was his niece.

Time and again, members of the family played a role in Baden politics. His father-in-law Bernhard August Prestinari and his uncle Eugen von Seyfried were members of the Baden Estates Assembly . His daughter Luitgard Himmelträger was involved in women's politics and was one of the first ten female representatives on the city council of Karlsruhe.

The engineering tradition was continued not least in his grandson Max Himmelhub , who invented chipboard based on the experiences of his parents' furniture factory .

plant

Technically

Honsell was a graduate of the Karlsruhe Polytechnic . In 1865 he entered the service of the Grand Ducal Baden Directorate of Water and Road Construction and quickly took on responsibility.

He planned and managed the construction of the Karlsruhe Rhine port and the expansion of the Mannheim port .

The correction of the Upper Rhine , which Johann Gottfried Tulla had begun, had already largely been completed, but Honsell completed it, corrected it where new challenges arose and defended it on the basis of scientific research.

His greatest hydraulic engineering achievement consists in making the Upper Rhine navigable from Mannheim up to Strasbourg, for which he created the planning in which he designed a low water channel. He did not live to see the completion of the execution of Honsell's Rhine regulation begun in 1907 . The first tugs started operating in 1913. Honsell had to hold back for a long time ex officio when it came to cargo shipping above the end point in Mannheim, Baden. It was only with the emergence of a plan for a canal on the left bank of the Rhine on the Alsatian side at the 3rd Shipping Congress in Frankfurt am Main in 1888 that the Grand Duke was convinced that shipping on a regulated Rhine - which Baden could then also take part in - was always better, as a canal that led past Baden. With the Rhine regulation, Baden prevailed over the canal projects. Honsell provided the technical justification for this, among other things, in the renowned specialist journal Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung in an article distributed over several successive issues. After the First World War, France enforced the full use of the Rhine through the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and from 1928 built the Rhine canal, which in some cases had devastating environmental consequences.

All structural measures were checked by Honsell for their economic benefit and, if this was not apparent, rejected.

From 1886 he set up a systematic level monitoring system and improved the flood intelligence service on the Rhine.

Organizationally

In addition to his - also internationally - quickly recognized professional authority, he possessed a high degree of organizational skill and assertiveness. So he rearranged the administration and supervision of the Baden waterways by initially separating them from road construction at least for Baden's main waterway, the Rhine, and concentrating on three Rhine construction inspections. After the devastating floods of 1882 and 1883, Honsell seized the opportunity and in 1883 established the Central Office for Meteorology and Hydrography and took over its management.

Scientific

The Baden office was the leading office in the field of hydraulic engineering in Germany. On March 9, 1883, the Reichstag decided to set up a Reich Commission to investigate the flow conditions of the Rhine and its main tributaries , in which Honsell and his scientific assistant Maximilian von Tein did the main work. The results of the investigation were published in eight “booklets” (actually partly multi-volume books). This work is still of fundamental importance today with regard to the flood events and flood protection in this area in the 19th century. With regard to the Rhine, a further important step was not taken again until the 1970s by the 'Flood Study Commission for the Rhine' .

In 1883, Emperor Wilhelm I appointed him extraordinary member of the Prussian Academy of Building .

From 1887 until he took over the finance ministry, he was professor for hydraulic engineering at the Technical University of Karlsruhe. In recognition of his scientific achievements, the Technical University of Karlsruhe awarded him an honorary doctorate in November 1906 (as Dr.-Ing.Eh ).

With the study of Lake Constance and the lowering of its flood levels in 1879, Honsell proposed the first of nine projects to date (2017) to regulate Lake Constance . None of them was ever carried out because the interests of the many neighboring residents involved are obviously too different and meanwhile the fear of irreparable damage has probably become too great. Nevertheless, the discussion flares up again with every flood, most recently in 1999.

Politically

On May 1, 1902, Max Honsell gave the lecture to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the reign of Grand Duke Friedrich in his presence in the auditorium of the Technical University of Karlsruhe. In addition to the obvious personal appreciation for Max Honsell, the lecture also showed the great importance Friedrich I attached to technical development by making the university the center of his jubilee in government.

From 1903 to 1906, Honsell was a member of the First Chamber of Baden appointed by the Grand Duke , and he chose the budget commission as his own commission. However, he never belonged to any political party.

In October 1906, the Grand Duke appointed him Minister of Finance for Baden. He was the first engineer to hold this post that he held until his death.

Scientific policy advice

The (questionable) scientific justification for the Rhine flood of 1882/1883 as a result of exceptionally high rainfall, which the MP Georg Thilenius illustrated in the German Reichstag using diagrams from Max Honsell's book Flood Disasters , is considered an early example of scientific policy advice in Germany.

Public perception: a "Honselle"

As finance minister, Max Honsell made few friends. His term of office was initially marked by declining government revenues and exploding government spending. Baden was particularly committed to the railways. His job as finance minister was to reorganize the state treasury, which is why he has also been referred to as the “savings minister”. The officials were annoyed about the cancellation of some privileges. On January 1, 1909, the law came into force concerning the costs of business trips and relocations of officials . According to this, daily rates for business trips were no longer granted at a flat rate, but graded according to the actual duration of "the foreign business (including the necessary rest breaks and possible waiting times for the departure of the train, etc.)" In Daxlanden : The local history says: The angry officials soon discovered that if they extended a business trip by taking a break in a pub, they could pay for their consumption with the difference in the tiered daily allowance. The “ Viertele ” enjoyed on this occasion became a “Honselle” .

Honors

Above all, but not only, he was awarded medals by many European houses for his services as a hydraulic engineer.

• Knight's Cross 1st Class of the Order of the Württemberg Crown on November 10, 1881
• Commander's Cross 2nd class of the Württemberg Order of Frederick on November 7, 1888
• Prussian Order of the Red Eagle, 2nd class on September 13, 1893
• Second class with star of the Bavarian Order of Merit of St. Michael on June 10, 1894
• Commander's cross with star of the Austro-Hungarian Order of Franz Joseph on August 1, 1897
• Baden Grand Cross of the Order of the Zähringer Lion on December 21, 1907
• Prussian Crown Order 1st class on May 12, 1908
• Grand Cross of the Grand Ducal Hessian Order of Merit on June 6, 1908
• Grand Cross of the Saxon Order of Albrecht on March 31, 1909

A street, a bridge and also a measuring ship in Karlsruhe are named after him, which travels the Rhine and Neckar in order to monitor the water quality . Frankfurt am Main named both Honsellstrasse and Honsellbrücke after Max Honsell. In addition, Rastatt and Kehl each have a Honsellstrasse.

literature

• Rudolf Fuchs: Max Honsell. G. Graunsche Hofbuchdruckerei und Verlag, 1912. (Incidentally, his first biographer is also his son-in-law and engineer in the Baden water and road construction)
• Walter Bleines:  Honsell, Max. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 9, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1972, ISBN 3-428-00190-7 , p. 602 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Max Honsell in the catalog of the German National Library
• Speeches by Max Honsell in the Baden state parliament in the digital collections of the Badische Landesbibliothek

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lilly Braumann-Honsell: Small world - big world! Oberbadische Verlagsanstalt Merk & Co., Konstanz 1938, pp. 126–135.
2. ↑ Karlsruher Zeitung of July 3, 1910 - [1] , accessed on November 5, 2017
3. ^ Reference to sarcoma in: Neue Badische Landeszeitung , No. 300 of July 2, 1910, 1st sheet
4. ↑ Barbara Guttmann: Between rubble and dreams. Karlsruhe women in politics and society in the post-war period. City of Karlsruhe, Women's Representative and City Archives, Karlsruhe 1997, ISBN 3-923344-39-2 , p. 61. ( PDF; 21.6 MB )
5. ^ Rudolf Fuchs: Max Honsell. G. Graunsche Hofbuchdruckerei und Verlag, 1912, p. 4.
6. ↑ ^{a b} http://www.kaiserstuhl.eu/natur-am-kaiserstuhl/rheinbegradigung/ Rheinbefadigung
7. ↑ Max Honsell: The waterway Mannheim-Ludwigshafen and Kehl-Strasbourg, Canal or free Rhine ?, I. In: Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung , 10th year 1890, No. # (from March 15, 1890) ( part 1 of 5)
8. ↑ Max Honsell , Federal Waterways and Shipping Office, Mannheim, accessed June 23, 2017
9. ^ Rudolf Fuchs: Max Honsell. G. Graunsche Hofbuchdruckerei und Verlag, 1912, p. 24.
10. ^ Iso Himmelsbach: Experience - Mentality - Management. Floods and flood protection on the non-navigable rivers in Upper Alsace and the Upper Rhine (1480-2007). Freiburg (Breisgau) 2013. ( urn: nbn: de: bsz: 25-opus-89694 online , accessed on June 11, 2017)
11. ↑ Theodor Rebbock: Grand Ducal Baden Finance Minister Dr.-Ing. Max Honsell (obituary). In: Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung , Volume 30, 1910, No. 55, p. 369. ( online , accessed June 15, 2017)
12. ^ Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, KIT Archive, Karlsruhe online , accessed on June 15, 2017
13. ↑ Max Honsell: Lake Constance and the lowering of its high water levels. Witter, Stuttgart 1879. ( online , accessed June 15, 2017)
14. ↑ Werner Konold: The regulation of Lake Constance. An old story. In: The Citizen in the State , issue 2/2000. ( Der Rhein ) State Center for Civic Education Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart ( online , accessed June 15, 2017)
15. ↑ Max Honsell: Fiftieth anniversary of the reign of His Royal Highness the Grand Duke Friedrich. Lecture and speeches held for the jubilee in the auditorium of the Technical University of Fridericiana on May 1, 1902. Historical outline of Baden engineering. Braun, Karlsruhe 1902. ( online , accessed August 18, 2019)
16. ↑ Badische Presse of July 2, 1910 (front page of the noon edition) ( online , accessed June 20, 2017)
17. ↑ Patrick Masius: Risk and Opportunity. The flood of the century on the Rhine in 1882/1883 An environmental historical consideration. Universitätsverlag, Göttingen 2013, pages 114–116.
18. ^ Badischer Landtag, 2nd Chamber, Supplements Volume 2, Supplements to the 58th session, page 253, "to § 4" online , accessed: June 15, 2017
19. ↑ Gottfried Ganz, Hans Peemüller: The straightening of the Rhine and its significance for Daxlanden. In: Werner Burkart (Ed.): Daxlanden. The local history. INFO Verlag, Karlsruhe 2007, page 210. ( online , accessed June 20, 2017)