Norbert Heermann

Norbert Heermann CanReg (born November 27, 1629 in Magdeburg , † May 26, 1699 in Wittingau ) was provost of the Wittingau monastery and historiographer . His baptismal name was Enoch.

Life

Norbert Heermann entered the Augustinian Canons - Klosterneuburg Monastery as a novice on May 7, 1649 . There he took the first name Norbert and took his religious vows on June 12, 1650. In November 1651 he began to study philosophy and theology at the University of Vienna , where he received the academic degree of baccalaureus in May 1653 and in September 1654 passed the master’s examination in philosophy. He then pursued theological studies until 1658.

He had already been ordained a priest in April 1654, and on September 23, 1656 he obtained permission from the Viennese official of the Passau diocese , Martin Geiger, to exercise pastoral care. After completing his theology studies in September 1658, he was sent to the convent in Forbes in South Bohemia with six other Klosterneuburg canons and at the same time appointed administrator of the local monastery. On July 15, 1660, the Klosterneuburg provost Bernhard Schmeding was appointed administrator of the Wittingau monastery, which was secularized during the Reformation and only in 1631 by the Bohemian King Ferdinand III. had been re-established. In 1662 Heermann was dismissed from the Klosterneuburg convent at his request and permanently assigned to the Wittingau convent. A year later, Emperor Leopold I appointed Heermann as provost of the Wittingau monastery, which had only been administered by administrators since 1631.

As before, Heermann tried to secure the former privileges and sources of income for the monastery. These were disputed with the monastery by the new rulers of the Wittingau rule, which had passed to the princes of Schwarzenberg in 1660 . Despite the poor relationship with the government administration, Heermann managed to secure the economic basis of the monastery and to raise its spiritual and cultural importance.

Norbert Heermann administered his provost office without any self-interest. After his death he was buried in monastic simplicity in front of the high altar of the Wittingau collegiate church. It was not until fifteen years after his death that his sister Anna founded an office for the soul , which takes place every year on June 5th, the day before the feast of St. Norbert, should be held in the collegiate church.

Norbert Heermann's Rosenberg Chronicle

The disputes with the rulership administration made it necessary for Heermann to sift through the archives of the monastery in order to gain an overview of its history and the rights to which the monastery was entitled. He also found a handwritten chronicle of the Rosenberg family , which was written in Czech by the Rosenberg archivist Václav Březan after 1594 . Heermann translated this chronicle into German without further editing and dedicated it to Count Adolf Wratislaw ( Vratislav ) von Sternberg on November 19, 1694 . A dedication to Prince Ferdinand von Schwarzenberg, who was responsible for the patronage of the Wittingau monastery, was probably out of the question because the relationship with him was burdened by decades of legal disputes.

After Březan's “Rožmberská historie” ( Rosenberg Chronicle ) is presumably irretrievably lost, at least the content could be saved or preserved through Heermann's translation. However, the translation also contains errors that were primarily caused by forgery of documents during the reign of Ulrich II von Rosenberg , which Březan regarded as genuine and which were only recognized as falsified at the end of the 19th century .

In 1897 Heermann's translation was edited by Matthäus Klimesch using footnotes and printed in 1897 under the title Norbert Heermann's Rosenberg'sche Chronik by the publishing house of the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences in Prague.

literature

• Preface . In: Matthäus Klimesch (Ed.): Norbert Heermann's Rosenberg'sche Chronik . Publishing house of the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences, Prague 1897.
• Anna Kubíková: Rožmberské kroniky. Krátky a summovní výtah od Václava Březana . Veduta, České Budějovice 2005. ISBN 80-86829-10-3 .