Oscar von Forckenbeck

Oscar von Forckenbeck

Oscar von Forckenbeck (born August 28, 1822 in Minden ; † July 29, 1898 in Wassenberg ) was a German lawyer and camerawoman and founder of the International Newspaper Museum in Aachen .

Live and act

The son of the Prussian General in Elsinore and Privy Councilor Augustus of Forckenbeck (1792-1871) and cousin of the politician Maximilian Franz August von Forckenbeck lived and went to school far away from the family in foster care and then studied at the Universities of Heidelberg , Göttingen and Berlin Jura and Cameralistics. Parallel to his studies, Forckenbeck undertook several trips abroad during this time, including with the linguist and literary scholar and lawyer Jakob Grimm to Scandinavia , whose lectures he attended in Göttingen and Berlin. Since he did not have the time to take an assessor exam due to the many trips he had made , he was denied a higher civil service career.

Instead, Forckenbeck initially accepted a position as bailiff in Rheine in 1851 , which he held until 1861. In addition, he was elected mayor here from 1852. In the meantime, he married Maria Packenius (1838–1921), daughter of the wealthy landowner and mayor of Wassenberg Alexander Packenius, whereupon Forckenbeck settled on the in-law Packenius estate, today's Forckenbeck house in Wassenberg , after his tenure in Rheine, which he did not appreciate very much . Here he worked as a private scholar and in the function of an estate manager connected to nature . Between 1870 and 1890, for example, he had his forester cultivate a swamp and moorland, known as the Jewish Quarry since the 14th century, to create a spacious park landscape, which also includes many new plantings of rare and exotic trees that he brought back from his world trips. belonged.

In between he felt wanderlust and, as a linguist and geographically interested person, he traveled to almost every continent on earth. On these trips he became aware, long before the establishment of a newspaper science , that the value of a newspaper is a cultural asset worth preserving and to be researched , and so from 1884 he began to collect newspapers from all over the world.

Undeterred by the lack of understanding of the population, he succeeded in establishing a newspaper museum in Aachen in 1885, which was to be made accessible to the public. Here Forckenbeck sorted the collections according to biographical, historical and cultural-historical as well as sources and finally presented the first public exhibition in Aachen's Suermondt Museum on February 28, 1886, with great success . Three years later, on April 1, 1889, he and Max Schlesinger (1846-1919) published the first comprehensive magazine : Das Zeitungsmuseum , which was later published by Schlesinger alone from 1892 to 1900. From 1890, the city of Aachen made the foyer of the city ​​theater available to him as a reading room , and the population could choose from more than 300 domestic and foreign copies that were continuously purchased.

After Forckenbeck's death in 1898, his widow transferred the collection, which now comprised more than 80,000 copies, as well as around 1,500 books with editions that he himself determined to the city of Aachen. In his honor, a street was posthumously named after him in both Rheine and Aachen.

literature

• Bernhard Poll :  Forckenbeck, Oskar. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 5, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1961, ISBN 3-428-00186-9 , p. 298 ( digitized version ).
• Christian Bremen: Oscar von Forckenbeck and the International Newspaper Museum of the City of Aachen (Bochum Studies on Journalism and Communication Studies; Vol. 89). Brockmeyer, Bochum 1998, ISBN 3-8196-0566-5 .
• Will Hermanns (Hrsg.): Oscar von Forckenbeck and his work. The Aachen newspaper museum. A ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the Museum Aachen . Aachen 1936.
• J. Jakelowitz: Oscar von Forckenbeck. Memories . In: The home . Supplement to the “Heinsberger Volkszeitung” / NS, Vol. 9 (1929), pp. 81–96.

Web links

• Literature by and about Oscar von Forckenbeck in the catalog of the German National Library
• The private scholar and collector Oskar von Forckenbeck (1822–1898) on the homepage of the IZM
• Forckenbeck house in Wasenberg