Ulrich Bräker

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Ulrich Bräker around 1793
Birthplace
Dreischlatt farm (youth)
Residential building on the Hochsteig

Ulrich Bräker , called the poor man from Toggenburg, also Näppis-Ueli, (born December 22, 1735 in the hamlet of Näppis (Scheftenau), municipality of Wattwil , Toggenburg ; † in September 1798 , buried on September 11, 1798 in Wattwil) was a Swiss writer . The former county of Toggenburg belonged to the abbey of St. Gallen during Bräker's lifetime .

Life

Bräker was born in 1735 as the son of simple farmers. In his youth he was a farmhand and saltpeter . In 1754 he moved to Wattwil with his parents. At the beginning of the Seven Years' War in 1756 a Prussian recruiting officer recruited him with cunning and trickery as a common soldier for the " Itzenplitz on foot regiment ". Disillusioned with the result of his departure for a foreign country, Bräker deserted that same year during the Battle of Lobositz in Bohemia and returned home. He married Salome Ambühl (1735-1822) and had seven children, some of whom died in childhood. He earned his living as a small farmer and cotton fergger . Since 1784 at the latest he suffered from frequent headaches (" migrenia ").

Reading broadened his horizons and began to keep diaries. He was discovered by Johann Ludwig Ambühl , the Wattwil schoolmaster and member of the Reformed Moral Society in Toggenburg zu Lichtensteig , which Bräker was admitted to in 1776. Bräker published the first texts in Ambühl's wallet from the Alps . Thanks to his acquaintance with Hans Heinrich Füssli , Zurich , he was able to publish it. He also read and commented on Shakespeare's works .

Ulrich Bräker's estate is kept in the Cantonal Library of St. Gallen (Vadiana) and in the State Archives of the Canton of St. Gallen .

plant

The importance of the enlightened Pietist Bräker lies above all in the fact that someone from a class of people speaks with him, of which there are no other records of his own from this time. The report about his six-month service in the army of Frederick the Great became particularly well known. This shaped the public image of the Prussian army and its numerous mercenary soldiers for a long time. Bräker can, however, not only be seen as a “witness for the prosecution” against the compulsion of the Prussian military system in the 18th century and as a “model deserter”, but also as a witness to the effectiveness of a positive corps spirit. The letters found and only published in 2015 by two Prussian comrades in the Bräker regiment significantly expand the available and evaluable source material of simple musketeers from the Seven Years' War. Your worries are very different from those of the soldier from Switzerland. They reveal the everyday life of Prussian peasant soldiers and provide information about the reality of the village during the war.

The life story and natural adventures of the poor man in Tockenburg is the autobiography of Bräker. It is considered to be his main work. The original manuscript has been lost, only the first editions, published by Hans Heinrich Füssli, Zurich, have survived.

reception

Ernst Wiechert gives Bräker's The Poor Man in Toggenburg in his Jeromin Children, Volume 2, Chapter IV, a key position when the village school teacher Stilling can no longer give his protégé Jons Jeromin any financial support because of the inflation after the First World War and he is the last buys this book: "Seven loaves of bread are enough for a week or two, but one book could be enough for a lifetime."

Bräker's preoccupations with Shakespeare, his own theater work and Toggenburg appear combined in Erich Kästner's poem Hamlets Geist , which is about a Hamlet performance at the «Toggenburger Stadttheater» which is getting out of hand .

Works

Quotes

  • "... in addition, Toggenburg is not such a rough country - it also has its own conveniences - like all other countries."
  • "... oh preach only about the food that your stomach has digested itself."
  • "In healthy days, one hundred and seven things feel wrong - and only one in sick ones."

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Ulrich Bräker  - Sources and full texts
Commons : Ulrich Bräker  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On the military classification cf. Willy Pfister : Aargauer in foreign military service. In: Contributions to the history of the Aargau. 1980. Martin Küster: A Toggenburger in Berlin . In: Berlin monthly magazine ( Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein ) . Issue 8, 1998, ISSN  0944-5560 , p. 4 ( luise-berlin.de ).
  2. ↑ Susanne Hoffmann: Self-help in case of illness with Ulrich Bräker (1735–1798): The cultural and social resources of the “poor man in Tockenburg” analyzed with Pierre Bourdieu's capital concept. In: Würzburger medical history reports , Volume 25, 2006, pp. 19–41, here: p. 19.
  3. ^ Jürgen Kloosterhuis: Donner, Blitz und Bräker. The soldier service of the 'poor man in Tockenburg' from the perspective of the Prussian military system. In: Alfred Messerli u Adolf Muschg (Ed.): Writing addiction. Autobiographical writings by the Pietist Ulrich Bräker (1725–1798). Göttingen 2004, p. 170 and 186
  4. ↑ Christian F. Zander: "A dog is better established ..." Prussian soldiers' letters (1747–1758). In: Ders .: Findings. Documents and letters from a Prussian peasant family (1747–1953). Hamburg 2015, pp. 15–158.
personal data
SURNAME Bräker, Ulrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 22, 1735
PLACE OF BIRTH Wattwil , Toggenburg, Canton of St. Gallen
DATE OF DEATH buried September 11, 1798
Place of death Wattwil