Wilhelm Pfänder

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Gymnastics festival in New Ulm around 1865

Jakob Wilhelm Pfänder (born July 6, 1826 in Heilbronn ; † August 11, 1905 in New Ulm , Minnesota ) was a German - American politician and gymnastics father.

Life

Jakob Wilhelm Pfänder was the youngest of the nine children of Küblers Jakob Andreas Pfänder and his wife Johanna Friederike, née. Kuenzel. He grew up in the Schwibbogengasse in Heilbronn, completed his school days in this town and began an apprenticeship in 1840 in the specialty and cotton goods store Ludwig Kunze, which he completed in 1845. One of the most important memories from this time was a concert by Franz Liszt on November 15, 1843 in the Kilian's Church , at which he was allowed to turn the sheet music for Liszt. Pfänder, an enthusiastic singer throughout his life, joined the North American Singers' Association a little later.

The Heilbronn gymnastics community was founded in 1845; The driving forces behind it were Georg Härle , Julius Haasis, Rudolf Flaigg and Wilhelm Pfänder, who became one of the gymnasts, but left his hometown soon afterwards: He moved to Ulm , where he had found a job in the Thomas Kölle grocery store and a gymnastics supervisor also newly founded TG Ulm. With 20 gymnasts from Ulm, he took part in the first German Gymnastics Festival , which was celebrated in Heilbronn in August 1846. Since there was still no rail link between Ulm and Heilbronn, the Ulm participants traveled on foot.

In the famine year of 1847, Pfänder decided, as did Carl von Stapf, member of the association, to emigrate to America. He left in March 1848 and visited his brother Carl in London on the way . On this occasion he met Karl Marx . Via New York he came to Cincinnati in the state of Ohio , where there were numerous residents of German origin and a number of politicians who had emigrated from Germany were active. So was z. For example, Karl Gustav Rümelin , who was born in Heilbronn, was elected to the House of Representatives in 1844 and the Ohio Senate in 1846 , and in 1848 Friedrich Hecker arrived in Cincinnati. Pfänder and other gymnasts consulted with Hecker and founded the German gymnastics community in Cincinnati on November 21, 1848. This was the first club of its kind in the USA ; Pfänder was initially spokesman and a little later gymnastics officer of the gymnastics community.

The first gym, a primitive wooden structure, was inaugurated in 1850. Pfänder gave the official address at the inauguration of this first gym in the USA. Just two years later, however, it had to be replaced by a larger structure, again made of wood, because the wave of immigration from 1848 onwards also caused the gymnastics community to grow steadily.

Pfänder first worked for the Urban Safe Factory, and from 1849 as an accountant for the daily newspaper Deutscher Republikaner . In 1851 he married Catherine Pfau, who had come to Cincinnati with her family from Minfeld . The first of 15 children born from this marriage was the son William. He was born in September 1852. Wilhelm Pfänder moved with his wife and children to Cincinnati's neighboring town of Newport , Kentucky , where he was also involved in founding a gymnastics community. It existed until 1936.

His stay in the Cincinnati area wasn't long, however. The settlement of the west was propagated in the gymnastics community; Minnesota , in particular , has been touted as a land of opportunity. In 1855, New Ulm was founded on the upper reaches of the Minnesota River . The driving force was Ferdinand Beinhorn with his Chicago Land Association. However, this association quickly got into financial difficulties in New Ulm, which seriously threatened the development and existence of the new city. But also in 1855 Pfänder's homeland association had proposed the establishment of a gymnastics town to the Socialist Turner Union of North America. A committee headed by Pfänder had been founded to put this goal into practice and, while visiting the terrain around New Ulm, agreed with Ferdinand Beinhorn to further expand New Ulm and thus make the Turnerstadt a reality. In January 1856 the German Land Association of Minnesota was founded, with which the financing could be secured. The first settlers arrived just a few months later, including Wilhelm Pfänder and his family. In 1857 Wilhelm Pfänder was elected mayor. He was also postmaster and justice of the peace in New Ulm and later kept the land register of Brown County . Pfänder ran a farm about two miles outside of New Ulm, in Milford. The idea of being able to found a socialist model town with New Ulm proved to be untenable.

The New Ulm gymnastics club was founded on November 11, 1856; Pfänder became his reporter. The first gymnasium was built in 1858, but a few years later it was destroyed in the course of the New Ulm Massacre . Pfänder was the first lieutenant of the First Minnesota Battery on the Union side in the American Civil War at the time. Commanded his war effort in the First Minnesota Battery, the pledges after the failure of the captain Muench, is in the novel Shiloh by Shelby Foote mentioned several times.

Henry August Schwabe , The Siege of New Ulm

Because of the Indian revolts in 1862 Pfänder was ordered back to Minnesota and appointed commander of the Minnesota Mounted Rangers before he took command of Fort Ridgely . So his family lived in Fort Ridgely until the end of the war, before they returned to the farm in Milford, from which they moved to New Ulm in 1870.

Wilhelm Pfänder became a Republican member of the Minnesota Senate in 1871 and was State Treasurer for two terms from 1876 , which is why the family moved to Saint Paul in 1876 . After returning to New Ulm in 1880, Pfänder opened an insurance and real estate agency. In 1877 the last of the 15 Pfänder children, five of whom died before their parents, was born. The ten surviving children had the first names William junior, Frederick, Herman, Albert, Kate, Louise, Josephine, Amelia, Emma and Minnie (Wilhelmine).

The daughter Wilhelmina (Minnie) Pfänder opened a kindergarten in New Ulm in 1890 together with Ida Heers . One of Pfander's sons-in-law, Louis Albert Fritsche, received his first license as a general practitioner in Minnesota. He opened his practice in New Ulm.

A great, great, great-grandniece of Pfänder is the pop star Victoria Beckham .

Wilhelm Pfänder visited his hometown on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the TG Heilbronn and was greeted enthusiastically on April 6, 1895 in the gym on Karlstraße. At the banquet on May 18 of the same year he was made an honorary member of the association. In 1901 he gave an inauguration address at the inauguration of the new Turner Hall in New Ulm, in which he emphasized that the new hall should also become a "home of freedom, enlightenment and progress [...] forever".

Pfaender Park

Since 2009 there is a Col. Wilhelm Pfaender Park in New Ulm.

literature

  • Hans Müller: A gymnast from Heilbronn in the Wild West. Wilhelm Pfänder (1826–1905) . In: Christhard Schrenk (ed.): Heilbronner Köpfe II. Life pictures from two centuries. Heilbronn City Archives, Heilbronn 1999, ISBN 3-928990-70-5 ( Small series of publications by the Heilbronn City Archives. 45), pp. 79–92
  • Annette Hofmann: Wilhelm Pfänder from Heilbronn: A German-American gymnastics pioneer . In: Adolf Cluss and the gymnastics movement. From Heilbronn gymnastics festival in 1846 to American exile. Lectures at the symposium of the same name on October 28 and 29, 2005 in Heilbronn . Heilbronn 2007. ( Small series of publications from the archive of the city of Heilbronn 54) ISBN 978-3-928990-97-4 . Pp. 65-72.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rainer Schimpf, House of History Baden-Württemberg: The Heilbronn merchant Wilhelm Pfänder in the USA , in: Moments 1/2003 ( Memento of the original from June 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked . Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.staatsanzeiger.de
  2. ↑ On www.leg.state.mn.us the names are probably given in anglicised form.
  3. ↑ Kremena Spängler, The Pfaender. Revolutionaries, artists, pioneers - and a major pop star , on: www.nujournal.com, October 12, 2008 ( Memento from June 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Kurt Nesbitt, Pfaender Park , on: www.nujournal.com, April 19, 2009 ( Memento from June 7, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Pfänder, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pfänder, Jakob Wilhelm (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American politician and gymnastics father
DATE OF BIRTH July 6, 1826
PLACE OF BIRTH Heilbronn
DATE OF DEATH August 11, 1905
Place of death New Ulm , Minnesota, United States