Wilhelm Polstorff

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Wilhelm Polstorff

Wilhelm Polstorff (born August 31, 1843 in Kirchdorf , † April 30, 1906 in Berlin ) was a German high school teacher, publicist and satirist.

Life

Wilhelm Polstorff was the son of the pastor in Kirchdorf. Karl Polstorff , Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry from Göttingen, was his brother. He received his secondary education at Lyceum II , today's Goethegymnasium , in Hanover and then studied philology at the University of Göttingen from 1863 to 1866 . After finishing his studies, he entered the Prussian school service and became a high school teacher at Lyceum I , the Ratsgymnasium in Hanover. He quit school in 1883 to become editor of the Kladderadatsch of the publisher Heinrich Albert Hofmann in Berlin , to which he had already contributed as a freelancer since 1874. Due to his own humor and his sense of satire, he became a formative contributor and editor of the paper for the magazine.

He acted as editor-in-chief on behalf of Johannes Trojan and as such was responsible in a special way for a series of Kladderadatsch articles published in 1893/94 , which Friedrich August von Holstein sharply criticized and which were based on information from the Foreign Office . The informants included the diplomat Ernst von Bothmer . The so-called Kladderadatsch affair , like the Kotze affair (and others) and the Harden-Eulenburg affair , are counted among the affairs that shook the Wilhelmine Empire and its court society from the 1890s. In the further course of the affair, Polsdorff, as the editor of the Kladderadatsch, was asked by the diplomat and assistant to Holstein's Alfred von Kiderlen-Waechter , who, as a Prussian Landwehr officer, seriously wounded Polstorff in the pistol duel on April 18, 1894 in Grunewald . Kiderlen had made the demand to save the honor of Wilhelmstrasse , i.e. the Foreign Office . It was originally called

"Five steps barrier and advance, and repeated ball changes until one is incapacitated."

Polstorff was granted a four-week delay in preparation for the duel . The seconds used the time to set the conditions

"Five steps barrier, five ball changes"

- quoted from Rudolf Emil Martin: Under the spotlight , Schuster & Löffler, Berlin / Leipzig 1910, p. 99

mitigate. Kiderlen and Polstorff were on 1 October 1894 depending four months imprisonment sentenced them from the little more than two weeks on the Ehrenbreitstein were serving and were then pardoned. Kiderlen's further diplomatic career was not affected by this; In 1895 he became envoy of the German Empire in Copenhagen .

In 1896, the informant von Bothmer took early early retirement , officially for health reasons . When Polstorff succumbed to the wound he had received on April 30, 1906, a few years after the duel with Kiderlen, a sealed letter was found in his estate, which was addressed to Ernst von Bothmer. Immediately after receiving it, von Bothmer shot himself on October 1, 1906.

reception

In connection with the confiscation of an edition of Spiegel , Rudolf Augstein summed up a polemical and somewhat unhistorical summary in an editorial for freedom of the press in 1952

"Where are the uncomplicated times when Wilhelm Polstorff's State Secretary Kiderlen-Wächter shot the Bismarck-loyal editor of" Kladderadatsch "because of an insulting poem in a duel?"

- Der Spiegel 29/1952 of July 16, 1952

Fonts

  • The old Greeks - Histoire ancienne , A. Hofmann & Co., Berlin 1902

literature

  • Wilhelm Polstorff in: Franz Kössler , Lehrerlexikon, p. 185
  • Wilhelm Polstorff in: The Kladderadatsch and his people, 1848–1898: a cultural image. A. Hofmann, Berlin 1898, pp. 271-274
  • In memoriam Wilhelm Polstorff: born: 31.VIII 1843 in Kirchdorf, died: 30.IV 1906 in Berlin; a short life picture of the poet and editor in the political joke paper "Kladderadatsch", 1933
  • Rudolf Polstorff: Wilhelm Polstorff: from his life and work; according to reports from his contemporaries and friends , Helwing, Hanover 1933
  • Helmuth Rogge: The Kladderadatsch affair , in: Historische Zeitschrift 195 (1962), pp. 90-130

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl Nolden: Friedrich von Holstein. (Prussian heads 12) 1983 ISBN 9783877761618 , p. 88
  2. ^ Ann Taylor Allen: Satire and Society in Wilhelmine Germany: Kladderadatsch and Simplicissimus, 1890–1914 , University Press of Kentucky, 2015, pp. 63–65 ( digitized version )
  3. ↑ The papers of Herr von Holstein - the splendor and decline of the Bismack empire, rediscovered in the estate of his Eminence Gray in Der Spiegel of October 2, 1957 ( digitized version )
  4. ↑ Kevin McAleer: Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siècle Germany , Princeton University Press , 2014, pp. 34/35 ( digitized version )
  5. ^ Polstorff, Imprisoned for Fighting a Duel, Is Now at Liberty , New York Times, November 27, 1894
  6. ^ Norman Rich: Friedrich von Holstein: politics and diplomacy in the era of Bismarck and Wilhelm II. , Volume 2, CUP Archive, 1965, p. 413 with reference to Holstein and Kiderlen-Waechter's biographer Ernst Jäckh ( digitized version )
personal data
SURNAME Polstorff, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German high school teacher, publicist and satirist
DATE OF BIRTH August 31, 1843
PLACE OF BIRTH Church Village
DATE OF DEATH April 30, 1906
Place of death Berlin