Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach

Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, the fourth child of Privy Councillor Carl Friedrich Leopold von Gerlach (the purchaser of Gut Rohrbeck), was born on 7 March 1795 in Berlin. He studied law in Berlin, Göttingen and Heidelberg, served as a volunteer in the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, and was wounded three times. As a judge he rose via Naumburg (1823), Halle (1829) and Frankfurt (Oder) – where in 1835 he succeeded his brother Wilhelm as vice-president – to become chief president of the Higher Regional and Appeal Court at Magdeburg (1844–1874). Politically he was one of the main founders of the Prussian Conservative Party; in the House of Representatives he led the extreme right (»Fraktion Gerlach«) from 1855 to 1858. In 1874, after a prosecution instigated by Bismarck over his pamphlet ‘Civil Marriage and the Chancellor’, he resigned; in 1877 he was elected to the Reichstag but died four days before it convened. Together with his brother Leopold he shaped the monarchist-Christian Kreuzzeitung Party. On 18 February 1877 he died as a result of a carriage accident on the Schöneberger Bridge in Berlin.

Chronicle

1. 1795

   Born in Berlin as son of Carl Friedrich Leopold von Gerlach.

2. 1810–1815

   Law studies in Berlin, Göttingen and Heidelberg; wounded three times as a volunteer in the Wars of Liberation.

3. 1814

   Keeps a campaign diary ("Tagebuch der Campagnen 1814"); with the diaries from June 1815 begins a series continued until February 1877.

4. 1816–1818

   In his Berlin years he courted Luise Hensel, the poet of the hymn "Müde bin ich, geh zur Ruh". Clemens Brentano was courting her at the same time; of the many suitors, a Berlin study of 1893 says, only one won her love – Ludwig von Gerlach. Brentano himself describes him in a letter: more learned and more serious than the young officer von Below, "in his brilliant absent-mindedness often outwardly neglected", a lawyer like him and like him staying with the army through the last campaigns, both "without any real liking for that estate". Luise Hensel gave up the attachment with a heavy heart and entered the Catholic church on 7 December 1818. Through her his brother Leopold too came into Brentano's circle.

5. 1817/18

   As his mother's assistant he negotiates the land separation with the peasants at Rohrbeck; in September 1817 he takes part in the militia exercises at Soldin and Landsberg in order to fulfil his duties "as owner of Rohrbeck". Into the deed of separation and redemption he inserts a clause that the law and constitution of the estate should otherwise remain in force; the commission rejects it, because the relation of lordship and peasants had been fundamentally changed.

6. 1823

   Higher Regional Court Councillor (Oberlandesgerichtsrat) in Naumburg.

7. 1824

   Engagement on 8 October to Auguste von Oertzen of Trieglaff, sister-in-law of Adolf von Thadden (Kröcher, Die alte Generation; Kraus 1994).

8. um 1824

   He would have been ready to give up his share of Rohrbeck for a comparatively small sum – so strongly did his Pomeranian connections around Trieglaff preoccupy him at the time. Serious negotiations with his brothers never took place.

9. 1824–1826

   Forty-nine letters from Auguste to him survive, written between November 1824 and November 1825, most of them from Stettin and Trieglaff, a few from Berlin, Greiffenberg and Naumburg. A last one, catalogued separately, came from Naumburg on 22 February 1826, six weeks before her death. The bundle lies in the family archive.

10. 1825

    The engagement to Auguste von Oertzen was reported to Mecklenburg by his brother Otto on 22 January, in a letter to Jasper von Oertzen: the bride was related to the recipient "in the third degree". That ties the marriage to a friendship begun at Göttingen. His wife brought him a second kinship: Ernst Senfft von Pilsach, later governor of the province of Pomerania, had married Auguste’s sister. In the records he is simply "my brother-in-law Senfft".

11. 1. Dezember 1825

    Married Auguste von Oertzen at Vahnerow, on a Thursday. He had arrived on 24 November; Frau von Oertzen lived with the bride in the newly furnished little house. On 27 November her birthday was celebrated there – her last. On the wedding morning everyone gathered at Trieglaff: besides the family the grandmother, Frau von Mellin, Pauline von Blanckenburg, who later became his brother Otto’s wife, Frau von Osten from Wietzmitz and the chamberlain von Schmeling.

12. 1826

    His first wife Auguste née von Oertzen (1802–1826) of Trieglaff dies on 6 April; he keeps a separate diary of the marriage from 1 January to the day of her death. His brother Otto set two poems to her memory, the copy of which lies in the family archive.

13. 14. Juli 1829

    Second marriage to Luise von Blanckenburg (1805–1858); his first wife, Auguste von Oertzen, had died in 1826. Both marriages remain childless – he raises the orphaned sons of his brother Wilhelm.

14. 1829

    Director of the Regional and Municipal Court at Halle.

15. 1830

    The Halle controversy. In the "Evangelische Kirchenzeitung" he attacked the Halle professors Gesenius and Wegscheider; the agitation over it occupied the Crown Prince’s evening circle that spring. His brother Leopold wrote in his diary that after mature reflection he entirely endorsed his brother’s conduct: no one could doubt the letter who did not, in the Catholic manner, deny the laity a voice in the church, and without him the thing would hardly have come about, such was the present cowardice. Most decidedly for him was the Crown Prince. The ministry declared against him, the king held back, and Leopold concluded: without royal protection Ludwig goes under. For the brother the quarrel had a consequence he recorded himself: he had been woken from the dream that had lulled him into the ministerial party. Of the quarrel one picture survives which nobody has seen since: in the Erlangen archive, under shelf mark ER02383, lies a single printed sheet of 1830, a "caricature of unknown origin". The five names the catalogue gives for it are exactly the parties involved – himself, Tholuck, Hengstenberg, Wegscheider and Gesenius.

16. 1831

    Of him as a child a curl remains: "hair of little Ludwig" stands on the envelope the family archive keeps. It is catalogued with Marie von Raumer (1764–1831), a sister of his mother Agnes, and with Agnes herself; both died that year. The same old relative had also kept a lock of little Jakob, born in 1830. Thirty-five years lie between the two locks. Marie was one of the two twin aunts who had lived in his parents’ house.

17. 1835

    Vice-president of the Higher Regional Court at Frankfurt (Oder), succeeding his brother Wilhelm.

18. 1840

    At the homage to the new king he handed over his memorandum against the continued persecution of the Lutherans. His brother Leopold recorded it in his diary, under the 26th of the month, when the king arrived in Berlin.

19. 1842

    As vice-president he tours the Rhenish courts (diary July/August); in 1844 and 1852 journeys take him to England.

20. 1841–1844

    What really occupied him in these years lies in a fonds of its own in the family archive: the Prussian reform of marriage law. He took down the council-of-state proceedings on the marriage act himself, from 18 January to 24 May 1843, and wrote memoranda on limiting the grounds of divorce, on the oath in matrimonial cases, on temporary separation. Among them are letters from his counterparts: Friedrich Carl von Savigny on 21 April 1843, the Kammergericht president Wilhelm Bornemann on 27 February 1843, the interior minister von Rochow on 13 May 1844, Adolf von Kleist on 10 June 1841. Beside them opinions on the staffing of the higher courts, on codification, on conflicts of jurisdiction, and, about 1839, ten pages on "Hegelianism in Prussia". Thirty years later civil marriage would take him to court.

21. 1844

    Chief president of the Higher Regional and Appeal Court at Magdeburg (until 1874).

22. 1844

    On 28 May he and Luise Johanna make a contract of inheritance and will.

23. 1844

    How far his influence reached is shown by a Pomeranian life of Hans von Kleist-Retzow: the young legal trainee was decisively influenced, it says, "above all by the later well-known political leaders Leopold and Ludwig von Gerlach and by the later editor of the Kreuz-Zeitung, Hermann Wagener". Four years afterwards those same three founded the paper together with Kleist-Retzow.

24. 1848

    Co-founder of the Neue Preußische Zeitung (the "Kreuzzeitung"); an 1849 caricature shows him as the "new Peter of Amiens" calling for a crusade.

25. 1849

    Member of the First Chamber; 1852–1858 member of the House of Representatives (Köslin constituency), from 1855 founder and leader of the ‘Gerlach faction’; from 1873 again in the Landtag. Also in the Erfurt Union Parliament 1849–1851 and the Brandenburg provincial diet 1849–1857 (BIORAB). In February 1850 he belongs to the small group of the extreme right (Bethmann-Hollweg, Count Schlieffen, Uhden, Kleist-Retzow, Count Krassow and others) which takes the oath on the constitution only with reservations published in the Kreuzzeitung (Kölnische Zeitung 8 February 1850).

26. 1849

    In the chamber debate on entailed estates he demanded that the three relevant paragraphs be struck out altogether – even, he said, if he held their content to be correct: he saw in them "nothing but a naked revolutionary phrase, an achievement of March", and wanted the difficulty solved "by way of sound legislation". Even an opponent conceded that of the motions "the only usable one is von Gerlach's – there is at least consistency in it". For a family that had held an entail of its own since 1809 this was no abstract question.

27. 1849 (Wrangel)

    At Sanssouci Field Marshal Wrangel made his acquaintance and then praised him without stopping – first to his brother Leopold, then before the king: his three wounds, his holding to his colours, his courage. The king agreed and, as Leopold noted, with some injustice set against him the former Kammergericht president von Kleist, whom he could not see again since Kleist had "left" him – that is what the king called his request for discharge.

28. 1850–1852

    How the other side saw him is shown by a Berlin comic paper of those years. It calls him outright "the head of the Kreuz-Zeitung party", puts "St Gerlach" first in a "gallery of Kreuzzeitung saints" – ahead of Wagener and Stahl – and has him say, in a round of refusals, "No absolutism, for without despotism it is no longer possible." On the quarrel over the first chamber it wrote in 1852: "The Bethmann party knows only what it does not want; the Gerlach party knows what it wants. But what it wants is so ghostly that many take fright and run away." The satirical sheets are opponents, not witnesses – but they show how plainly his direction could be recognised.

29. 1850

    A scene recorded by a newspaper report: he spoke "before very empty benches" for the oath formula "so help me God" and urged that the right of the church be preserved – "the basic right of all basic rights". Before the vote the deputy von Vincke observed that during this speech the house, particularly on its right side, had emptied so far that he doubted whether it was quorate.

30. 1850

    A quarrel among friends about what he wrote: Jasper von Oertzen, who had known him for years, identified him as the unnamed author of the Kreuzzeitung’s "Rundschauen" and on 2 August took him to task over their treatment of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Gerlach replied at length, declared himself "open to instruction", called the differences put to him slight, and held that they agreed in the main. Oertzen answered on 30 September.

31. 30. März 1850

    In the ministerial council at Bellevue, Radowitz delivered an address on the apostate princes and on "the danger of the influence of the Stahl-Gerlach association". With that the group around him, his brother Leopold and the legal philosopher Friedrich Julius Stahl had a name, given it by its opponent – and it was spoken in the king’s presence.

32. 17. November 1851

    He sent his brother Leopold a letter from Bismarck, and Leopold copied the passage on the Hamburg constitutional affair into his diary. Bismarck, since the summer Prussian envoy to the re-established federal diet, reported his manoeuvres in the complaints committee and closed with a sentence addressed to the brother: "The North German Junker, scold him as you will in your Rundschau, is after all in Germany the one-eyed among the blind; there are only Junkers and tailors in this country, and the true Junker occurs only on the North German plain." The "Rundschau" was his own column in the Kreuzzeitung.

33. 1851 (Wien)

    How far the reputation reached Leopold learned from an Austrian chamberlain: Herr von Hammerstein, an Austrian imperial major, told him that Emperor Franz Joseph held the "Gerlach party" in high esteem. Leopold wrote it down and added at once how foreign Austrian policy was to him.

34. 1852 (Kammerdebatte)

    In the debate on taxing religious communities he took a position that is antisemitic by any present-day measure: against Bethmann-Hollweg he declared that "the Jews" were "not a religious society but a people", and saw in the tax a punishment of the revolution. The Jewish deputy Veit replied that neither the constitution nor the legislation anywhere regarded the Jews as a people – if Gerlach ignored that, it was no wonder, since to him even the General State Laws were of "revolutionary" origin. The exchange stands in the chamber reports of the Pomeranian papers.

35. 1855

    Commander's cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern for the "First President of the Court of Appeal at Magdeburg, von Gerlach" (Justiz-Ministerialblatt 26 January 1855).

36. 1857

    He opened the budget debate and in doing so, as Count Schwerin acknowledged, set out "in a manner of speaking a programme of his party": economy, a distinction between productive and unproductive expenditure, the safeguarding of the budget right. Minister-President von Manteuffel replied that the speech had been more an appeal to the house than to the government. Against the deputy von Patow, who had said that the old Prussian soldiery failed in 1806 and was rehabilitated in 1813 by the people's army, he insisted "as a fighter of 1813" that without the core of the old Prussian soldiery the army would not have conquered France and Germany. The deputy Herzberg counted up that he had repeatedly called officials "servants" and had spoken thirteen times of their hunger and want.

37. 1858

    His second wife Luise dies on 5 August of a second stroke while taking the cure at Suderode in the Harz (Magdeburgische Zeitung, 10 August 1858); she is buried there on 10 August – his nephews Friedrich and Jakob, Philipp Nathusius and Wilhelm von Kügelgen stand by the twice-widowed man (Kraus 1994).

38. 1864–1876

    He continued the family history himself. Four volumes in his own hand lie in the family archive: to 1840, then 1840 to 1853, 1853 to 1864 and 1864 to 1876. The last alone runs to 451 pages. At the end he set a short characterisation of the family’s peculiarities. The four brothers, he wrote, had been neither smokers nor swimmers nor huntsmen; none had given to the building of Cologne cathedral or to the Gustavus Adolphus Foundation, none wore decorations where he was not obliged to, none had been to the theatre since 1820, none was a freemason. What they had instead was an appetite for people – and for books, their father to the end of his life.

39. 1864 (Kopenhagen)

    In the middle of the war a Copenhagen paper appealed to him. On 28 May 1864 the Dagbladet weighed the Augustenburg claims: if constitutional lawyers like Pernice, jurists like von Gerlach and statesmen like von Bismarck said the rights of succession were very tangled and the claims very doubtful, then that verdict counted for more than the verdict of a whole theological faculty. The faculty meant was the one at Kiel, which had shortly before pronounced its anathema on the Kreuzzeitung. He was read closely enough in Copenhagen for the papers to know who wrote the monthly surveys in his own journal.

40. 1873–1877

    With the votes of the Centre Party deputy for the Rhenish constituency of Sieg-Mülheim-Wipperfürth: in the by-election of 15 January 1873 he receives 242 electors' votes against 174 for Lukas, and on 17 January he takes his seat in the House of Representatives "in the front row of the Centre" (Bonner Zeitung 16 January, Echo der Gegenwart 18 January 1873). In November 1873 and October 1876 he is re-elected alongside Father Dautzenberg – the Centre press recommends the Protestant because he has "stood up with such manly resolve for the rights of the Catholic Church" (Bonner Zeitung 5 November 1873, Deutsche Reichs-Zeitung 25 October 1876). In January 1874 he moves in vain to strike from the civil-registration bill the repeal of compulsory baptism and of the ban on marriages between members of different confessions, arguing it would "drive Christianity and sacrament more and more out of the family" (Deutsche Reichs-Zeitung 22 January 1874). After his death the constituency elects Friedrich von Kehler as his successor on 31 May 1877 (Deutsche Reichs-Zeitung 2 June 1877).

41. 1874

    Resignation after prosecution and fine over ‘Civil Marriage and the Chancellor’. The pamphlet "Kaiser und Papst" (1872) had already raised a storm in the press – the newspaper portal counts over 200 mentions in 1872/73.

42. 1877

    Death on 18 February following a carriage accident on the Schöneberger Bridge in Berlin, four days after his election to the Reichstag; buried at the Domfriedhof II in Berlin. Funeral on 21 February: service by Pastor Knak in the small Bethlehem church, then the procession moves along Leipziger Straße, Spittelmarkt, Molkenmarkt and Alexanderplatz to the old cemetery of the cathedral parish in Elisabethstraße – the Kreuzzeitung experiences it almost as a demonstration against Bismarck (Kraus 1994). The accident: run over by a mail coach on 16 February (Kölner Sonntags-Anzeiger); Field Marshal Manteuffel and the Centre Party group in corpore attend the 3 p.m. funeral (Hallische Zeitung, Düsseldorfer Volksblatt). The Bonn Centre-party paper counts among the mourners "v. Gerlach's parliamentary colleagues from all factions", Field Marshal Manteuffel, Uhden, Kleist-Retzow, Hegel and the four nephews described as "adoptive sons" with the old servant; some fifty carriages follow the coffin. His newly won Reichstag seat for Osnabrück remains vacant (Deutsche Reichs-Zeitung 23 February, Pfälzer Zeitung 15 March 1877).

43. 1877 (Nachruf in Kopenhagen)

    Three days after his death the Copenhagen Fædrelandet printed an obituary. It opens: on 18 February died the well-known Prussian politician, the leader of the Junker party, Ernst Ludvig von Gerlach. What follows is accurate down to the details – date of birth, universities, three wounds, promotion to lieutenant of rifles, the founding of the Kreuzzeitung, the years in the Upper and Lower Houses, the break with Bismarck, and at the last his votes with the Centre and his support of the Hanoverians a few days before the end. One error stands in it. The paper makes him first president of the court at Frankfurt on the Oder in 1844; there he had been vice-president since 1835, and in 1844 he went to Magdeburg. The confusion has its reason: the Frankfurt post had been held before him by his brother Wilhelm.

44. 1923

    On the seventy-fifth anniversary the Neue Preußische Zeitung recalled its founding. Klaus von Gerlach collected the jubilee issues and the pieces written for them – twenty newspapers and cuttings reaching back to 1898, today in the family archive.

45. Nachlass

    Some 17,000 items – 15,000 letters from almost 9,000 correspondents, the diaries 1815–1877, memoranda, the estate inventory of 9 March 1877 – form the core of the Gerlach Archive, which came to Erlangen University in 1954 through Hans-Joachim Schoeps (Kalliope: 3,383 records). Among them are letters of Otto von Bismarck. Klaus von Gerlach worked them up after the war: at Berchtesgaden, between 1949 and 1951, he wrote the sixty-five-page study "Ludwig von Gerlach and Otto von Bismarck in the light of Bismarck's letters in the Rohrbeck archive", preserved in two typescript copies.

Sources and literature