Moritz Geisenheimer

Moritz Geisenheimer (1818 – 27 March 1878) was a German merchant, playwright, activist of Jewish Emancipation and the German Gymnastics and National Movement, one of the first sports officials in Düsseldorf, and a publicist and politician of the democratic movement during the German revolutions of 1848–1849.

Life

Born in Düsseldorf, the merchant Geisenheimer had a spice and colonial goods shop in the middle of the Düsseldorfer Altstadt, in Bolkerstraße, later in Bahnstraße 41 (today the Stadtmitte district). Literary and interested in the contemporary topics of Judaism in Germany, he wrote an article in 1841 for the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, published in Leipzig, in which he introduced the philologist and poet Ludwig Wihl. His brother, the painter Lazarus Wihl, was one of Geisenheimer's friends during the Vormärz.

Geisenheimer first appeared in the public life of his city with a drama that he, as a hitherto unknown playwright, had submitted to the management of the Düsseldorfer Theater under the title The Bravo and which premiered on its stage on 30 March 1847 with only moderate success. The material of the play was taken from the novella The Bravo by James Fenimore Cooper, published in 1831, and presented in the form of a romance the story of a Carlo, a freedom fighter for popular sovereignty and republicanism who, after being rescued from imprisonment, finally prefers emigration, but announces his intention to return in a better time. Critics were not enthusiastic about either the ending of the play or the performance.

In the summer of 1847, Geisenheimer also made a political appearance. The occasion was an anti-Jewish remark made by the Prussian Minister of State Ludwig Gustav von Thile in the "Three Estates Curia" of the Erster Vereinigter Landtag in the course of deliberations on the Prussian Jewish Law of 1847, which was subsequently disseminated via press reports. Von Thile had claimed in a session of this body on 14 June 1847 that "the Jew in and of himself can have no fatherland but that to which his faith refers him. Zion is the fatherland of the Jews." For this reason, Jews could never become Germans and were consequently also incapable of assuming state offices. Geisenheimer, together with the painter Louis Bacharach and the doctor Salomon Heinemann, protested against this in the liberal Deutsche Zeitung published in Heidelberg with the following public statement:

We declare loudly and before all the world: We Jews of Prussia have and long for no other fatherland than the country whose glory and greatness are our glory and greatness, whose language is ours, whose customs are ours, whose fall and rise we feel vividly as a part of the whole, for whose freedom we know how to fight and die. Germany or Prussia is the country in which we were born, in which our dead rest, whose brothers are our brothers. We have no other fatherland than our Germany, our Prussia with its history and future. The spirit of reconciliation and harmony will, we are also aware, eventually sink into the heart of even the most intolerant. Until then, we and all our co-religionists are, in the words of Uriel da Costa, 'of those who die by the wayside'.

In 1847, Geisenheimer was socially active in the field of gymnastics. In that year, he was one of the founders of the "Gymnastics Club for Adults", one of the oldest gymnastics clubs in the Rhineland, which still exists today under the name Düsseldorfer Turnverein von 1847. In 1848, 1850 and 1851, he led the executive committee of this association, whose task was also seen in making the people wehrhaft.

When the March Revolution 1848 broke out in Düsseldorf and a vigilance committee led by Lorenz Cantador paraded through the streets of the city with great publicity, associations emerged at the local level to publicly articulate political interests. In April 1848, Geisenheimer was among the founders of the Verein für demokratische Monarchie (lit. transl. Democratic Monarchy Association). As one of the leading figures of the association, which succeeded in getting its candidates elected with a clear majority in the elections to the Frankfurt National Assembly and the Prussian National Assembly, Geisenheimer represented the Düsseldorf democrats at the Rhineland-Westphalian Congress on 12 August 1848 in Cologne. He also acted as publisher and editor of the association organ Die Volksstimme.

Geisenheimer died after a long period of suffering at the age of 59 in Düsseldorf, mourned by his wife, offspring and brother-in-law.