Ludwig and Mathilde Hitzfeld
“Confident in Their just Cause”
In the final phase of the revolution in spring 1849, which encompassed numerous German regions, the enforcement of the Imperial Constitution was central. The question was whether the constitution adopted by the Frankfurt National Assembly, with its principles of popular sovereignty, fundamental rights, and separation of powers, should be defended, if necessary, by military means against dissenting individual states. There was particular approval for such an approach in Saxony, the Palatinate, Rhenish Hesse, and Baden.
The Palatinate’s contribution to such an “Imperial Constitution Campaign” began on May 1, 1849, in Kaiserslautern. This was preceded on March 28 by the non-recognition of the Imperial Constitution by the Bavarian King Maximilian II, who did not agree to the constitution primarily for two reasons: the intended unitary state order and the exclusion of Austria.
The Palatinate’s reaction to this occurred five weeks later in Kaiserslautern. Here, three proposals were discussed at a public assembly: 1. A grand address to the King with the aim of revoking his rejection decision, 2. The immediate establishment of a provisional government for the Palatinate and thus the secession from Bavaria, 3. The appointment of a State Defense Committee for the implementation of the Imperial Constitution and the organization of popular defense, in order to be prepared for any potential military action against the Palatinate from outside.
The first proposal was presented by Kirchheimbolanden district physician Dr. Ludwig Hitzfeld (1794-1869) (Colonel Seyler, Kirchheimbolanden Citizens’ Association. However, it did not even make it to a further vote. The decision between the other two proposals ultimately went to the State Defense Committee by a narrow majority.
The measures that the committee then decided upon in the following two and a half weeks led directly to open confrontation with the Bavarian state power. This included, for example, the formation of a Palatinate militia by consolidating local citizen militias. This was to be done with the cooperation of a three-member advisory team, of which Hitzfeld was a member. Further measures by the State Defense Committee, including those by Kirchheimbolanden notary Karl Wilhelm Schmidt, were later legally prosecuted for this reason.
However, Schmidt already lost his office again on May 17, as a Provisional Government now replaced the State Committee. This was elected by representatives of the Palatinate cantons, including Hitzfeld for the Kirchheimbolanden canton. With this, the Palatinate simultaneously declared its independence from Bavaria. The relevant proclamation was announced by the “Kirchheimbolander Wochenblatt” in its May 22 issue.
This also drew the battle lines, and the military counter-reactions now to be expected were declared illegitimate from the outset.
They occurred four weeks later, starting with the Schlossgarten skirmish in Kirchheimbolanden [Location 48].
The “Well-Known Female Irregular Demoiselle Hitzfeld”
The scene is heroic. Raising a black-red-gold flag, a young woman stands like a Valkyrie on a barricade. Is it truly the Kirchheimbolanden native, born in 1826, who was referred to in 1853 in the “Pfälzer Zeitung” as the well-known female irregular Demoiselle Hitzfeld?
Local tradition maintains this image to this day: in pictorial representations on the square at the Grey Tower [Location 54] and in the district administration’s council chamber, with the naming of a Kirchheimbolanden school, as well as a street.
Mathilde Hitzfeld (1826-1905), the daughter of Kirchheimbolanden district physician Dr. Ludwig Hitzfeld, who was politically active in various ways in 1848/49, was indeed accused in the post-revolutionary wave of trials of inciting to fight against the Prussian troops. She is also said to have broken open the cellar door of wine merchant Levi here, or at least to have assisted in doing so.
Similarly, in 1905, the obituary for Mathilde Hitzfeld, who died in the USA, highlighted in the Kirchheimbolanden “Lokalanzeiger”: She participated in the barricade fight in Kirchheimbolanden and, with a small band of daring freedom heroes, tried in vain to halt the advance of the Prussians.
Mathilde Hitzfeld, then, an Icon of the Revolution?
However: Although accused of participating in treasonous undertakings that took place in May and June of that year [1849] in the Palatinate district, she was acquitted by the end of the year based on King Maximilian II’s amnesty law.
But: The myth lives on. Above all, the image depicting her holding the flag fuels it.
One is reminded of Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting “Liberty Leading the People”.
The image of the Kirchheimbolanden barricade is entirely in this vein, as is the very similar depiction of Lisette Hatzfeld at the Mannheim roadblock. Both illustrations were published at the end of the 19th century.
For Mathilde Hitzfeld, the connection to the black-red-gold flag also goes back to a very specific root: the flag consecration of the “Donnersberg Freischaren 1848”. The report about it in the “Kirchheimbolander Wochenblatt” is full of pathos: She took the flag, presented it in a fiery speech to the flag bearer of the Freischar […] and concluded by saying: “If you return with this flag and a united and free fatherland, I will give you this hand.”
Legacy of Remembrance
Mathilde Hitzfeld is particularly associated with the legacy of remembrance concerning 1848/49. Not only are a street and a school in Kirchheimbolanden named after her, she is also present with the mural in the parking lot at the Grey Tower [Location 54] and in the museum in the Stadtpalais.
Her lifelong connection with Kirchheimbolanden has contributed significantly to this. Therefore, in 1899, she was also invited to the 50th anniversary celebration of the Schlossgarten skirmish. However, being 73 years old by then, she could not travel from the USA. She therefore apologized in a long letter: “Believe me, I have not forgotten that time; I have not changed myself or my views. The same enthusiasm for justice and freedom still burns as brightly within me today as it did 50 years ago.”
Her husband, Theodor Kaufmann, also saw himself entirely in this spirit. In Dresden, during the May Uprising of 1849, his path had crossed with Richard Wagner and Gottfried Semper. He knew Wagner from the Dresden People’s Association, and Semper from “Barricade No. 13” during the May Uprising. The barricade, according to one of the insurgents in a later police report, had various commanders. First, Professor Semper commanded it […], then a certain Kaufmann. On June 24, Kaufmann was therefore put on a police wanted list, but he evaded it by fleeing to Switzerland and emigrating to the USA.
It is therefore not unlikely that he was indeed the artist who designed a woodcut that appeared in 1850 in a Düsseldorf publishing house, which in the same year published a Kaufmann copperplate engraving cycle on the “Idea of God”.
Under the title “Blessed with Powder and Lead 1849”, the woodcut depicts the death of an executed irregular, while the state’s forces continue their march.
The blindfolded irregular, executed, is depicted as a martyr by the cockaded hat lying next to him. The state power has prevailed. However, the sun shines in the distance. For the ideas of equality for all people and of the rights that everyone has to their bodily and vital necessities have by no means died. They remain the hopeful goal. For the woodcut is placed in a context: “Comfort for 1849ers,” such is the title of the four-page series featuring Socrates, Jesus, and Hus [Jan Hus] as links in that chain of blood witnesses to the development of humankind.
Thus, the legacy of remembrance has its topos. If the image therefore truly implemented a Kaufmann design, then it illustrates a political thought entirely in the spirit of Mathilde Hitzfeld.
So how can Mathilde Hitzfeld and 1848/49 be represented today? The mural in the parking lot at the Grey Tower prompts this question, as does her personification in the museum in the Stadtpalais.
There in the museum, the marching band of the Kirchheimbolanden Gymnastics Club, “founded” in 1961, and the accompanying traditional costume group are also commemorated – both in Freischar uniforms and with Mathilde Hitzfeld also present.
However, this historicization is now only museal, as it no longer exists in that form. However, this also demonstrates the change to which the view of 1848/49 is subject. But this also illustrates a fundamental characteristic of historical memory in general: It is subject to the spirit of the times. And that, as is well known, is fluid.
“Isn’t Freedom for Everyone?”
The contemporary witness, who is central to Friedrich Albrecht Karcher’s “Novella from the Year 1849”, published in Kaiserslautern in 1851, under the book title “The Female Irregular”, is fictional, but excellently stages the revolutionary events in the Palatinate. For example, the protagonist asks: Does man fight only for himself? Isn’t freedom for everyone? Don’t we women also have a heart that beats for the fatherland? Miserable bonds of convention that shackle us women!
Mathilde Hitzfeld could have formulated it similarly. However, women like her or Flora, the “Female Irregular” in Karcher’s “Novella”, were the exception – even in Kirchheimbolanden. But the two Hitzfelds, Mathilde and her mother Anna Maria, Regine Glaser and Therese Giessen, they and others also championed the revolutionary cause of the men – primarily, however, by embroidering and sewing the citizen militia and Freischar flags.
For “equal participation of women in politics in 1848/49 was not only rejected by most men, but also not even sought by the majority of women.” And yet: women not only made flags, they also appeared publicly at flag consecrations, read newspapers, and discussed.
This then inevitably led to the question: “Isn’t freedom for everyone?”
“Good Friends”
The liberal bourgeois society of the 1830s/40s in Kirchheimbolanden was not only connected by their shared political-social thinking, but also frequently interconnected by family ties. The Glaser, Giessen, Pilgeram, and Brogino families are not isolated cases.
The entries in the church register of the Protestant congregation regarding the Hitzfeld family show the same. For example, at the wedding of Ludwig’s Anna Maria Hitzfeld in 1821, “Jakob Anton Brogino, merchant and good friend” and the court messenger Andreas Joseph Ropiquet, also a “good friend”, are noted as witnesses. Both wedding witnesses are also listed in a list compiled by the Kirchheimbolanden Justice of the Peace in 1832 of the “Society of Partisans [named], who harbor [liberal] political sentiments and principles”.
Equally revealing is the list of witnesses at Mathilde Hitzfeld’s baptism (1826). It names another “liberal partisan” from 1832, “Friedrich Lenning, merchant,” as well as Jakob Anton Brogino’s brother-in-law. And for the baptism of Mathilde’s sister Magdalena Ina (1724), “Jakob Knöbel, schoolteacher” is listed, father of Friedrich Wilhelm Knöbel, who was accused in 1832 as a “traitor” and of “defaming the highest state authorities”.
Such networks shaped the liberal bourgeois society in the 1830s/40s, not only in the Palatinate-Bavarian town of Kirchheimbolanden.
