Ehrenfried von Willich (5 September 1777 [1]– 2 February 1807) full name: Johann Ehrenfried Theodor von Willich) was a Protestant chaplain at the Swedish Queen's Regiment in Stralsund.
Ehrenfried von Willich was from a family of theologians from the Margraviate of Brandenburg. He was born in Sagard on the island of Rügen, the son of the pastor Philipp Philipp von Willich (1720-1787) and half-brother of the country doctor Moritz von Willich (1750-1810), the first country physician in Swedish Pomerania. [2]
At first Willich was the tutor and business-partner of Wilhelm Graf von Schwerin-Putzar in Prenzlau. From the spring of 1803 he was a chaplain in the Queen's Regiment in Stralsund, which at that time belonged to Swedish Pomerania. [3]
In 1803 Willich became engaged to Henriette von Mühlenfels (1788-1840), who was just 15 years old and had been an orphan for two years. She was daughter of the royal Prussian lieutenant-colonel Friedrich Gottlieb von Mühlenfels [4] († 1801), a Squire on Sissow (today part of Gustow, island of Rügen), and of Pauline of Campagne. [5] She was 16 by the time he married her on 5 September 1804. This marriage produced two children: Henriette (1805-1886) and Ehrenfried von Willich (1807-1880).
Almost two months before the birth of his eponymous son, while Napoleon's troops were besieging Stralsund (see Coalition Wars), Willich died of nerve fever ( typhus), which at that time was rampant in the city.
Since May 1801 Willich had been a close friend and correspondent of the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. In 1809, two years after Willich's death, Schleiermacher married Willich's widow, the now 21-year-old Henriette. [6]
- Rainer Schmitz: Bis nächstes Jahr auf Rügen. Briefe von Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher und Henriette Herz an Ehrenfried von Willich 1801-1807. [7] Evangelische Verlagsanstalt publisher, 1984
- Literature about Ehrenfried von Willich in the State Bibliography (Landesbibliographie) of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern
- ^ According to other sources: 1773.
- ^ Some sources, even Schleiermacher experts, erroneously call Ehrenfried a much younger brother of the pastor Heinrich Christoph von Willich; but he was actually Ehrenfried's uncle (brother of Ehrenfried's father and 39 years his junior).
- ^ Friedrich Schleiermacher. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Briefwechsel und biographische Dokumente, part 5, volume 6 (correspondence 1802–1803), page XLVIII (Nr. 30), Verlag de Gruyter, Berlin 2005 ( Ehrenfried von Willich at Google Books)
- ^ Mühlenfels, Friedrich Gottlieb von on Deutsche Biographie
- ^ Friedrich Schleiermacher. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Briefwechsel und biographische Dokumente, part 5, volume 7 (Correspondence 1803–1804), page XXXVI (Nr. 21), Verlag de Gruyter, Berlin 2005 ( Ehrenfried von Willich at Google Books)
- ^ Note at Gunter Scholtz (2007), "Schleiermacher, Friedrich", Neue Deutsche Biographie (in German), vol. 23, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 54–57; ( full text online)
- ^ Bis nächstes Jahr auf Rügen. Briefe von Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher und Henriette Herz an Ehrenfried von Willich 1801-1807 on Worldcat
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