continuing with the ancient texts rescued from from my old website about the Weiss chronicles, here's the short biography of Christoph Gottlieb Kauer, so following up from generations 10-6 in this blog entry, we now come to:
5. The railway man
A fateful day
August 18th, 1870, must have been one of those days when everything goes wrong. Either that, or some people in very high positions were extremely stupid.
In either case, the early morning of that day saw some 200,000 German soldiers moving at an angle of 45 degrees towards a line of 112,000 French soldiers who occupied a safe position on high ground a few kilometre from the city of Metz, and who had had time to dig trenches for their protection. The strategic vision of the German commander, Helmuth von Moltke, was to outflank the French line. There were a few problems with that plan. First that he didn’t know how long that line was, as nobody had actually gone to check. Second that some of the generals at the front just ignored his orders to hold still and drove their men into the gunfire regardless.
On the other side, things went just as spectacularly wrong. General Bazaine, a distinguished soldier who had simply been promoted one step too far (in an early example of the Peter principle), did not even consider the possibility that he might be able to win this battle. His only ambition was to secure his retreat to Metz, which was to prove the trap in which Moltke eventually caught him. A single day of supreme stupidity and pointless slaughter left more than 12,000 French soldiers dead, wounded or prisoners. The German side counted 20,160 men who were left dead or wounded. Among the latter was a 25-year-old from Simmern, Christoph Gottlieb Kauer.
Christoph Gottlieb Kauer was born at Simmern in 1845 as the first child of shoemaker Mathias Kauer and his wife Sophie Weiß. He completed an apprenticeship as a shoemaker, but then worked as a clerk for a notary.
Simmern was then part of the Kingdom of Prussia. For young men this meant that they had to do obligatory military service for three years, starting at the age of 20, followed by another four years in the reserve and one year in the “Landwehr.” Thus, Christoph Gottlieb will have done his service years from 1865 to 68. In July 1870, when Bismarck’s infamous Ems telegram tricked France into declaring war on Prussia, he was well within his reservist years. Within two weeks of the declaration of war, he must have been in the army of over 1.1 million men dispatched towards French border.
Christoph served as a corporal in the 8th company of the 3rd infantery regiment of the 29th brigade. This was part of the First Army led by General Karl von Steinmetz (1796-1877), a veteran of many wars, starting with the liberation of Napoleonic rule in 1815. This time, however, Steinmetz soon became a liability by following his own impulses and ignoring the subtle strategies and direct orders of the chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke (1800-1891).
This problem became most obvious in the battle of Gravelotte on August 18, 1870, the biggest and bloodiest battle of this war. Steinmetz was supposed to pin down his end of the French line near the village of Gravelotte while other parts of the German Army moved towards the far end to outflank the French. Moltke had stripped Steinmetz of the command of two of the Corps in his First Army, including the VIII Corps in which Christoph served. Furthermore, Moltke had ordered him to hold still during the 18th, to allow the left wing of the German armies time for the planned strategic move.
Around noon on that day, however, Steinmetz grabbed the command over the VIII Corps back without anybody’s authorisation. By 2:30 pm he had enough of sitting still and -- in clear breach of direct orders -- sent three of the four brigades of the VIII Corps, including Christoph’s 29th brigade, forwards in an attempt to take the farm St Hubert, an exposed outpost in front of the French lines. To get there, the infanterists had to advance across a ravine with no protection, utterely exposed to the French troups equipped with superior mitrailleuses and long range rifles.
The three German brigades didn’t have the slightest chance to get there and were mowed down within minutes. The survivors sought shelter and only much later managed to take St. Hubert, after the German artillery had forced the French out of it. And even then it didn’t bring them any luck and they had to evacuate it again before nightfall.
Legend has it that Christoph shouted “Hooray” a little too enthusiastically when storming towards French positions, allowing a projectile to enter his wide-open mouth and take a large chunk of his jaw-bone on the way out. He grew a rather large beard to cover up the disfigured jaw. But considering the many thousands who died on that day, he (and our lineage) had a lucky escape.
On the next morning, the German troups found that the French had given up and retreated to Metz, where Bazaine’s army surrendered on the 28th of October. By then, the empire of Napoleon III had collapsed, following the defeat of Sedan, where the emperor was taken prisoner. In compensation, Bismarck constructed a new German empire, under Prussian leadership, as King William of Prussia became the emperor William I on January 18, 1871. General Steinmetz was “promoted” to the position of governor of Posen in a move designed to keep him out of mischief (and out of what remained of Moltke’s hair!), while Bazaine was court-martialled and found guilty of treason for giving up too easily.
In spite of (or because of) this traumatic event, Christoph was an early enthusiast of the European idea, later inscribing his family bible with a short poem including the line: “Europa ist mein Vaterland.” In compensation for his battle injury he was offered a career in the railways of the newly conquered Alsace-Lorraine region, the state-owned Reichseisenbahnen in Elsass Lothringen.
Marriage
In 1874 he married Margarethe Imig (1847-1930), also from Simmern, daughter of Weißbender (a cooper who made smaller vessels for dairy and kitchen use from lightly coloured wood, hence the "white" part) Wilhelm Imig (1820-1877) and Regina Catharina Strack (1817-1877). These two had seven children and 40 grandchildren. Margarethe was number two, but number four, Elisabeth, is also of interest, as her son, Julius Düsselmann, married Margarethe’s daughter Helene Kauer, and these two happen to be my great-grandparents.
Margarethe’s ancestors are all from the Hunsrück area for as far as we can tell (to the 10th generation, counted from myself). The Imig lineage can be traced back to Mathias Immig, born 1657 at Fronhofen near Simmern. He lived to the age of 71, but his wife Magdalena outperformed him, reaching the age of 88, which for somebody born in 1651 must have been a miracle. This may be where Margarethe and her five daughters got their longevity genes from.
There is a lovely story of a bunch of would-be emigrants in the early 18th century, including an Imig family, coming from the Pfalz region and heading for America, who got stuck after some 200 km near Kleve, on the Lower Rhine, and founded a “colony” comprising the villages of Pfalzdorf and Luisendorf.
To this day, there are many Imigs in both villages. The most prominent of them was the historian and poet Jakob Imig, 1905-1994. The ancestors of the Imigs in this group of frustrated emigrants have been traced back to Peter Imig, born 1620 in Fronhofen and his wife Gertrud, who was born in Biebern (1621) but died in Fronhofen (1684). While the link to “our” Imigs cannot be established with certainty, Peter and Gertrud Imig might very well be the parents (or other close relatives) of Mathias Imig, who was born 37 later in the same village.
After the war, Christoph Kauer worked with the nascent railways in the Alsace region, moving along with the job, as becomes obvious from the different birth places of his children (Mulhouse, Morhange, Fontoy). His last appointment was that of a station master at Adamsweiler (Adamswiler), where three of his daughters got married in 1900-1907, and where he died in 1909. I have a picture postcard of Adamsweiler showing the railway station as one of the four “tourist attractions” of the village. In front of the station you see a lineup of a station master with a very big beard, his wife, his 5 teenage daughters, and the station staff. When I visited the place in 1989, the station at Adamsweiler was still standing, essentially unchanged, but boarded up and put up for sale.
After Christoph’s death, Margarethe went to live with her second daughter, Auguste Fuchs (see below) at Saargemünd (Sarreguemines), Lorraine. The area became part of France in the Versailles Treaty, and in June 1919 Margarethe was forced to leave. She moved to Bad Münster am Stein, where she lived with her daughter Johanna (or Auguste?) until she died in September 1930, aged 83.
There are quite a few objects from the household of Christoph and Margarethe still in the family today, including a 20-volume encyclopaedia (Pierer’s Conversations-Lexicon), a grandfather’s clock, the bible mentioned above, and six pieces of furniture.
Intriguingly, Christoph and Margarethe produced two sons who died in infancy, and 5 daughters who lived between 73 and 87 years (which, for children born in the 1870s and 1880s is quite an achievement). Clearly, they weren’t meant to spread the name Kauer any further. While two of the five daughters remained childless, the other three had a total of nine children, including my grandmother, her brother and sister, and their six first cousins. With a few of them my grandparents and my great-aunt still held contact when I was a child. Names including Nelly and Martha were mentioned frequently, only I didn’t have the faintest clue who these people were!
1. Christoph Gottlieb Matthias, born 12.10.1875, died within a month.
2. Johanna Sofia, born 9.11.1876 Mühlhausen, died 26.11.1953 Hahnenbach. She remained unmarried, worked as a secretary at Bad Kreuznach. In 1934, she took early retirement and used her savings to build the house at Hahnenbach, which is still in the family. The land was provided by the distant relatives from the Weiß/Schmidt/Weirich/Giloy lineage (descended from Maria Magdalena Weiß, second child of the teacher Christian Gottlieb Weiß). These families have been running the only pub in the village over centuries.
3. Auguste (1879-1952) married in 1900 Wilhelm Fuchs (1872-1963) Postinspektor at Münster a.St.
1. Helene (1901-1965) married Mr Petz
2. Natalie “Nelly” (1906-1984) married (1931) Christian Paust. One son, Dieter, and two grandsons.
4. Anna Katharina (1880-1965) married Heinrich Thiebold (1877-1948), a teacher from Brebach (Saar).
1. Erwin born 1902, died in infancy.
2. Martha (1907- ) married Willi Helmer, Saarbrücken, one son, two daughters.
3. Robert born 1910, married Aenne Schmidt.
4. Herta born 1917.
5. Louise Regina gen. Kätha (1883-1960), remained unmarried, served as household helper to her sister Helene.
6. Helene, married Julius Düsselmann
1. Ruth (1908-1993)
2. Werner (1911-1941)
3. Esther (1918-1983)
7. Karl (1888-1891) died of measles.
More details re the descendants in the Kauer Clan entry.
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