Piter Poel

Piter Poel (17 June 1760 – 3 October 1837) was a diplomat who in his later years became the publisher of the "Altonaischer Mercurius" (newspaper). A couple of years after his baptism his Godfather, Peter, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, became (for just six months, during 1762) the Tsar of Russia.

Poel was born in Russia, but his father had been born in the Netherlands, and at the time of his baptism his first name is thought to have been spelled in family and church records as "Pieter" or "Petrus". Sources also sometimes identify him as Peter Poel.

Life Family provenance Piter Poel was born in Arkhangelsk, where his father, Jacobus "Jan" Poel, had been sent by Rutger van Brienen to set up a northern branch of the St. Petersburg based van Brienen trading company. Sources comment admiringly on Jan Poel's ability as a linguist: he had undergone a commercial training in Leiden and was fluent in Dutch, Russian and German. His lecturers included Ludwig Timotheus Spittler. While at Göttingen he became a member of the influential "ZN" Student fraternity in 1781, as he would much later recall in his memoirs. Poel made full use of the networking opportunities that the fraternity membership provided.

Settling in Hamburg and Altona In 1785 Piter Poel moved to Hamburg where he developed a close friendship with merchant Caspar Voght. Early 1786 the two of them set out on an extended business trip, taking in Paris and London. Piter Pohl now lived in Altona for nearly fifty years, and it is where he would die in 1837. The marriage was a happy one of what was, in its day, one of the most influential German-language newspapers in northern Europe. In Altona Piter Poel also undertook work as a journalist and writer.

In 1793 Poel joined with two of his friends to buy a country house beside the Elbe at Neumühlen, a half hour walk to the west of his town house in Altona's Große Freiheit (street). The other purchasers were the merchant and enlightenment philosopher Georg Heinrich Sieveking (1751-1799) and the banker-merchant Conrad Johann Matthiessen (1751-1822). Together the three of them developed the house as a summer residence which quickly became known as a meeting point for Hamburg's wealthy cosmopolitan elite. The project survived Sieveking's early death in 1799 and Matthiessen's divorce in 1801, but the house at Neumühlen as sold in 1811 and Poel set up a home in Teufelsbrück a few hundred meters further downstream. Between 1816 and 1822 he lived together with Caspar Voght at house in Flottbek, another settlement on the western fringe of Altona, and it was here that on 18 October 1821 his wife died following a two-day illness. After the same of the Neumühlen house, his subsequent homes continued to provide a social hub for the Hamburg elite, with Poel himself at the heart of things. Four years after he was widowed his elder sister Magdalena, with whom he had always been close, fell ill and he rushed to her home in Bückeburg to take his leave of her, but arrived too late. Seven of his eleven children had lived into adulthood, and Piter Poel now withdrew increasingly into private life, while still sustaining friendships, notably with Caspar Voght and the Danish diplomat Johann Georg Rist who lived in Altona between 1815 and 1834.

Literary legacy During this period he began to work on his memoirs, covering the years up to the outbreak of the French Revolution. He insisted that these were not intended for publication despite the promptings of "insightful" friends. A couple of years before his death, in 1835 he agreed to the publication of fragments of his memoirs, notably in the "Altonaer Merkur" (newspaper). He also published a lengthy work on the reoccupation of Hamburg by the French in 1813, which was published under the title "Hamburgs Untergang". Much later his son Gustav Poel (1804-1895) published various of his father's papers under the title "Bilder aus vergangener Zeit".