Theodor Brüggemann

Theodor Brüggemann (31 March 1796 – 6 March 1866) was an energetic school teacher who became a Prussian government official and a politician.

Life Johann Heinrich Theodor Brüggemann was born in Soest, a small town to the east of Dortmund which at the time of his birth still had not recovered from the devastation of the Thirty Years' War at the start of the century. He was the child of a mixed marriage: his father was a catholic brandy distiller. His mother was a Protestant.

It was on Hermes' recommendation that in 1814 he became a teacher of ancient languages at the gymnasium (secondary school) in Düsseldorf, becoming one of its three administrative directors in 1823 and taking over as the institution's head shortly afterwards.

Political As a pupil of Georg Hermes the young Brüggemann adhered to his teacher's rationalist theology, heavily permeated by the moral philosophy of Fichte and Kant. However, by the time of the so-called Cologne turmoil of the mid 1830s, Brüggemann had become very much more conservative in his strong catholic observance than his former mentor.

Around 1846 he tried, without success, to set up a pro-government newspaper in the Rhineland. In 1850 he was a member of the upper house in the short-lived Erfurt Union Parliament, a Prussian led initiative which attempted to build on the pan-German Frankfurt Parliament of 1848/49, but without its dangerously radical aspects and also, as matters turned out, without Austria. Meanwhile, between 1849 and 1854 he also sat as a member in the first chamber of the Prussian Parliament ("Landtag"), where he was a leading voice for the country's catholic minority. Between 1851 and 1854 he was a vice-president of the chamber. Between 1854 and 1866 the king made him a member for life of the upper house, in which he served as vice-president of the chamber between 1854 and 1855.