Victor Aimé Huber

Victor Aimé Huber (10 March 1800 – 19 July 1869) was a German social reformer, political thinker, travel writer and literary historian. Alongside Eduard Pfeiffer, Karl Korthaus, Hermann Schulze, Wilhelm Haas and Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen, Huber was one of the leading founding fathers of the German co-operative system.

Biography

Early life and education

Victor Aimé Huber was born in Stuttgart, the son of the writer couple Ludwig Ferdinand Huber and Therese Huber, née Heyne, widowed Forster. After the early death of his father, he was sent to Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg in Hofwil near Bern as a foster son at the age of 6. Fellenberg, a former friend of Pestalozzi, was about to establish an educational establishment for the sons of the upper classes, where Victor Aimé Huber was the first pupil to receive his schooling. In 1816, he left the institution prematurely in a dispute with Fellenberg and moved to Göttingen to live with his mother's relatives. Here he studied medicine while also studying languages and literature.

In 1820, Huber obtained his doctorate in Würzburg with the aim of setting up as a practising doctor in Bavaria and providing his widowed mother with a carefree retirement. But first he travelled to France, Spain, Portugal, Scotland and England in 1821 and published travelogues that appeared in the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, a widely read supplement to Cotta's Allgemeine Zeitung.

It was not until 1824 that Huber returned to Germany and endeavoured to complete his medical studies at the University of Munich. He failed due to the examiners' disfavour and failed the exam in 1825. Huber interpreted this as a twist of fate, gave up his unloved medical studies and turned his attention entirely to publishing political articles — first with Cotta, then as a freelance journalist — for which he travelled to France and England.

Career overview

As Huber did not earn enough money from writing to support his mother, he took up a position as a teacher of history and modern languages at the commercial school in Bremen in 1828, and later at the Altes Gymnasium in Bremen. In 1830 he married Auguste Klugkist, the daughter of Bremer senator Hieronymus Klugkist. In 1832 he became professor of new and occidental languages in Rostock, in 1836 in Marburg and in 1843 professor of literary history and editor of the conservative journal Janus in Berlin. In 1852, he left the civil service and settled in Wernigerode, from where he worked as a private individual and co-operative expert.

Confession and conversion

Huber was baptised a Catholic, following his father's denomination, without ever feeling an inner affiliation to the Catholic Church. His guiding principles did not come from religion, but rather from political liberalism.

This changed when Huber had to realise on his travels that the ideal of liberalism could only be realised in a very imperfect way; in addition, his socially insecure position meant that he was unable to provide for his mother. Therese Huber died shortly before he was able to bring her to Bremen, a fact that Huber was unable to come to terms with for the rest of his life. Out of this life crisis, Huber converted to the Reformed Church. The change had been prepared by contacts with important representatives of the revivalist movement, but also by his connection with the reformed Klugkist family of senators. Since his conversion, Victor Aimé Huber saw himself as a devout, church-going, Protestant Christian who relied on the Bible and his confession. The doctrine of justification was at the centre of his faith, which is why he became more and more involved in the Lutheran church over time.

As a Protestant Christian, Huber was also involved in church issues. He was one of the first outside Hamburg to publicly campaign for Johann Hinrich Wichern's Rauhes Haus, which he had visited himself shortly after its foundation. Even before the Wittenberg Church Congress, Huber campaigned for the Inner Mission at Janus; when this organisation began to flourish after 1848, he was excluded from its organisation, not least due to his controversial political reputation. Huber remained a keen supporter of the Inner Mission and gave lectures on the co-operative system at several church congresses; his friendship with Wichern lasted until 1862.

In Janus in 1847, Huber reported in detail on the negotiations of the first General Synod of the Protestant Church in Prussia, whose resolutions, however, came to nothing in the upheavals of the March Revolution.

Together with Friedrich Julius Stahl, Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg and Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, Huber was involved in the Evangelical Association, a branch of the Gustav Adolf Association. The association published Christian writings at affordable prices, as well as an illustrated gospel book and a widely published illustrated Bible, the motifs of which were selected by Huber. His aim was to reach working-class families in particular with Christian educational content.

Political commitment

As a student, Huber was passionate about the ideals of liberalism, which he saw above all in the realisation of a free constitution made by the people. In search of this ideal, he travelled through France, Spain, Portugal and Great Britain, all of which were constitutional states at the time.

From 1830 onwards, Huber increasingly tended towards monarchical conservatism and ultimately categorically rejected constitutions for German states. In 1842, he wrote the first conservative party programme in Germany, at a time when the conservatives were still far from seeing themselves as a party. This commitment earned him a call to Berlin University, where he was mainly wanted as the initiator of a new conservative journal to be founded. As editor and main author of the journal Janus. Jahrbücher deutscher Bildung, Gesinnung und That, which first appeared in 1845, Huber found himself politically caught between two fronts: as a monarchist and pietist, he was the enemy par excellence for the liberals and socialists; his strictly anti-constitutionalist, monarchist conservatism also proved to be incompatible with the political convictions of the leading Prussian classes, so that even his actual like-minded colleagues turned against him. The ideological and financial success of Janus was correspondingly modest and became a losing proposition for both the Prussian government and Huber.

When Prussia became a constitutional state in the course of the March Revolution of 1848, Huber discontinued Janus, withdrew largely from political journalism and devoted himself entirely to the social question. He left Berlin in 1852.

The social question and the co-operative movement

From childhood, Huber's mother and foster father Fellenberg had modelled the social responsibility of the upper classes for the lower classes. Huber was only able to fulfil this responsibility when he himself, as a professor, found himself in secure material circumstances. He founded infant care centres and sewing schools in Rostock and Marburg. His endeavours initially remained entirely within the framework of the charitable work that was common at the time.

On a research trip in 1844 (the same year as Engels), Huber travelled through the residential areas of factory workers in Manchester. It became clear to him that poverty was not an individual fate, but that the labour force was threatening to impoverish an entire section of the population. To counteract this development, Huber propagated a concept for housing cooperatives in 1846 under the title ‘inner colonisation’. According to his plan, cottage settlements were to be built that would provide working-class families with sufficient living space that would enable them to live a regulated, Christian family life in addition to their material livelihood. Over time, the workers were to become homeowners through their rent payments and thus secure their financial situation. Huber also planned to connect the tenants into an organic community through various (Christian) educational institutions. He wanted to generate the necessary capital from the sale of shares. Huber's call to found, finance and manage the housing co-operatives was aimed solely at the financially and ideally better-off. He could only envisage the active participation of the workers themselves once they had been trained by the elites to help themselves by living in the co-operatives.

Huber's socio-political ideas were realised in practice to some extent. From 1849 to 1852, he was on the board of the liberal Berlin non-profit building society, which built six small houses for 15 families on the property at Schönhauser Allee 58/58a. The estate, known as Bremer Höhe, was intended to be a prime example of ‘inner colonisation’, but (in its early form) did not last long. In 1888/89, the last cottages, which had fallen into disrepair, were demolished to make way for a new, denser development.

With his co-operative ideas, Huber was one of the intellectual pioneers of the co-operative movement in Germany. His importance lies less in his practical work or theory than in his work as a multiplier. He tirelessly collected information while travelling to Belgium, England and France, which made him the leading expert on the European cooperative system, who enjoyed a high reputation abroad in particular. He published the information he gathered in countless articles and brochures as well as at conferences.

During his lifetime, Huber did not meet with any significant response in Germany. He did not succeed in systematising his theories in a coherent main work, which made it difficult for them to be received. Moreover, with his Christian-conservative coloured plans for cooperatives, Huber was literally caught between the stools of all the relevant socio-political currents of his time: for the conservatives, the cooperative idea was too liberal, for the liberals, Huber's views were too conservative-monarchist, for the socialists, too paternalistic-reactionary and for political Catholicism, too Protestant.

Works

In the work of the series Skizzen entitled "Madrid, Lisbon and the Refugiados in London" he refers to his relationship with the Spanish liberal émigrés in London, especially with the Valencian publisher Vicente Salvá. A catalogue of the latter (1872) cites a work of his published in Berlin in 1844 in Latin on the castillian Romancero, of which very few copies were published as gifts (De primitiva cantilenarum popularium epicarum, vulgo romances, apud Hispanos forma). Certainly the Romancero was of great interest to him: in the Skizzen aus Spanien of 1828, in which he speaks at length about the liberal revolution in Spain, and which includes not a little about the Sierra Morena, Cordoba and the fair of Mairena, he includes the romance ¡Ay de mi Alhama! as the only appendix, including its musical score. Other works by him as a Hispanist include Geschichte des Cid Ruy Diaz Campeador von Bivar (1829), the collection of romances of El Cid entitled Chronica del famoso cavallero Cid Ruydiez Campeador (1844) and Spanisches Lesebuch (1832), a bilingual literary anthology of Castilian poetry and prose.

Major publications

• "Guckkastenbilder und sonst Allerley aus Paris". In: Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, No. 205 (1819), No. 208 (1821), No. 212, No. 259.
• De lingua et osse hyoideo pici viridis (1821)
• Skizzen aus Spanien (1828)
• "Über Verwahrlosung und Rettung der Kinder, zunächst in Beziehung auf die Rettungsanstalt in Hamm bei Hamburg". In: Mecklenburgische Blätter (1834/35), No. 24, pp. 368–376, No. 25, pp. 385–390, No. 26, pp. 393–407.
• Die englischen Universitäten. Eine Vorarbeit zur englischen Litteraturgeschichte (1839/1840; 2 volumes)
• Über die Elemente, die Möglichkeit oder Notwendigkeit einer konservativen Partei in Deutschland (1841)
• "Woher die rechten Leute nehmen?" iIn: Janus (1845), Vol. I, pp. 69–108.
• "Eindrücke und Betrachtungen eines Reisenden. (Aus Briefen an einen Freund.) Manchester. Das Proletariat". In: Janus (1845), Vol. II, pp. 641–678, 705–727.
• Die Selbsthilfe der arbeitenden Klasse durch Wirtschaftsvereine und innere Ansiedlung (1848; anonymous)
• "Die innere Mission als Sache der Kirche". In: Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, No. 95 (1848), pp. 937–944.
• Concordia. Blätter der Berliner gemeinnützigen Baugesellschaft (1849)
• Skizzen aus Ireland (1850)
• Bruch mit der Revolution und Ritterschaft (1852; anonymous)
• Innere Mission und Association. Eine Denkschrift an den Kirchentag von 1853 (1853)
• Reisebriefe aus Belgien, Frankreich und England im Sommer 1854 (1855)
• Sieben Briefe über englisches Revival und deutsche Erweckung (1862)
• "Das Wesen der Genossenschaft und ihre Bedeutung für die Innere Mission". In: Fliegende Blätter aus dem Rauhen Hause (1862), pp. 353–365.
• Erinnerungen an Fellenberg und Hofwil (1867)

References

Bauer, Rudolph (1998). "Huber, Victor Aimé." In: Hugo Maier, ed., Who is who der Sozialen Arbeit. Freiburg: Lambertus, pp. 270–71.

Baumann, Eike (2009). Der Konvertit Victor Aimé Huber (1800–1869). Geschichte eines Christen und Sozialreformers im Spannungsfeld von Revolution und Reaktion. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt.

Briesemeister, Dietrich (2009). "Victor Aimé Huber como hispanófilo." In: Berta Raposo & Ingrid García-Wistädt, eds., Viajes y viajeros, entre ficción y realidad. Publicacions de la Universitat de València, pp. 131–55.

Droz, Jacques (1960). "Victor-Aimé Huber: un conservateur social du milieu du XIX e siècle," Archives de sociologie des religions, 5e Année, No. 10, pp. 41–47.

Elvers, Rudolf (1881). "Huber, Victor Aimé." In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). 13. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 249–58.

Grothe, Ewald (2016). Die Abgeordneten der kurhessischen Ständeversammlungen 1830–1866. Marburg: Historische Kommission für Hessen.

Haas, Renate (1990). V. A. Huber, S. Immanuel und die Formationsphase der deutschen Anglistik. Zur Philologisierung der Fremdsprache des Liberalismus und der sozialen Demokratie. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.

Heyck, Eduard (1898). Die Allgemeine zeitung 1798-1898. Beiträge zur geschichte der deutschen presse. München: Verlag ser Allgemeinen zeitung.

Hindelang, Sabine (1983). Konservativismus und soziale Frage. Vikto Aimé Hubers Beitrag zum sozialkonservativen Denken im 19. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.

Kanther, Michael A.; Dietmar Petzina, (2000). Victor Aimé Huber (1800–1869). Sozialreformer und Wegbereiter der sozialen Wohnungswirtschaft. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.

Lengemann, Jochen (1996). MdL Hessen. 1808–1996. Biographischer Index. Marburg: Elwert, p. 194.

Losch, Philipp (1909). Die Abgeordneten der kurhessischen Ständeversammlung 1830–1866. Marburg: Elwert, pp. 29–30.

Paulsen, Ingwer (1956). Viktor Aimé Huber als Sozialpolitiker. Berlin.

Schoeps, Hans-Joachim (1972). "Huber, Victor Aimé". In: Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB). 9. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, p. 688.

Schwentker, Wolfgang (1993). "Victor Aimé Huber and the Emergence of Social Conservativism." In: Larry E. Jones & James Retallack, eds., Between Reform, Reaction and Resistance. Studies in the History of German Conservativism from 1789 to 1945. Providence/Oxford: Berg, pp. 95–121.

External links

• Works by Victor Aimé Huber at Gallica
• Works by Victor Aimé Huber at Hathi Trust
• Works by Victor Aimé Huber at Open Library
• Works by Victor Aimé Huber at German National Library
• Works by Victor Aimé Huber at German Digital Library