also a new town hall which was erected in 1904–1906. Other buildings are: the old bastion, named Kaisertrutz, now used as a guardhouse and armoury; the gymnasium buildings in the Gothic style erected in 1851; the Ruhmeshalle with the Kaiser Friedrich museum, the house of the estates of the province (Ständehaus), two theatres and the barracks. Near the town is the chapel of the Holy Cross, where there is a model of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem made during the 15th century. In the public park there is a bust of Schiller, a monument to Alexander von Humboldt, and a statue of the mystic Jakob Böhme (1575–1624); a monument has been erected in the town in commemoration of the war of 1870–71, and also one to the emperor William I. and a statue of Prince Frederick Charles. In connexion with the natural history society there is a valuable museum, and the scientific institute possesses a large library and a rich collection of antiquities, coins and articles of virtu. Görlitz, next to Breslau, is the largest and most flourishing commercial town of Silesia, and is also regarded as classic ground for the study of German Renaissance architecture. Besides cloth, which forms its staple article of commerce, it has manufactories of various linen and woollen wares, machines, railway wagons, glass, sago, tobacco, leather, chemicals and tiles.
Görlitz existed as a village from a very early period, and at the beginning of the 12th century received civic rights. It was then known as Drebenau, but on being rebuilt after its destruction by fire in 1131 it received the name of Zgorzelice. About the end of the 12th century it was strongly fortified, and for a short time it was the capital of a duchy of Görlitz. It was several times besieged and taken during the Thirty Years’ War, and it also suffered considerably in the Seven Years’ War. In the battle which took place near it between the Austrians and Prussians on the 7th of September 1757, Hans Karl von Winterfeldt, the general of Frederick the Great, was slain. In 1815 the town, with the greater part of Upper Lusatia, came into the possession of Prussia.
See Neumann, Geschichte von Görlitz (1850).
GÖRRES, JOHANN JOSEPH VON (1776–1848), German
writer, was born on the 25th of January 1776, at Coblenz. His
father was a man of moderate means, who sent his son to a Latin
college under the direction of the Roman Catholic clergy. The
sympathies of the young Görres were from the first strongly
with the French Revolution, and the dissoluteness and irreligion
of the French exiles in the Rhineland confirmed him in his hatred
of princes. He harangued the revolutionary clubs, and insisted
on the unity of interests which should ally all civilized states to
one another. He then commenced a republican journal called Das
rote Blatt, and afterwards Rübezahl, in which he strongly condemned
the administration of the Rhenish provinces by France.
After the peace of Campo Formio (1797) there was some hope that the Rhenish provinces would be constituted into an independent republic. In 1799 the provinces sent an embassy, of which Görres was a member, to Paris to put their case before the directory. The embassy reached Paris on the 20th of November 1799; two days before this Napoleon had assumed the supreme direction of affairs. After much delay the embassy was received by him; but the only answer they obtained was “that they might rely on perfect justice, and that the French government would never lose sight of their wants.” Görres on his return published a tract called Resultate meiner Sendung nach Paris, in which he reviewed the history of the French Revolution. During the thirteen years of Napoleon’s dominion Görres lived a retired life, devoting himself chiefly to art or science. In 1801 he married Catherine de Lasaulx, and was for some years teacher at a secondary school in Coblenz; in 1806 he moved to Heidelberg, where he lectured at the university. As a leading member of the Heidelberg Romantic group, he edited together with K. Brentano and L. von Arnim the famous Zeitung für Einsiedler (subsequently re-named Tröst-Einsamkeit), and in 1807 he published Die teutschen Volksbücher. He returned to Coblenz in 1808, and again found occupation as a teacher in a secondary school, supported by civic funds. He now studied Persian, and in two years published a Mythengeschichte der asiatischen Welt, which was followed ten years later by Das Heldenbuch von Iran, a translation of part of the Shahnama, the epic of Firdousi. In 1813 he actively took up the cause of national independence, and in the following year founded Der rheinische Merkur. The intense earnestness of the paper, the bold outspokenness of its hostility to Napoleon, and its fiery eloquence secured for it almost instantly a position and influence unique in the history of German newspapers. Napoleon himself called it la cinquième puissance. The ideal it insisted on was a united Germany, with a representative government, but under an emperor after the fashion of other days,—for Görres now abandoned his early advocacy of republicanism. When Napoleon was at Elba, Görres wrote an imaginary proclamation issued by him to the people, the intense irony of which was so well veiled that many Frenchmen mistook it for an original utterance of the emperor. He inveighed bitterly against the second peace of Paris (1815), declaring that Alsace and Lorraine should have been demanded back from France.
Stein was glad enough to use the Merkur at the time of the meeting of the congress of Vienna as a vehicle for giving expression to his hopes. But Hardenberg, in May 1815, warned Görres to remember that he was not to arouse hostility against France, but only against Bonaparte. There was also in the Merkur an antipathy to Prussia, a continual expression of the desire that an Austrian prince should assume the imperial title, and also a tendency to pronounced liberalism—all of which made it most distasteful to Hardenberg, and to his master King Frederick William III. Görres disregarded warnings sent to him by the censorship and continued the paper in all its fierceness. Accordingly it was suppressed early in 1816, at the instance of the Prussian government; and soon after Görres was dismissed from his post as teacher at Coblenz. From this time his writings were his sole means of support, and he became a most diligent political pamphleteer. In the wild excitement which followed Kotzebue’s assassination, the reactionary decrees of Carlsbad were framed, and these were the subject of Görres’s celebrated pamphlet Teutschland und die Revolution (1820). In this work he reviewed the circumstances which had led to the murder of Kotzebue, and, while expressing all possible horror at the deed itself, he urged that it was impossible and undesirable to repress the free utterance of public opinion by reactionary measures. The success of the work was very marked, despite its ponderous style. It was suppressed by the Prussian government, and orders were issued for the arrest of Görres and the seizure of his papers. He escaped to Strassburg, and thence went to Switzerland. Two more political tracts, Europa und die Revolution (1821) and In Sachen der Rheinprovinzen und in eigener Angelegenheit (1822), also deserve mention.
In Görres’s pamphlet Die heilige Allianz und die Völker auf dem Kongress zu Verona he asserted that the princes had met together to crush the liberties of the people, and that the people must look elsewhere for help. The “elsewhere” was to Rome; and from this time Görres became a vehement Ultramontane writer. He was summoned to Munich by King Ludwig of Bavaria as Professor of History in the university, and there his writing enjoyed very great popularity. His Christliche Mystik (1836–1842) gave a series of biographies of the saints, together with an exposition of Roman Catholic mysticism. But his most celebrated ultramontane work was a polemical one. Its occasion was the deposition and imprisonment by the Prussian government of the archbishop Clement Wenceslaus, in consequence of the refusal of that prelate to sanction in certain instances the marriages of Protestants and Roman Catholics. Görres in his Athanasius (1837) fiercely upheld the power of the church, although the liberals of later date who have claimed Görres as one of their own school deny that he ever insisted on the absolute supremacy of Rome. Athanasius went through several editions, and originated a long and bitter controversy. In the Historisch-politische Blätter, a Munich journal, Görres and his son Guido (1805–1852) continually upheld the claims of the church. Görres received from the king the order of merit for his services. He died on the 29th of January 1848.
