Heinrich Brockhaus

Heinrich Brockhaus (4 February 1804 – 15 November 1874) was a German book dealer and publisher who became a liberal politician. Life Heinrich Brockhaus was born into a protestant family in Amsterdam, a principal commercial centre in the Batavian Republic (today the Netherlands) where his father had set up his business in 1802 after falling out with a business partner in the family's former home city, Dortmund. Heinrich's father was the German publisher Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus (1772-1823). His mother, born Sophie Wilhelmine Arnoldine Beurhaus, was the daughter of a Dortmund senator (leading politician), Johann Friedrich Beurhaus. Heinrich and his younger brother, Hermann Brockhaus (1806-1877) were pupils at the prestigious boys' school run by Carl Lang at Schloss Wackerbarth (Wackerbath castle/manor). Heinrich never received any higher education. Nevertheless, he displayed very early an uncommon interest in literature and oratory. At the age of fifteen he was already working in his father's publishing business. He was not yet twenty when his father died suddenly, and he found himself responsible for running his father's business, which by now had become established in Leipzig. Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus (1772-1823), in his will, had given effect to a determination that the business should be run for the benefit of all his heirs, and Heinrich ran it, initially, with his elder brother, Friedrich Brockhaus (1800-1865). Later on the brothers agreed that Heinrich should run the business on his own: Friedrich retired from it and moved away to Dresden. Under Heinrich's direction, the business flourished. In 1831 he purchased the publishing house J.F. Gledisch, a firm which could trace its origins back to the seventeenth century. In 1837 he launched the "Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung" (subsequently expanded and later relaunched as the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung), a newspaper which under his proprietorship had a reputation as a middle-class liberal publication.