The Rosenstrauchs, both father and son, seem to have kept their family history deliberately secret. People who met Johannes Ambrosius reported that although he was a gifted raconteur and public speaker, he was tightlipped about his past. The same appears to have been true of Wilhelm. The reason, most likely, is that Johannes Ambrosius’s personal history – as a religious convert, a man separated from his wife, and especially as an actor – was of a nature to inspire distrust and moral disdain and thus might damage the family’s claim to respectability. Throughout his adult life, he was dogged by allegations that as a former actor, he could not be an honest person of upright character and sincere religiosity. Johannes Ambrosius wanted to be accepted as a pastor, and Wilhelm needed to inspire confidence as a businessman; neither had an interest in encouraging knowledge of the family’s dubious past.
These considerations most likely affected the fate of the memoir of 1812. After Rosenstrauch’s death, it passed into Wilhelm’s possession. Why Wilhelm never published it is unclear, particularly considering the wide popularity in Russia of memoirs about the 1812 war. Most likely he wanted to avoid drawing attention to his connection with his father; he may also have worried about Russian reactions to the memoir’s depiction of class conflict among Russians in 1812, which ran counter to the widely accepted “patriotic” narrative of national unity in the face of the Napoleonic invasion. A Russian historian named M. S. Korelin published a brief article about the memoir in the 1890s, but without identifying the author; otherwise, it appears that the memoir was never described in any printed publication until the 21st century.
At least three copies of the memoir are known to exist today. One is a clean copy in Rosenstrauch’s own hand. This is the manuscript that is reproduced, with all its idiosyncrasies of spelling and punctuation, in the present publication. It is in the possession of the Division of Written Sources of the State Historical Museum in Moscow (fond 402, delo 239). The second was made, judging by the paper and the handwriting, by a Russian scribe in the late 19th century. It is held by the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow (fond 1337, opis’ 2, edinitsa khraneniia 49), and may be the version used by Korelin in the 1890s. The third copy, a typescript, belongs to Ms. Elke Briuer of Vicksburg, Mississippi: it comes from Ms. Briuer᾽s grandmother, a descendant of Wilhelm Rosenstrauch, who fled from her native Russia to Germany in the last days before the outbreak of World War I.
Rosenstrauch’s memoir of 1812 is a significant document for the history of civilians in the Napoleonic Wars. The life story of Rosenstrauch and his son Wilhelm exemplifies the often friendly and cooperative bond between Germany and Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries. The manner in which the memoir found its way to Mississippi is illustrative of that relationship’s breakdown in the 20th century. Perhaps it is grounds for optimism for the future that the memoir is now at last being published in a shared effort by a major Russian publisher and the German Historical Institute of Moscow.
The illustrations in the present book depict the following:
1. Map of the areas in Germany and the Netherlands where Rosenstrauch is known to have lived or traveled in 1768–1804.
2. Portrait of Rosenstrauch (1834) by Johann Baptist Ferdinand Matthias Lampi (1807–1855), from the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
3. Lithograph, based on Lampi’s portrait of Rosenstrauch, that was sold after his death to raise funds for his church in Khar’kov.
4. Title page of Rosenstrauch’s memoir of 1812, from the State Historical Museum in Moscow.
5. A petition for financial assistance following the devastation of Moscow in 1812, signed by Rosenstrauch, from the Central Historical Archive of Moscow.
6. Portrait of General Comte de Flahaut (a French officer mentioned in Rosenstrauch’s memoir of 1812), by François-Pascal-Simon Gérard, c. 1813, from the Bowood Collection, Bowood Estate, Calne, Wiltshire (England).
7. Napoleonic soldiers and Russian civilians in occupied Moscow, after a drawing by Christian Wilhelm Faber du Faur, from the Bavarian Army Museum, Ingolstadt (Photo: Christian Stoye). UID-Nr.: DE 811 33 55 17.
8. Portrait of Wilhelm Rosenstrauch, from the collection of Grafika.ru.
Further information on Rosenstrauch can be found in these publications:
Alexander M. Martin, “‘It Was the Lord’s Will That I Should Not Leave Moscow’: J. A. Rosenstrauch’s Memoir of the 1812 War,” Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 22, no. 4 (2012): 31–45
Alexander M. Martin, “Johannes Ambrosius Rosenstrauch (1768–1835),” in Stephen M. Norris and Willard Sunderland, eds., Russia’s People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500-Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), pp. 105–116.
Alexander M. Martin, “Middle-Class Masculinity in an Immigrant Diaspora: War, Revolution, and Russia’s Ethnic Germans,” in Karen Hagemann et al., eds., Gender, War, and Politics: Transatlantic Perspectives, 1775–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 147–166.
Johannes Ambrosius Rosenstrauch
Geschichtliche Ereignisse in Moskau im Jahre 1812. Zur Zeit der Anwesenheit des Feindes in dieser Stadt
Most eyewitness accounts of Moscow during the occupation of 1812 appeared in print before the end of the 19th century. An exception is the memoir of Johannes Ambrosius Rosenstrauch, which is here published for the first time, along with a biography of the author. In the course of a colorful life that took him from his native Prussia to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and finally Odessa and Khar’kov, Rosenstrauch (1768–1835) was an actor, merchant, freemason, and pastor. In 1812 he was a merchant of fashion goods in Moscow and was forced to share his house with a motley group of homeless foreigners, Russian serfs, and French officers. His memoir describes both his own spiritual evolution during the war and the drama (and sometimes humor) of what he observed: the fire, the looting, the class conflicts among Russians, the hostility and occasional cooperation between the Russians and the French, and the general cruelty as well as absurdity of war.
This publication inaugurates a new series, Archivalia Rossica, a joint editorial project of NLO and the German Historical Institute in Moscow. The series will publish bilingual or translated editions, with detailed scholarly commentary, of foreign-language sources from archives in Russia and abroad about Russian history from the 18th to the early 20th century.
Иллюстрации
Илл. 1. Карта странствий И. – А. Розенштрауха в Германии и Голландии.
