1 On the biography of Prince Ernst II of Hohenlohe-Langenburg: Hereditary Prince Ernst Wilhelm Friedrich Karl Maximilian of Hohenlohe-Langenburg - hereinafter called "Ernst II" in distinction to his grandfather Ernst - was born on 13 September 1863 in Langenburg as the son of Princess Leopoldine, born Princess of Baden, and Prince Hermann of Hohenlohe-Langenburg. He spent his school time in Karlsruhe, his mother's home town, at the Grand Ducal Gymnasium, which he left after graduating from high school in 1881. He then studied law as part of a contemporary university tour which took him to Paris, Bonn, Tübingen and Leipzig between 1881 and 1884. In 1885 Ernst II took his first legal exam at the Higher Regional Court in Naumburg a. d. Saale and during his military officer training at the 2nd Garde-Dragonerregiment in Berlin-Lichterfelde in the years 1886-1889 he also used the available time for extensive social activities at the courts of Emperor Wilhelm I and his son Friedrich. After completing his training, Ernst II advanced in the military hierarchy to lieutenant-colonel á la suite of the army (1914). The hereditary prince then aspired to a career in the Foreign Office, for which he first used one of his frequent stays in London in 1889 as a kind of private 'apprenticeship' at the German embassy. Queen Victoria was a great-aunt of Ernst II, so that he could always move at the highest social level. In 1890-1891 he passed his diplomatic exam and then took up a position as 3rd secretary in the embassy in St. Petersburg. Already in 1892 Ernst II achieved his transfer to London with the help of his father, who had enough influence as governor of Alsace-Lorraine, where he served as 3rd embassy secretary until 1894. In this year the hereditary prince Prince Hermann followed to Strasbourg to work as legation secretary of the ministry for the Reichsland Alsace-Lorraine. In 1896 Ernst II married his cousin of the 3rd degree Alexandra (1878-1942), a princess from the British royal family, whose father Duke Alfred of Edinburgh had taken over the Thuringian Duchy of Saxony-Coburg and Gotha three years earlier. Together with his wife and the offspring who soon followed - Gottfried, Marie Melita, Alexandra, Irma and Alfred, who died shortly after his birth - Gottfried, Marie Melita, Alexandra and Irma moved his centre of life to Langenburg and finally left the diplomatic corps in 1897. He had begun to establish himself in his role as heir when, after the unexpected death of Alexandra's brother Alfred (1899), the open question of succession in Saxony-Coburg and Gotha required a settlement. Ernst II was assigned as regent and guardian for the new, still youthful Duke Carl Eduard, a task he took over in 1900 after the death of his father-in-law, so that he now stood for 5 years at the head of a German principality. After the end of the regency, during which he had acquired the goodwill of his Thuringian subjects through a liberal attitude, Emperor Wilhelm II, his 3rd cousin, gave him the prospect of a position as State Secretary and appointed him in 1905 provisional head of the Colonial Department in the A u s w ä r t i g e s A m t , which was to be upgraded to his own R e i c h s k o l o n i a l a m t . But because of internal quarrels and the resistance in the Reichstag against the financing of the new authority, the hereditary prince had to take his hat off again in 1906. The following year Ernst II returned to the political stage as a member of the Reichstag for the constituency of Gotha, in which he had run as a representative of the bourgeois parties against the SPD. As a guest student of the parliamentary group of the German Reich Party, he sometimes appeared with speeches in the plenum, but everyday parliamentary work remained largely alien to him. As a result of a special political constellation in the Reichstag, Ernst II nevertheless managed to be elected vice-president of parliament in 1909 as a compromise candidate for the right-wing conservative camp. But he was not able to carry out this task for long either, because he did not want to come to terms with the conventions of parliamentary debates. As early as 1910 he used the anti-Protestant "Borromeo encyclical" of Pope Pius X to resign from his office in protest, albeit at the price of no longer being able to play a political role at the national level in the future. In 1913 Prince Hermann zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg died and his son took over the noble inheritance, which also included the county of Gleichen in Thuringia. Ernst II successfully compensated for the loss of leading political offices through his increased commitment to social forces, which rather worked in the background: first and foremost the Protestant Church, the Order of St John and the Red Cross. Within these institutions he held important and influential positions at local and state level, through which - in conjunction with his memberships in numerous associations and federations - he was able to cultivate a broad network of correspondents from noble, political, scientific, ecclesiastical and cultural circles.As commentator of the Württembergisch-Badenschen Genossenschaft des Johanniterordens and honorary president of the Württembergischer Landesverbandes vom Roten Kreuz it was obvious for Ernst II not to strive for a position with the fighting troops, but in the organization of voluntary nursing at the outbreak of the First World War. After a short period as a delegate for each stage in Berlin and on the western front, he was appointed at the end of 1914 as the general delegate for voluntary nursing care for the eastern theater of war, so that he spent the longest period of the war in the eastern headquarters - among others in the vicinity of Field Marshal von Hindenburg. In 1918 he was finally promoted to the highest representative of his organization, the Imperial Commissioner and Military Inspector, and in this function he led, among other things, the German delegation to prisoner of war exchange negotiations with the USA in Bern. Here he benefited from his diplomatic experience, which the emperor had already drawn on in 1915, when he sent the prince to Constantinople and the Balkans as a special ambassador. After the end of the war, Ernst II resigned his high office in nursing and devoted himself again to his church and association activities. He paid special attention to the Protestant Commission for Württemberg, for which he acted as chairman of the Gerabronn district and the Langenburg local group as well as delegate in the regional committee. While the unification of the Protestant regional churches in the German Reich had already been of great concern to him as a Thuringian regent, in the 1920s and 30s he continued to campaign for the Protestant cause at church congresses and church assemblies in Württemberg and at Reich level. In 1926 the Langenburg prince was also appointed senior citizen of the Hohenlohe House, and in the same year he was elected governor of the Balley Brandenburg, i.e. the second man of the Order of St John in the Empire. During National Socialism, Ernst II, as in republican times, stayed away from political offices, especially as he was of an advanced age. From 1936 he invested a large part of his energy in the endeavour to have the Langenburg ancestral estate recognised as an inheritance court and also took care of the publication of his correspondence with the widow composer Cosima Wagner. 11 December 1950 Prince Ernst II died very old in Langenburg, where he was also buried. 2. inventory history, inventory structure and distortion: Before distortion, the estate was in a relatively heterogeneous state, which was due to an inconsistent way of transmission and multiple processing approaches. During the fire at Langenburg Castle in 1963 and the associated temporary relocation of documents within the building complex, the original order probably suffered its first damage, which was intensified in the subsequent period in the course of the transfer of Langenburg archives to Neuenstein. Probably the estate was torn apart and transferred to the central archive in several parts that could no longer be reconstructed in detail. At the latest during the administrative work carried out there in the 1960s under Karl Schumm, the written remains of Ernst II were mixed with other files from Langenburg. Further parts of the estate may also have arrived in Neuenstein in the following decade. Building on the gradually implemented provenance delimitation of the Langenburg archival records, a rough pre-drawing of the estate could be tackled in the early 1980s, but this was not completed. A last addition from the family archives was made to the now formed holdings in 1992 by the delivery of Ernst-related files, most of which had originated in the Langenburg authorities, in particular the domain chancellery.Ernst II regulated his correspondence with the help of registrar-like notes, which he usually affixed directly to the incoming documents. It contained information on the date, recipients and content of the replies and other written reactions. He also noted instructions to his administration and often complete drafts of letters on the incoming mail. In addition, the testator himself already arranged and sorted his documents further by forming units oriented to factual topics and correspondence partners and providing them with notes in the sense of a file title along with its running time. In general, he attached the notes to envelopes of different sizes, most of them used, which served as packaging or were enclosed with the files. Over the decades, Ernst seems to have repeatedly tackled such disciplinary measures, which had a long tradition in the family, without, however, being able to recognize a stringently maintained pattern. Only the rough distinction between factual and correspondence files formed a perceptible red thread, which was also observed in the current distortion. However, it must be taken into account that even in the fascicles formed according to subject criteria, parts of correspondence are often found, only compiled on a specific topic. Although this leads to overlaps with the correspondence series, the fact files were largely left as such and only slightly thinned out with regard to the correspondence partners, since they are mostly units that are comprehensible in terms of content and partly rich in content. While the 'file titles' created by Ernst II normally largely corresponded with the content of the fascicles, it must be noted for the following indexing approaches, also and especially for the preliminary indexing in the 1980s, that the names, dates and subjects noted on archive covers often deviated from the actual content and could hardly be used for the current indexing. The situation was aggravated by the fact that the mixing with files of foreign provenance - including the estates of Ernst's father Hermann and his wife Alexandra as well as the domain chancellery and court administration - could never be completely eliminated and therefore numerous individual files had to be sorted out in the course of the current processing. However, this separation of provenances was not implemented consistently in every respect, but in particular files from the Langenburg and Coburg-Gotha administration, which refer directly to Ernst II, were left in existence; the official records usually differ from the actual estate in the outward appearance in the form of differently coloured folders with file titles, running times and file numbers. Furthermore 2 fascicles on the death of Ernst II and at the end of his reign in Saxony-Coburg and Gotha come from the estates of Ernst's children Gottfried and Alexandra. A special case is Ernst's correspondence with Cosima Wagner, which is kept entirely in Neuenstein, so that not only the letters received from the deceased, but also the letters to the composer's wife (Ernst, his mother Leopoldine and his cousin Max von Baden), stored in bound folders, were recorded as part of the princely estate (see 4.).Thus, the newly registered estate represents an inventory enriched with personal material. In addition, it is to be expected that there will still be isolated files from the estates of relatives whose origin could no longer be clearly clarified (e.g. loose individual pages or fascicles which refer to festive events without naming an addressee or previous owner), apart from the principle of retaining the original separation of factual and correspondence files, massive interventions had to be made in the formation and titling of the fascicles. In many cases, due to later order work, mixing within the fascicles and unclear new file formations had occurred, otherwise about a quarter of the holdings proved to be largely unordered. Even the rather ad hoc sorting carried out by Ernst II himself did not follow any kind of 'file plan', so that content overlaps and repetitions were the order of the day. Therefore, in the course of the current distortion, fascicles were repeatedly reshaped or newly formed under consideration of either thematic or corresponding criteria. The extraction of individual documents for assignment to other fascicles was generally documented by enclosed notes. Individual photographs and photo series with illustrations of Ernst II. were separated and formed into a separate 'photo collection' (see 5.), and in order to provide a better orientation for the user, the find book of most of Ernst II.'s relatives shows the degree of kinship to the deceased in square brackets in the appropriate places.The collection La 142, Nachlass Fürst Ernst II., was arranged and recorded from June to December 2004 by archivist Thomas Kreutzer within the framework of a project sponsored by the Kulturstiftung Baden-Württemberg. It covers 19.4 running meters. Files and volumes in 927 units with a running time of (1845-) 1868-1951 (1959).Neuenstein, in April 2005Thomas Kreutzer 3. Note for use:: During the distortion, cross-references were made in the files that refer to the former bundle number - not to today's order number. To find the corresponding fascicles, the concordance has to be used.Concordance earlier - today's tuft number: 4. Literature:: Heinz Gollwitzer, The Lords of Stand. Die politische und gesellschaftliche Stellung der Mediatisierten 1815-1918. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Sozialgeschichte, Göttingen 1964, bes. S. 244-253.Maria Keipert/Peter Grupp (Ed.), Biographisches Handbuch des deutschen Auswärtigen Dienstes 1871-1945, Vol. 2, Paderborn et al. 2005, S. 344f.Thomas Kreutzer, Protestantische Adligkeit nach dem Kollbruch - Die kirchliche, karitative und politische Verbandstätigkeit von Ernst II. Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg between 1918 and 1945, in: Nobility and National Socialism in the German Southwest. Edited by Haus der Geschichte Baden-Württemberg in conjunction with the State Capital Stuttgart (Stuttgart Symposium, Series 11), Leinfelden-Echterdingen 2007, pp. 42-82 Thomas Nicklas, Ernst II. Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg. Standesherr, Regent, Diplomat im Kaiserreich (1863-1950), in: Gerhard Taddey (ed.), Lebensbilder aus Baden-Württemberg, Vol. 21, Stuttgart 2005, pp. 362-383.Frank Raberg (ed.), Biographisches Handbuch der württembergischen Landtagsabgeordneten 1815-1933 (Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für geschichtliche Landeskunde in Baden-Württemberg), Stuttgart 2001, pp. 381f.Karina Urbach, Diplomat, Höfling, Verbandsfunktionär. Süddeutsche Standesherren 1880-1945, in: Günther Schulz/ Markus A. Denzel (ed.), German nobility in the 19th and 20th centuries, St. Katharinen 2004, pp. 354-375 Karina Urbach, Zwischen Aktion und Reaktion. The Southern German Class Lords and the First World War, in: Eckart Conze/ Monika Wienfort (ed.), Adel und Moderne. Germany in European Comparison in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Cologne 2004, pp. 323-351.Freie Deutsche Presse Coburg, 30.12.1950 (obituary).Hohenloher Zeitung, [after 11.12.]1950 (obituary).further materials:La 95 Domänenkanzlei LangenburgLa 102 Fürstliche HofverwaltungLa 143 Nachlass Fürstin Alexandra zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg
