History of Tradition Dr. Ernst von Scheurlen, retired Ministerialrat, did not leave any testamentary disposition over the documents. Since 1945 at the latest, these had been in the house of his oldest daughter Katharina Schmidt, née Scheurlen, who, after her death on 3 January 1989, took over her son Karl Schmidt, a retired pastor. There - in the spirit of Ernst von Scheurlen - they were accessible to all relatives and were occasionally inspected by individuals. For the transfer to the Main State Archives in Stuttgart, the consideration that there would be no comparable place of secure storage in the relatives in the future was decisive. As a result, a deposit agreement was concluded between Mr Karl Schmidt and the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg on 1 December 2008. Content and Evaluation Karl Scheurlen ( 1824, 1872) Karl Scheurlen was born on 3 Sept. 1824 in Tübingen, where his father Karl Christian Friedrich Scheurlen was professor of law. He attended school there and in Stuttgart, where his father had been appointed to the Obertribunal in 1839. He studied law in Tübingen from 1841 to 1846 and then completed his legal clerkship. In 1847 he became court actuary at the Heilbronn Higher District Court. During the revolutionary events of 1848, Karl Scheurlen adopted an emphatically conservative attitude. In 1850 he was appointed public prosecutor in Esslingen. In 1851 he was appointed Assessor of Justice and Public Prosecutor in Ellwangen, where he married Katharina Pfreundt in 1852. From 1856 on Karl Scheurlen was chief magistrate in Mergentheim, from 1863 chief justice councillor in Esslingen and from 1865 lecturing councillor in the Ministry of Justice. Together with his friend, the then Obertribunalrat von Mittnacht, Karl Scheurlen was commissioned by the Minister of Justice of Neurath to work out the principles of a judicial reform which Mittnacht, since 1867 Minister of Justice, completed in 1868 and 1869. Karl Scheurlen's ascent had also continued in 1867 with his appointment to the Privy Council; however, his two attempts to acquire a Landtag mandate failed. By decree of 23 March 1870, Karl Scheurlen was appointed head of the Department of Home Affairs and Minister of the Interior on 17 July of the same year. This appointment took place at the time of a domestic political crisis: 45 members of the Württemberg state parliament had refused in the spring to approve the military budget, the rejection of which would have made Württemberg meet its obligations from the 1866 Protection and Defense Alliance with Prussia, which was widely unpopular. The fact that the broad resistance against the military budget unexpectedly subsided can be traced back to the French declaration of war of 15 July 1870. After the new elections of 1871, which were announced with reference to the political reorganization of Germany after the Franco-German War, Karl Scheurlen found himself faced with a well-meaning majority among the members of parliament. He himself was also elected as a deputy twice, in Gaildorf and Künzelsau; he accepted the election in Gaildorf. His death on April 1, 1872, caused by a heart condition, came as a surprise. Karl Scheurlen cultivated lively literary and artistic interests in addition to his work in justice and politics. He wrote numerous verses and poems. His talent for drawing is particularly remarkable; he used it, among other things, to make numerous sketches of accused persons and judicial officials during his time at court, or to illustrate the "Amtspflege", the organ of the Hauffei, his Tübingen student fraternity. Many of his drawings have a humorous character; self-portraits and depictions of family members and acquaintances are extremely frequent. Ernst von Scheurlen ( 1863, 1952) Ernst von Scheurlen was born in Mergentheim on Feb. 5, 1863, the youngest of six children of the later Minister of the Interior, Karl Scheurlen, and his wife Katharina Scheurlen. After school he studied medicine in Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1885. After his state examination from 1887 to 1891, he worked there as an assistant doctor at the Charité and the Reich Health Office; bacteriology and hygiene were already the focal points of his scientific interest at this time. The marriage to Sophie von Möller (1889), who belonged to a family of German descent from the then Russian Narwa, also took place during this period. In 1893 Ernst von Scheurlen became a battalion doctor in Strasbourg. At the same time he taught hygiene and bacteriology at the Technical University in Stuttgart and at the University of Strasbourg in 1893-1894 and 1895-1897 respectively. He also headed the hygiene and bacteriology department of the large garrison hospital in Stuttgart. In 1897 he took up a position as a medical councillor at the Königlich Württembergischen Medizinalkollegium. His tasks included working for the State Insurance Institute, the Trade Supervisory Office, the Reich Health Council, in the management of the Medical State Investigation Office, etc. It is due to his activities that the city of Stuttgart received its central sewage treatment plant during the First World War. During the entire First World War, Ernst von Scheurlen was involved as a hygienist in disease control and water supply at various sections of the Western and Eastern fronts. After the First World War, he devoted himself in particular to water supply, crop control and blood group research. He has written down his research results in numerous publications. He retired in 1930, but this did not mean the end of his scientific career; his last publication dates from 1950, two years before his death on Oct. 8, 1952 at the age of 89. In addition to his scientific work, Ernst von Scheurlen documented the history of his family from about 1800 with great dedication. For this purpose he combined numerous pictures, sketches, poems and letters of his father, who died at an early age, with other collection material and supplemented, explained and commented this material by a written representation of the family history.
