Radical-democratic Bremen merchant who founded the city’s Democratic Association in 1848
A Bremen linen merchant and banker. He volunteered in the Wars of Liberation and in the 1820s sat in Bremen’s citizens’ convention, demanding a democratic constitution that would respect the rights of the “little man”. Arrested in 1835, he went into exile in Paris and returned in 1837. In July 1848 he co-founded a Democratic Association of guild craftsmen, advocated an armed popular rising and met Karl Marx in London. From 1848 until his death he sat in the Bremen Bürgerschaft.
Activities and affiliations
- 1817–1842
- 1848–1862
- 1848–
Career Timeline
- 1813–1814Volunteer in the Hanseatic Legion and Lützow Free Corps
- 1817–1842Linen trade and banking in Bremen (Rösing & Plump)
- 1835–1837Arrest and exile in Paris
- 1848.07Co-founded the Bremen Democratic Association
- 1848–1862.10.08Member of the Bremen Bürgerschaft
Bremen democracy in 1848
A good speaker, Rösing won many followers among the young merchants of the Union society. In July 1848 he founded, with Nikolaus Ordemann and the watchmaker Georg Meyer, a Democratic Association made up of guild craftsmen; the communists soon left it to form a General Workers’ Association. Rösing advocated an armed popular rising, kept in touch with the revolutionary democratic pastor Rudolph Dulon of Bremen’s Church of Our Lady, and on his travels met Marx in London. Repeated house searches and imprisonment led him to hand his bank to his brother-in-law Plump.
In Incubus (1869) Karl Heinrich Ulrichs named Rösing, one of the main leaders of Bremen’s democrats in 1848–1850, as an Urning. Engels mocked the passage in his letter to Marx of 22 June 1869, writing “from Rösing to Schweitzer”.