I believe in the possibility of complete freedom of nations, in a former earthly bliss, which was proclaimed thousands of years ago in all religions and especially in the Jewish religion and must also come to common sense one day," wrote 16-year-old Leopold Sonnemann in his diary in June 1848. "I believe that this happiness of the human race can only be achieved through the introduction of democracy in the form of the social republic with the system of the community."

Gerald Braunberger

Editor.

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These sentences, written down by a young man who was deeply impressed and shaped by the events of the revolutionary year 1848, shaped Sonnemann's entire life. The most important creation of the enterprising man, the "Frankfurter Zeitung", felt committed to Sonnemann's convictions and thus to the ideas of 1848 long after the death of its founder.

"A frenzy of redemption went through Germany and Austria. What had been whispered to each other in secret could be openly proclaimed as the demand of the whole people: a Germany, no longer a league of dynasties, but held together by a people's representation, respected in the world by a powerful central power, political, economic, legal unity! A free Germany, without censorship, landlordship, police justice, guild and passport compulsion, with equality of all citizens of every faith, every origin, every property and every position before the law!" read an unnamed commemorative article in Sonnemann's newspaper 75 years after the opening of the National Assembly in Frankfurt's Paulskirche. "The reasons for the failure – too much trust in the enemy of yesterday, understandable lack of political experience, revolutionary-utopian mode of thinking (here strangely mixed with German erudition and pedantry), lack of sustainable will in the then predominantly petty-bourgeois and peasant people – these reasons are obvious. May the followers of a bygone era point out again and again with secret joy these 'apolitical traits'! For the rest of us, the political opportunities in the German people, which have also been shown here, are important."

Sonnemann's career was not something he was born with. As the son of a cotton weaver who initially lived in Höchberg and lived in modest circumstances, he had to join his parents' company at the age of 14. At that time, the family, which had left Lower Franconia because of pronounced anti-Semitism, lived in Offenbach, where Leopold's father ran an intermediary trade in cotton goods. There, the young Leopold was gripped by the ghost of 1848, where, as a friend recalled, "only the resolute objection of his parents was able to restrain the young man when he was about to join the freedom fighters". Sonnemann was strongly impressed by the south-west German revolutionary Friedrich Hecker, whose uprising against the rule in Baden ("Heckerzug") quickly collapsed.

The stock market as a professional passion

After his father's death, Leopold took over his father's business, which he converted into a banking business in Frankfurt, not untypical for the time. Sonnemann's professional passion became the stock market, which was growing dynamically in the face of industrialization, but on which fraudsters also competed for investors' money. In order to create more transparency and protect investors from harm, Sonnemann and his banker colleague Bernhard Rosenthal founded the "Frankfurter Geschäftsbericht" in 1856, which changed its name to "Frankfurter Handelszeitung" after a successful start. Rosenthal soon withdrew, whereupon Sonnemann expanded his political reporting and in 1859 changed the title of his publication to "Neue Frankfurter Zeitung – Frankfurter Handelszeitung".