Master, Karl Wilhelm von (ennobled 1896)

Lawyer, politician

Born: 03.02.1863 in Frankfurt am Main

Died: 14.02.1935 in Geneva

The son of Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Meister, one of the founders of Farbwerke Hoechst, he was awarded his doctorate in law in Heidelberg in 1886 and passed the major state examination for senior civil servants in Berlin in 1891.

In 1893 he was appointed district administrator of the newly formed Höchst district and in 1895 district administrator of the Obertaunus district in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe. From 1894 to 1902 he was a member of the Nassau municipal parliament. He originally belonged to the National Liberal Party, but later joined the Free Conservative Reich Party. In 1912, he was nominated for the Reichstag election, but was unable to stand as the joint candidate of the bourgeois camp and so he decided not to run. In 1905, Meister came to Wiesbaden as district president.

In his person, he embodied the style of Wilhelmine Wiesbaden. He was wealthy by birth, possessed suave manners and was a dazzling orator. In Wiesbaden and Bad Homburg, he came into close contact with Kaiser Wilhelm II. In 1915, he was awarded the rank of Privy Senior Government Councillor. However, his term of office as district president not only included the glorious years of the Wilhelmine era, but also the First World War and the post-war period with the revolution and the occupation of the Wiesbaden administrative district by the French. Meister had the difficult task of coming to terms with the occupying power on the one hand and ensuring the functioning of his administrative authority on the other.

On June 1, 1919, he resigned from his office after being asked by the French Administrateur superieur at the government president Colonel Pineau to submit to the separatists under Adam Dorten, who had proclaimed a "Rhenish Republic" on the same day. Meister evaded this request by resigning.

In 1930, he moved with his family to Geneva, where he worked as an honorary delegate of the German League for the League of Nations until 1933. From 1919-26 he was a member of the supervisory board of Farbwerke Hoechst and from 1926-35 of I. G. Farben AG. By imperial decree, he was elevated to the hereditary Prussian nobility in 1896 by Kaiser Wilhelm II together with his brother Herbert. He was made an honorary citizen of Kronberg in 1902. The Meisterturm on the Kapellenberg in Hofheim am Taunus was named after him. In Bad Homburg, Wilhelm-Meister-Straße commemorates him and his father. The Wilhelm-von-Meister Foundation for Social Purposes still exists today.