by Hans Fahrländer – Aargauer Zeitung 14.11.2019 at 06:00 hrs
The central element of the commemoration of the great Enlightenment philosopher is a new cinema film produced by his two descendants, Matthias and Adrian Zschokke.
On 22 March 1771 Johann Heinrich Daniel Schokke was born in Magdeburg as the youngest of eleven children of the cloth maker Johann Gottfried Schokke and the Elisabeth Dorothea born Jordan. This marked the beginning of a 77-year life’s work of tremendous density.
Schokke later became Zschokke, the theology student a popular writer who was read all over Europe. In 1795 he immigrated to Switzerland, the “dreamland of his childhood”.
In 1802 he settled in Aargau, then in 1818 in the villa Blumenhalde in Aarau which he had planned. Here he became a newspapermaker, civil servant, Grand Councilor, Constitutional Councilor and much more, a pioneer of liberalism, a fighter for democracy and popular education …