Background
Gottfried William Leonhard Fritschel was born on December 19, 1836, in Nürnberg, Germany. He was the youngest of the three sons of Martin Heinrich and Katharina Esther (Kassler) Fritschel.
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Gottfried William Leonhard Fritschel was born on December 19, 1836, in Nürnberg, Germany. He was the youngest of the three sons of Martin Heinrich and Katharina Esther (Kassler) Fritschel.
In 1833, Gottfried Fritschel followed his brother Conrad Sigmund into the Missionary Institute at Neuendettelsau, where he was profoundly influenced by Wilhelm Löhe.
Gottfried studied the voluminous theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and made himself a living concordance of Luther’s writings. Such learning was necessary, for the synod was being attacked by the unceasing, rancorous, yet learned polemics of the Missouri Synod; and to Gottfried and Sigmund, almost alone, fell the task of defending the theological position of the Iowa Synod, which was substantially that of Wilhelm Löhe.
He learned Norwegian and Swedish and gave much encouragement to the Scandinavian Lutherans of the Northwest. His private studies were chiefly in Spanish literature and in geography; his brother noted that he excerpted some standard treatises on geography as carefully as he did the works of Luther.
Completing his theological training with a year at the University of Erlangen under Franz Delitzsch, Theodosius Harnack, von Hofmann, and Thomasius, Fritschel came to the United States in the spring of 1857, was ordained at Dubuque on May 31 (Pentecost) by Georg Martin Grossmann, and entered at once on his work as professor of theology in the Wartburg Seminary of the Iowa Synod.
The seminary led for some years a precarious existence. To save expense it was moved in 1857 to St. Sebald, Clayton County, Iowa, where students, professors, and professors’ families were housed in a single wooden building at the edge of the open prairie, five miles from the nearest settlement, almost a day’s journey from a railroad. The next year his brother joined him as the second professor.
Each professor, until 1864, received an annual salary of $100 together with an allowance for heat and light. Close to penury as their life must have been, in later years neither brother could remember that they had suffered by any real privation. Indeed, they reared and educated large families, collected a respectable library, and led an intense intellectual life.
While on a missionary tour of the Dakotas in the summer of 1888, he became alarmingly ill and never recovered. The following Christmas, he was compelled to give up his classes.
He died at Mendota, California, where the seminary had been situated since 1874.
Gottfried Fritschel contributed numerous articles to Samuel Kistler Brobst’s Theologische Monatsheft, and to the Iowa Synod’s periodicals, the Kirchenblatt and the Kirchliches Zeitschrift. He was an editor at various times of the Kirchenblatt; he and his brother edited the Zeitschrift from its founding in 1876. Gottfried also rendered great service of an inconspicuous sort by mastering the English language and insisting that his pupils study English.
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As a preacher, Gottfried Fritschel was less eloquent than Sigmund, but his quiet, sober reasoning drew thoughtful hearers to him. What most distinguished the man was a certain inner illumination: few have better illustrated the adage that the heart makes the theologian.
To gain fluency and to improve his pronunciation, he overcame the shyness that he usually felt among strangers and taught for one summer semester in Upper Iowa University, where he was surrounded by English-speaking people.
On August 29, 1858, at St. Sebald, Fritschel married Elise Eleanore, daughter of the Rev. Georg Köberle. She with seven of their ten children survived him. Five of the seven sons entered the service of the Iowa Synod.
