Ernst Moritz Arndt

Ernst Moritz Arndt

Monument in front of the University of Greifswald depicting of Ernst Moritz Arndt.

Ernst Moritz Arndt (December 26, 1769 – January 29, 1860) was a German patriotic author and poet. Early in his life, he fought for the abolition of serfdom, later against Napoleonic dominance over Germany, and had to flee to Sweden for some time due to his anti-French positions. He is one of the main founders of German nationalism and the movement for German unification. After the Carlsbad Decrees, the forces of the restoration counted him as a demagogue and he was only rehabilitated in 1840.

Arndt played an important role for the early national and liberal Burschenschaft movement and for the unification movement, and his song "Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?" acted as an unofficial German national anthem.

Long after his death, his anti-French war propaganda was used again by nationalists in both World Wars and also by the National Front of the GDR 1949-1989. This together with some strongly antisemitic statements has led to a rather ambivalent view of Arndt today.

Early life and studies

Arndt was born at Groß-Schoritz (a part of Garz/Rügen) on the island of Rügen in Swedish Pomerania as the son of a prosperous farmer, and emancipated serf of the lord of the district, Count Putbus; his mother came of well-to-do German yeoman stock. In 1787 the family moved to the neighbourhood of Stralsund, where Arndt was able to attend the academy. After an interval of private study he went in 1791 to the University of Greifswald as a student of theology and history, and in 1793 moved to Jena, where he came under the influence of Fichte.

After the completion of his university studies he returned home,for two years was a private tutor in the family of Ludwig Koscgarten (1758-1818), pastor of Wittow, and having qualified for the ministry as a candidate of theology, assisted in church services. At the age of twenty-eight he renounced the ministry, and for eighteen months led a life of traveling, visiting Austria, Hungary, Italy, France and Belgium. Turning homewards up the river Rhine, he was moved by the sight of the ruined castles along its banks to intense bitterness against France. The impressions of this journey he later described in Reisen durch einen Teil Deutschlands, Ungarns, Italiens und Frankreichs in den Jahren 1798 und 1799 (1802-1804).

Opposition to serfdom and Napoleonic rule

Arndt in his elder years

In 1800 he settled in Greifswald as privat-docent in history, and the same year published Über die Freiheit der alten Republiken. In 1803 appeared Germanien und Europa, a fragmentary ebullition, he himself called it, of his views on the French aggression. This was followed by one of the most remarkable of his books, Geschichte der Leibeigenschaft in Pommern und Rügen (Berlin, 1803), a history of serfdom in Pomerania and on Rügen, which was so convincing an indictment that King Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden in 1806 abolished the evil.

Arndt had meanwhile risen from privat-docent to extraordinary professor, and in 1806 was appointed to the chair of history at the university. In this year he published the first part of his Geist der Zeit, which, he flung down the gauntlet to Napoleon and called on countrymen to rise and shake off the French yoke. So great is the excitement it produced that Arndt was compelled to take refuge in Sweden to escape the vengeance of Napoleon.

Settling in Stockholm, he obtained government employment, and devoted himself to the great cause which was nearest his art, and in pamphlets, poems and songs communicated his enthusiasm to his countrymen. Schill's heroic death at Stralsund compelled him to return to Germany and, under the disguise of Aßmann, teacher of languages, be reached Berlin in December.

In 1810 he returned to Greifswald, but only for a few months. He again set out on his adventurous travels, lived in close contact, with the first men of his time, such as Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, August von Gneisenau and Heinrich Friedrich Karl Stein, and in 1812 was summoned by the last named to St Petersburg to assist in the organization of the final struggle against France. Meanwhile, pamphlet after pamphlet, and his stirring patriotic songs, such as "Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?" "Der Gott, der Eisen wachsen ließ," and "Was blasen Trompeten?" were on all lips.

Arndt's domicile in Bonn after 1819

When, after the peace, the University of Bonn was founded in 1818, Arndt was appointed to impart of his Geist der Zeit, in which he criticized the reactionary policy of the German powers. The boldness of his demands for reform offended the Prussian government, and in the summer in 1819 he was arrested and his papers confiscated.

Although speedily liberated, he was in the following year, at the instance of the Central Commission of Investigation at Mainz, established in accordance with the Carlsbad Decrees, arraigned before a specially constituted tribunal. Although not found guilty, he was forbidden to exercise the functions of his professorship, but he was allowed to retain the stipend. The next twenty years he passed in retirement and literary activity.

In 1840 he was reinstated in his professorship, and in 1841 was chosen rector of the university. The revolutionary outbreak of 1848 rekindled in the venerable patriot his old hopes and energies, and he took seat as one of the deputies to the National Assembly at Frankfurt. He formed one of the deputation that offered the Imperial crown to Frederick William IV, and indignant at the king's refusal to accept it, he retired with the majority of von igerns adherents from public life.

He continued to lecture and to write with freshness and vigour, and on his 90th birthday received from all parts of Germany good wishes and tokens of affection. He died at Bonn. Arndt was twice married, first in 1800, his wife dying in the following year; a second time in 1817. His youngest son drowned in the Rhine in 1834.

There are monuments to his memory at Schoritz, his birthplace, and in Bonn, where he is buried.

Works

See also Wikisource (in German).

Poems and songs

Arndt's lyric poems are not all confined to politics. Many among the Gedichte are religious pieces. This is a selection of his best-known poems and songs:

• Sind wir vereint zur guten Stunde ("When we are united in happy times") [1]
• Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland? ("What is the fatherland of the Germans?") [2]
• Der Gott, der Eisen wachsen ließ ("The god who let iron grow") [3]. Melody written by Albert Methfessel (1785-1869).
• Zu den Waffen, zu den Waffen ("To the weapons, to the weapons") [4]
• Kommt her, ihr seid geladen ("Come here, you are invited", Evangelisches Gesangbuch (evangelic hymnbook), 213)
• Ich weiß, woran ich glaube ("I know what I believe in", Evangelisches Gesangbuch (evangelic hymnbook), 357)
• Die Leipziger Schlacht ("The Battle of Leipzig", Deutsches Lesebuch für Volksschulen (German reader for elementary schools))

Other works

(A selection.)

• Reise durch Schweden ("Voyage through Sweden", 1797);
• Nebenstunden, Beschreibung und Geschichte der Shetländischen Inseln und Orkaden ("Description and history of the Shetland and Orkney Islands", 1820);
• Die Frage über die Niederlande ("The Netherlands question", 1831);
• Erinnerungen aus dem äusseren Leben (an autobiography, and the most valuable source of information for Arndt's life, 1840);
• Rhein- und Ahrwanderungen ("Peregrinations along the Rhine and Ahr", 1846),
• Meine Wanderungen und Wandlungen mit dem Reichsfreiherrn Heinrich Carl Friedrich vom Stein ("My peregrinations and metamorphoses together with Reichsfreiherr Heinrich Carl Friedrich vom Stein", 1858),
• Pro populo germanico (1854), which was originally intended to form the fifth part of the "Geist der Zeit".

Biographies

Biographies have been written by

• E. Langenberg (1869) and
• Wilhelm Baur (1882); see also
• H. Meisner and R. Geerds, E. M. Arndt, Ein Lebensbild in Briefen (1898), and
• R. Thiele, B. M. Arndt (1894).

See also

• Greifswald
• Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald (old German university -former GDR- named after him)

References

• O.C. Hiss, Kleine Geschichte der geheimen Presse, Vanitas Presse: Berlin, 1946
• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ernst Moritz Arndt

• Works by Ernst Moritz Arndt at Project Gutenberg