Ernst Moritz Arndt

Ernst Moritz Arndt (26 December 1769 – 29 January 1860) was a German nationalist historian, writer and poet. Early in his life, he fought for the abolition of serfdom, later against Napoleonic dominance over Germany. Arndt had to flee to Sweden for some time due to his anti-French positions. He is one of the main founders of German nationalism during the Napoleonic wars and the 19th century movement for German unification. After the Carlsbad Decrees, the forces of the restoration counted him as a demagogue.

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.

Early life and studies Arndt was born at Gross Schoritz (now a part of Garz on the island of Rügen), then in Swedish Pomerania. He was 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 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 the German idealist philosopher Gottlieb Fichte.

After the completion of his university studies he returned home, and for two years was a private tutor in the family of Ludwig Koscgarten (1758–1818), pastor of Wittow on Rügen, and having qualified for the ministry as a candidate of theology, he assisted in church services. In 1800, he started teaching history at Greifswald.

In 1800 he taught at the University of Greifswald as an independent lecturer (privatdocent) in history, and the same year published Über die Freiheit der alten Republiken. Germanien und Europa appeared in 1803, a "fragmentary outburst," as he himself called it, on his views on French aggression. This was followed by one of his most influential 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 serfdom.

These ideas led Arndt to generate anti-French propaganda during the Napoleonic conquest of the German states:

Arndt also was prejudiced against Poles and other Slavs, and published an anti-Polish pamphlet in 1831 in which he castigated Polish "barbarity and wildness". During the liberal Revolution of 1848, when the issue of reviving the Polish state was raised in Frankfurt, Arndt declared that "tribes" of Slavs and Wends "have never done or been able to do anything lasting with respect to state, science, or art," and concluded: "At the outset I assert with world history that pronounces judgment [that] the Poles and the whole Slavonic tribe are inferior to Germans."

He also warned of close contact with Judaism. He warned of the "thousands [of Jews] which by the Russian tyranny will now come upon us even more abounding from Poland" – "the impure flood from the East". Moreover, he warned of a Jewish intellectual conspiracy, claiming that Jews had "usurped" half of literature. In 1815 he wrote of the French: "Jews... I call them again, not only for their Jewish lists and their penny-pinching avarice, but even more because of their Jew-like sticking together."

Works

Poems and songs Arndt's lyric poems are not all confined to politics. Many among the Gedichte are religious pieces. What is the German's Fatherland? German Classics 1900 William Cleaver Wilkinson Vaterlandslied (Arndt), better known as Der Gott, der Eisen wachsen ließ ("The god who let iron grow") Melody written by Albert Methfessel (1785–1869). Zu den Waffen, zu den Waffen ("To arms, to arms") Kommt her, ihr seid geladen (Come here, you are invited), EG 213 (No. 213 in the current German Protestant hymnal ) Ich weiß, woran ich glaube ("I know what I believe in", EG 357) Die Leipziger Schlacht ("The Battle of Leipzig", Deutsches Lesebuch für Volksschulen (German reader for elementary schools))

Other selected works

Reise durch Schweden ("Voyage through Sweden", 1797) Mährchen und Jugenderinnerungen (1818), a collection of folktales. 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 (1840) An autobiography, and the most valuable source of information for Arndt's life. This is the basis of E. M. Seeley's Life and Adventures of E. M. Arndt (1879) 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) Originally intended to form the fifth part of the Geist der Zeit.

Biographies Schenkel (Elberfeld, 1869) E. Langenberg (Bonn, 1869) Wilhelm Baur (Hamburg, 1882) H. Meisner and R. Geerds, E. M. Arndt, Ein Lebensbild in Briefen (1898) R. Thiele, E. M. Arndt (1894).