Harro Harring

Harro Paul Harring (28 August 1798 – 14 May 1870) was a German-Danish revolutionary and writer. Often identified as Danish, he was, more accurately, from North Frisia in the Duchy of Schleswig.

Early life Harring was the son of a farm owner in Schleswig. First employed in the customs, he went to Copenhagen to devote himself to military historical painting. In 1820, he lived in Vienna and Würzburg, and then returned to Denmark. In 1821 he fought in the Greek War of Independence, and then went to Rome, where he stayed a year, then to Vienna in order to concentrate again on art.

Subsequently Harring lived in Switzerland and in Munich, and worked in Vienna as a playwright at the Theater an der Wien. He was in Prague and later went to Warsaw (1828), to enter as a cornet in a Russian lancer regiment. In September 1838, he was on Jersey, in the winter 1838-39 back in Helgoland, then in Bordeaux and Bruges; in 1841 he was in the Netherlands, and later lived in England and France. After a period in Brazil, in August 1843 he traveled to the United States, where he lived as a painter and writer. As early as 1846 he had formulated: A united, free fatherland, from the North Cape to the beach of the Eider. So he quickly came into conflict with the German-oriented Schleswig-Holstein movement, which demanded annexation to Germany. In 1849, he was banished, and went to Christiania. His revolutionary writings on Norway incited the country to insurrection against its monarchical constitution. He had to leave in May 1850.

Later life Harring first went to back to Copenhagen, and then again to London, where he participated in a European "democratic central committee", in a poor condition. When he went to Hamburg in the year 1854, he was immediately arrested, and only through the mediation of the American consul was he able to go to America, staying until 1856 in Rio Janeiro; and then returned to the United Kingdom. From Jersey, he asked the Danish government to grant him just one place on home ground. He lived alternately in London and Jersey.

He had poisoned himself with phosphorus, from matches. Karl Marx, in order to diminish other German revolutionaries in the same mould, mocked Harring's memoirs as developing an archetype (Urbild) to which others (meaning Gottfried Kinkel, Arnold Ruge, and Gustav Struve in particular) sought to conform.