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Ernst Moritz Arndt
Monument in front of the
depicting of Ernst Moritz Arndt
Ernst Moritz Arndt (26 December 1769 – 29 January 1860) was a
patriotic author and . Early in his life, he fought for the abolition of , later against
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
and the movement for . After the , the forces of the restoration counted him as a
and he was rehabilitated in 1840.
Arndt played an important role for the early national and liberal
movement and for the unification movement, and his song "" acted as an unofficial German national anthem.
Long after his death, his anti-French war propaganda was used again in both World Wars. This together with some strongly antisemitic statements has led to a rather ambivalent view of Arndt today.
Arndt was born at
(now a part of ) on the island of
as the son of a prosperous farmer, and emancipated
of the lord of the district, Count P 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
as a student of
and history, and in 1793 moved to , where he came under the influence of .
After the completion of his university studies he returned home,for two years was a private tutor in the family of Ludwig Koscgarten (), 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 , , ,
and . Turning homewards up the river , 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 ().
Arndt in his elder years
In 1800 he settled in Greifswald as privat-docent in history, and the same year published ?ber 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
and on , which was so convincing an indictment that King
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, in which he flung down the gauntlet to
and called on countrymen to rise and shake off the French yoke. So great was the excitement it produced that Arndt was compelled to take refuge in Sweden to escape the vengeance of Napoleon.
Settling in , 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. 's heroic death at Stralsund compelled him to return to Germany and, under the disguise of Assmann, teacher of languages, be reached
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 ,
and , and in 1812 was summoned by the last named to
to assist in the organization of the final struggle against France. Meanwhile, pamphlet after pamphlet, and his stirring patriotic songs, such as "" "Der Gott, der Eisen wachsen liess," and "Was blasen Trompeten?" were on all lips.
Arndt's domicile in
after 1819
When, after the peace, the
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 , 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 . 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 , and indignant at the king's refusal to accept it, he retired with the majority of 's 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 . Arndt was twice married, first in 1800, his wife dying i a second time in 1817. His youngest son drowned in the Rhine in 1834.
There are monuments to his memory at Schoritz, his birthplace, at the University of Greifswald, and in Bonn, where he is buried. The
was named in Nazi Germany and the name has been recently contested.
Originally an enthusiastic supporter of the ideas of the French revolution, Arndt dissociated himself from them when the
became apparent. When Napoleon began to conquer Europe, this renunciation was transformed into hatred.
Like Fichte and , Arndt began to define a German nation as a society of homogeneous descent, drawing on the history of the
and the "teutonic" Middle Ages. Yet while his writings lack a specific political programme, they define external enemies instead. While freedom is often cited, it used in a diffuse context, just like the terms nation, home country and people. It has been noted, that the freedom Arndt envisioned was not that of a modern
society but a freedom of an archaic and
tribal community. The Frenchmen are called weakened, womanish and morally depraved by Arndt while he praises German virtues which should be preserved:
"The Germans have not been bastardised by foreign peoples, have not become half-breeds, they more than many other peoples have remained in their native state of purity..."
These ideas lead Arndt to produce a harshly critical anti-French propaganda during the Napoleonic occupation of the German states whereby he incited the Germans to hate the French people:
"When I say I hate the French carelessness, I despise the French daintiness, I disapprove of the French loquacity and flightiness, I may pronounce a flaw, but it is a flaw that I share with all my people. I could likewise say I hate the English presumption, the English prudery, the English seclusiveness. These hated, despised, dispraised characteristics are not yet vices as such, from the peoples that they represent they may come with great virtues which I and my people are lacking. Therefore let us hate the Frenchmen quite freshly, let us hate our Frenchmen, the infamisers and destroyers of our power and virginity, even more, now that we feel how they weaken and enervate our virtue and strength."
He also warned of too close contact with . While he reasoned that "the seed of " was hardly predominant in a second generation after conversion to Christianity, he still warned of the "thousands 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 plot, claiming that Jews had "usurped" a good half of all literature.
Arndt also mingles his hatred of the French with antisemitism, calling the French "the Jewish people (das Judenvolk)", or "refined bad Jews (verfeinerte schlechte Juden)". In 1815 he writes about the French: "Jews... I call them again, not only for their Jewish lists and their penny-pinching
but even more because of their Jew-like sticking together."
Arndt was also an enemy of the Polish people and published an anti-Polish pamphlet in 1831 where he described Polish "barbarity and wilderness". In 1848 during events of
when the Polish issue was raised 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: the Poles and the whole Slavonic tribe are inferior to Germans."
See also .
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")
("What is the fatherland of the Germans?")
German Classics 1900
Der Gott, der Eisen wachsen liess ("The god who let iron grow") . Melody written by
Zu den Waffen, zu den Waffen ("To the weapons, to the weapons")
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 ", Deutsches Lesebuch für Volksschulen (German reader for elementary schools))
(A selection.)
Reise durch Schweden ("Voyage through Sweden", 1797)
Nebenstunden, Beschreibung und Geschichte der Shetl?ndischen Inseln und Orkaden ("Description and history of the
Islands", 1820)
Die Frage über die Niederlande ("The Netherlands question", 1831)
Erinnerungen aus dem ?usseren 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
and ", 1846)
Meine Wanderungen und Wandlungen mit dem Reichsfreiherrn Heinrich Carl Friedrich vom Stein ("My peregrinations and metamorphoses together with ", 1858)
Pro populo germanico (1854) Originally intended to form the fifth part of the Geist der Zeit.
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).
(old German university -former GDR- named after him)
Staas, Christian. "Einheit durch Reinheit". Zeit Geschichte (in German) (3/2010): 38–42.
Ripper, Werner (1978). Weltgeschichte im Aufriss (in German) 2. Frankfurt: Verlag Diesterweg. p. 191.  . Die Deutschen sind nicht durch fremde V?lker verbastardet, sie sind keine Mischlinge geworden, sie sind mehr als viele andere V?lker in ihrer angeborenen Reinheit geblieben...
Arndt, E.M.
(in German) 4. Leipzig. p. 148. Wenn ich sage, ich hasse den franz?sischen Leichtsinn, ich verschm?he die franz?sische Zierlichkeit, mir missf?llt die franz?sische Geschw?tzigkeit und Flatterhaftigkeit, so spreche ich vielleicht einen Mangel aus, aber einen Mangel, der mir mit meinem ganzen Volke gemein ist. Ebenso kann ich sagen: Ich hasse den englischen ?bermut, die englische Spr?digkeit, die englische Abgeschlossenheit. Diese gehassten und verachteten und getadelten Eigenschaften sind an sich noch keine Laster, sie h?ngen bei den V?lkern, die sie tragen, vielleicht mit grossen Tugenden zusammen, die mir und meinem Volke fehlen. Darum lasst uns die Franzosen nur recht frisch hassen, lasst uns unsre Franzosen, die Entehrer und Verwüster unserer Kraft und Unschuld, nur noch frischer hassen, wo wir fühlen, dass sie unsere Tugend und St?rke verweichlichen und entnerven.
Schmidt, J?rg (7 September 2009). .
(in German). Tausende, welche die russische Tyrannei uns nun noch wimmelnder j?hrlich aus Polen auf den Hals jagen wird,... die unreine Flut von Osten her.
Arndt, E.M. (1814). Noch ein Wort über die Franzosen und über uns. p. 13 ff.
Arndt, E.M. (1815). Das Wort von 1814 und das Wort von 1815 über die Franzosen. p. 71. Juden... nenne ich sie wieder, nicht bloss wegen ihrer Judenlisten und ihres knickerigen Geitzes, sondern mehr noch wegen ihres judenartigen Zusammenklebens.
Germany and Eastern Europe: Cultural Identity and Cultural Differences Keith Bullivant,Geoffrey Giles, Walter Pape, page 144 Jurgen Lieskounig "Branntweintrinkende Wilde" Beyond Civilization and Outside History: The Depiction of the Poles in Gustav Freytag's "Soll und Haben"
The apocalypse in Germany Klaus Vondung and Stephen D. Ricks page 112,University of Missouri Press 2001
O.C. Hiss, Kleine Geschichte der geheimen Presse, Vanitas Presse: Berlin, 1946
 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the : Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "".
(11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
 Rines, George Edwin, ed. (1920). "". .
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