The dead to the living
The dead to the living is a political poem in rhyme form that Ferdinand Freiligrath wrote in July 1848 in Düsseldorf . In the poem Freiligrath had the Berlin victims of the German Revolution in March direct angry accusations and revolutionary appeals to the living.
Content of the poem
The poem begins with the people who fell in Berlin in March introduce themselves and describe in drastic pictures how they were presented in the funeral procession. They reproach the living for not having proven themselves worthy of their sacrifice: “And cowardly forfeited everything through you what we defiantly achieved! What our death turns to you, rotten and lost. ” To the disgraceful and unfavorable course of things, which are listed in detail since their death, they attach the expectation that their corpses would have to be dug up and presented again, but not before the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV. , "That dismissed man" , but out "into the country" . The anger of the living is then taken into account as the strength for a necessary “second war” : “You must have remained angry - oh, believe us, the dead! He stayed with you! yes, and he wakes up! he will and must awaken! He will make half the revolution into a whole! ” As a result of this revolution, nourished by “ Grimm ” , in the course of which the armed force of the army is used under the leadership of the vigilantes, the king and princes would have to flee, and the people, then sovereign , would consequently be able to shape his own future.
history
prehistory
Ferdinand Freiligrath's poetry, which was previously characterized by romantic features, had become increasingly politicized in the 1840s. In 1844 he presented a collection of political poems under the title A Creed of Faith , which took up the moods of the Vormärz and established Freiligrath's reputation as a political poet. In the same year he renounced a pension that had been granted to him by Friedrich Wilhelm IV in 1842, as well as a possible employment at the court of Weimar. In August 1844 he emigrated because of the danger of police persecution. He went to Brussels , where he had close contact with Karl Heinzen , Karl Marx and Heinrich Bürgers . He then stayed in Switzerland . In 1846 he published the volume of poetry Ça ira! In this work he took the position that Germany was ripe for revolution. For financial reasons he then traveled to London , where he worked as an employee of a bank and as a lecturer at the university. He was about to emigrate to the United States when a series of revolutions broke out in Europe and the “March Revolution” took place in some states of the German Confederation . In the Kingdom of Prussia , Freiligrath's homeland, there was a barricade uprising in Berlin on March 18, 1848 , after King Friedrich Wilhelm IV wanted to appease the masses with liberal concessions. Over 200 people died in the suppression of this uprising. On March 20, 183 of them were solemnly laid out on the Berlin Gendarmenmarkt and led in a funeral procession across the Schlossplatz , where the king paid his last respects to the dead by taking off his cap. The dead then found their final resting place in the specially created cemetery of the March fallen .
Revolutionary activities in Düsseldorf and Cologne
In this situation Freiligrath gave up his plan to emigrate to the United States. In the spring of 1848 he wrote to friends:
“Now time loosens my tongue. In the jubilation of these proud days of world history, in the conscious happiness of this all-grasping, all-moving movement, I must clasp your hand in old love and new hope! Lord God, what a victory! Centuries squeezed into two weeks! [...] In the middle of the thunder of this sublime democratic thunderstorm, which we all suspected to break out, but could not foresee in this strength and generality! [...] where all the interests of the individual take a back seat to the great and mighty whole [...] Time needs men! Do each what he can! [...] I am coming back to Germany to take part in your further struggles and developments in the immediate vicinity to the best of my ability: immediately prepared for press trials, as well as for further barricades and probable anti-Russian watch fires [...]. "
In May 1848 he traveled from London to Düsseldorf, where he had friends, including Theodor Eichmann, Heinrich Koester and Wolfgang Müller von Königswinter . He moved into an apartment in the house of the painter Henry Ritter , Windschlag 275, today Oststrasse. In Düsseldorf, since the beginning of the March Revolution, democratically-minded citizens have come together in a vigilante group, which their commander Lorenz Cantador paraded through the streets of the city in front of the Prussian authorities and the military in order to demonstrate the democratic awakening and the people's takeover . The Düsseldorf vigilante group belonged to Freiligrath's sympathies. Following his self-image as a “trumpeter of the revolution”, he joined the Volksklub in Düsseldorf , a politically left-wing association of the early workers' movement that was rapidly gaining popularity and was striving for a “social democracy” in a “red republic”. In this association, which Ferdinand Lassalle , Louis Kugelmann and Paul von Hatzfeldt counted among its members, he temporarily took over the office of cashier. In June he visited the Cologne workers' association , where, at the invitation of chairman Andreas Gottschalk, he wrote his poem Despite everything! presented.
Publication of the poem
In July 1848 the poem Die Todten to the Living was written . It also represents a reaction to the news of the violent suppression of the June uprising in Paris, with which the February Revolution of 1848 came to a counterrevolutionary end, an event to which, to Freiligrath's horror, the Cologne politician Franz Raveaux responded with an address of praise to the French government . Freiligrath recited the poem at the meeting of the Volksklub on August 1, 1848, which took place in the inn of Stübben, near the Düsseldorf train station . The chairman of the Volksklub, Julius Wulff , was at the time in custody in the Düsseldorf detention center after he had read and distributed Max Cohnheim 's republican catechism for the German people at a Volksklub event on July 3rd . Freiligrath's poem met with great applause from the audience of one to two hundred, who each paid a silver groschen to enter the event. In the Volksklub it was decided to have the poem printed immediately in order to sell it for a silver groschen for the benefit of the club. The Franck'sche Buchdruckerei in Düsseldorf's Neustraße took over the printing order for 9,000 copies, which were then sold through direct sales and through the book trade.
State response, arrest and trial
The chief procurator Karl Schnaase , whose task as the organ of the administration of justice was to prosecute violations of the legal order , also learned of these events . He and the General Procurator in Cologne recognized in the poem a "direct incitement of the citizens to arm against the sovereign power and to overthrow the existing state constitution". They had Freiligrath arrested on August 29 and brought to the same cell in the Düsseldorf detention center in which Julius Wulff was already sitting and waiting for his trial. On September 18, he was charged with "crimes against Articles 102 and 87 of the Criminal Code". On the morning of October 3rd, the public hearing of the Royal Assize Court in Düsseldorf under the direction of President Broicher opened and the jury sworn in. After the indictment was read out, State Prosecutor von Ammon elaborated on the indictment. After the defendant and the witnesses had been questioned, the lawyers Mayer and Weiler spoke in defense of Freiligrath. In support of their demand for the accused's acquittal, they stated that his poem should not be assessed as a criminal offense but as “poetry” and as the pictorial language of poetic fantasy. Other poets were not punished for this in their time either. There was no immediate "irritation" of the citizens. The jury, who were asked for their verdict by the chairman after these statements, came to the decision after a few minutes with an absolute majority that Freiligrath was not guilty. There was a cheer in the courtroom; Cheers were repeatedly given to the poet. After the negotiation, enthusiastic citizens celebrated him in a pageant in the streets of Düsseldorf. According to police reports, 15,000 people are said to have been on their feet, including Karl Marx. The next day the trial against Julius Wulff took place. Freiligrath was invited as a witness. This process also ended with an acquittal and demonstrations of joy.
reception
The poem Die Todten an die Lebenden became more widely distributed in print and quickly became popular. It gave rise to various allusions. In 1848, an anonymous author wrote an answer from the living to Freiligrath's poem in the form of a humiliating poem about the revolution. Further literary reactions were the writing The Wachenden to the dreaming of a certain "seriousness" or the work Short answer of the living to the dead . The Dusseldorf shoemaker and illustrator Wilhelm Müller (1804-1865) made silhouettes with silhouettes of Freiligrath, one among others, of this displayed, referring to his family name as Wolf, shows the poet along with Julius Wulff in Düsseldorf's holding cell.
literature
- First political trial before the jury: the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, accused of having incited the citizens to arm themselves against the sovereign power, also to overturn the existing constitution with his poem: "Die Todten an die Leben" (The Dead to the Living): Crimes against § §. 102 and 87 of the Criminal Code; Detailed information after the assistant negotiations that took place in Düsseldorf on October 3, 1848 / by J. K. H. Schaub'sche Buchhandlung, Düsseldorf 1848 ( digitized version of the Bavarian State Library ).
- Manfred Hettling: The dead to the living. The political cult of sacrifice in 1848 . In: Christian Jansen, Thomas Mergel (Ed.): The revolutions of 1848/49: Experiences - processing - interpretation . Collection Vandenhoeck, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1998, ISBN 3-525-01364-7 , p. 54.
- Margot Ulrich-Götzinger: The trial against Ferdinand Freiligrath and Julius Wulff . In: Die Bilker Sternwarte , 56, Düsseldorf 2010, pp. 212–216.
Web links
- The dead to the living (digital copy in the digital collection of the University and State Library Düsseldorf)
- The dead to the living (digitized version of the Bavarian State Library)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Quoted from: Volker Giel: Poetry and Revolution. The poetry of Ferdinand Freiligrath and Georg Herwegh in the revolution of 1848/49. An analytical comparison. In: But I wandered and wandered - the sun stayed behind me. Grabbe yearbook 2000/2001, ed. v. Friedrich Bratvogel, 19./20. Jg., Detmold 2001, pp. 324–350 ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ; Website in the georgherwegh-edition.de portal , accessed on July 19, 2015
- ^ Christian Leitzbach: Poet prince and revolutionary . Website in the portal literatur-archiv-nrw.de , accessed on July 19, 2015
- ^ Wilhelm Buchner: Ferdinand Freiligrath. A poet's life in letters . Volume II. Verlag Moritz Schauenburg, Lahr 1881, p. 211 ( digitized version ).
- ↑ Thomas Giese: "In spite of everything and everything" . Article in the portal nrhz.de , accessed on July 19, 2015
- ↑ Detlev Hellfaier: “Bitterst Mockery ” about the king. On the trial against Freiligrath in 1848. Article in the llb-detmold.de portal , accessed on July 19, 2015
- ↑ Manfred Hettling, p. 63
- ↑ Answer of the living to Freiligrath's poem: The dead to the living. Website in the europeana.eu portal , accessed on July 19, 2015
- ^ Christian Leitzbach, website of the literature archive NRW
- ↑ Die Todten an die Leben ( Memento from July 19, 2015 in the web archive archive.today ), website in the duesseldorf.de portal
- ↑ See text and illustration no. 112 in: VI. “No more life for me without freedom” - Freiligrath's struggle for democracy and freedom 1848–1851. Website in the llb-detmold.de portal , accessed on July 19, 2015
