Karl Follen

Karl Follen (1796-1840)

Karl Theodor Christian Friedrich Follen (also: Follenius , later in the USA: Charles Follen ; born September 4, 1796 in Romrod near Alsfeld , Hesse ; † January 13, 1840 on Long Island Sound , USA ) was a German - American Scholar, writer and radical democrat of the Vormärz .

family

His father was the Giessen court attorney Christoph Follenius, (1759-1833), his mother Rosine Follenius (1766-1800). Rosine Follenius had left Giessen, which was occupied by French revolutionary troops, so that Karl was born in Romrod. His father shaped him through a Christian upbringing. He was the brother of Adolf Ludwig Follen and Paul Follen , the founder of the " Giessener Emigration Society " from 1833; the son of his sister Luise was the scientist Carl Vogt .

Life

to water

He attended high school in Giessen, learned the languages ​​Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French and Italian and was inspired by Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker (1784–1868) for Schiller's heroism and the anti-French nationalism of Jahn , Körner and Arndt . In 1813 he began to study law . In 1814 he and many students joined a free corps train to France to fight against Napoleon I , but did not take part in combat operations.

On November 17, 1814, together with other students from the University of Giessen, he founded the Teutsche Reading Society for the establishment of patriotic purposes , a student association that, along with the Jena “ Urburschenschaft ”, pioneered the German fraternity movement. After the collapse of the Reading Society in January 1815, the moderate connection Teutonia and led by Follen radical aligned formed Germania that the acronym as a secret covenant sign M H B G ( "At the heart of M uth, despite under H uth, the sword B Lutheran, makes everything G ut ”). The German Education and Friendship Association emerged from this later .

In 1816, as a supporter of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn's nationalistic gymnastics movement , Follen took part in the founding of the “Christian-Teutschen Fraternity”, whose statutes (“mirror of honor”) he drafted. In it, he granted the right to membership and political decision-making to those students who were connected in the "history of blood, faith, education"; thus Jews were excluded from participation. He became the inspiring core of the so-called Giessen Blacks because of their costume . In January 1817 he wrote a resolution on legal equality within the fraternities and thus directed himself against the isolationism of the country-like fraternities. Violent arguments against his person, which went hand in hand with denunciations and exclusions of Follen's supporters from the country teams, increasingly earned the mirror of honor the reputation of a document of subversion and treason. On March 22nd, the University of Giessen first threatened fraternity members with relegation threats.

Follen convinced with his great talent for speech, his poetic and musical talent.

“We must achieve the freedom of the people by every means that is available to us. Riot, murder of tyrants and everything that is called a crime in ordinary life and is rightly punished, must simply be counted among the means ... among the weapons that are left to us against the tyrants alone. "

Likewise, in his Republican Great Song , which was circulated as a leaflet , he openly called for tyrannicide and revolt : "Down with thrones, crowns, merrymakers, drones and barons". In 1818 he founded the Allgemeine Gießener Burschenschaft Germania , which was dissolved in 1819 by the Karlsbad resolutions . In the same year he received his doctorate as Dr. juris in civil and church law . He immediately campaigned against a rate hike in favor of the Hessian farmers through a petition that was published in the Hessian newspapers on November 28, 1818. With that he put his career at risk. Since Follen did not get an appointment as a professor, he left Giessen and went to the liberal Sachsen-Weimar in 1819 . At the University of Jena he taught at the law faculty.

Jena

In Jena, Follen met the nationalist philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries , who was respected among the students and who had made attitudes and inner convictions a principle of political action. Follen radicalized Fries' system: the joyful willingness to make sacrifices lived, the absolute act of persuasion up to and including martyrdom : “It is better to commit an act that violates God's commandment if it has saved the people. The knowledge that comrades have to suffer in bondage remained an unbearable burden for him ”(according to Christian Sartorius ). Here he founded and directed the inner, secret circle of the “unconditional”, to which the theology student Karl Ludwig Sand belonged. After his assassination attempt on the writer August von Kotzebue , the suspicions were directed against Follen as the alleged intellectual author of the act, although Sand insisted until his execution that he had planned and prepared the assassination alone.

Escape

Follen's license to teach was revoked. In autumn 1819 he fled to his father's house in Giessen, where he was also banned from teaching and banned from traveling. In the winter of 1819 he went to Strasbourg , where he devoted himself to language and literature studies. In February 1820 he turned to Paris , where his meeting with the Marquis de Lafayette in particular was to be significant for his journey to America. The murder of Charles Ferdinand de Bourbon , the Duke of Berry , on February 13, 1820 triggered a wave of deportations, so that Follen also had to leave France and fled to Switzerland. In September he started working at the canton school in Chur. His brother Adolf Ludwig followed him here after two years in prison in Berlin.

Basel

In 1821 Follen accepted a call to the University of Basel , where he soon became a point of contact for German exiles, whom he referred to the university and who made the university's reputation grow. These included u. a. Martin Leberecht de Wette , with whom he published the scientific journal from 1823 . In all of this, Follen maintained constant contacts with Germany, organized annual illegal club days and created the plan for a revolutionary youth league .

In 1824 Prussian pressure increased on the University of Basel to part with Follen. A letter alleging a conspiracy was followed by an unsuccessful investigation. On August 27, a Prussian note was received for the extradition of the "bored Prussian subject" Follen (although his place of birth Romrod was not part of Prussia, but rather to the province of Upper Hesse in the Landgraviate of Hessen-Darmstadt , since 1806 Grand Duchy of Hesse), whereupon the Swiss government unsuccessfully File inspection requested. When Prussia, Austria and Russia finally threatened to break off friendly relations, the Swiss government decided to arrest them, but at the same time advised Follen to leave the country. He fled from Basel to Le Havre in the trunk of a stagecoach , where he set sail on November 5, 1824 with Karl Beck , Friedrich Bunte, Jakob Homburg and Wilhelm Wesslehöft on board the Cadmos . During the crossing he began to learn the English language; he reached America on December 19, 1824.

America

Within six months in New York and Philadelphia he had settled in America - supported by the lively contact with Lafayette , the openness of Boston and his own enthusiasm for American democracy. Here he anglicized his name in Charles Follen . In 1825 he worked at Harvard University, initially as a professor of German language and modern German literature. He reformed the study regulations on the German model, wrote in 1826 a widely read German Reader (German reader) , then in 1828 a German grammar (German Grammar) . In 1826, together with other emigrants, he introduced gymnastics based on the German model, according to the gymnastics father Jahn, as a university subject, which was first held in the university dining room and then in the new Boston gymnasium.

Follen made the acquaintance of the writer Eliza Lee Cabot (1787-1860) from a respected Boston family. The marriage took place on September 15, 1828; he became a US citizen in March 1830, and their son Charles was born. In 1832 he was the first to put a Christmas tree in his Cambridge home, introducing the custom to New England.

Abolitionist and Unitarian

The Unitarian Church in Lexington, Massachusetts, named after Follen

Memorial stone in Lexington Cemetery

The abolitionism movement to abolish slavery in the USA started in 1831. U. a. Follen had contacts with William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879). Since he denounced slavery and ethnic discrimination in his lectures, his contract at the university was not renewed in 1832. He was subsequently the target of violent allegations, with the press branding him as a foreign arsonist. Undeterred, he pursued his goals of slave emancipation.

In 1836 a unitary theological faculty was founded in Boston . In the same year Follen was ordained as a Unitarian pastor in Lexington, Massachusetts . Two years later Follen was pastor of a Unitarian congregation in the Upper East Side of New York (now the Unitarian Church of All Souls). In 1839 he designed the project for a new church in Lexington. On January 13, 1840, he began his journey from New York to Lexington with the steamship Lexington for the dedication of the church . He was the victim of a shipping disaster off Long Island. Because of his uncompromising criticism of slavery, the conservative Boston public initially refused a funeral. It was not until public pressure from the Massachusetts Antislavery Society that Follens was buried on April 17, 1840 in the Marlborough Chapel.

His collected works were published posthumously by his wife in 1842.

literature

• Frank Mehring: Between Natives and Foreigners. Selected Writings of Karl / Charles Follen (1796–1840) (= New Directions in German-American Studies. Volume 4). Peter Lang, New York 2007.
• Edmund Spevack: Charles Follen's Search for Nationality and Freedom: Germany and America 1796-1840. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1997, ISBN 0-674-11011-0 .
• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Sub-Volume 2: F-H. Winter, Heidelberg 1999, ISBN 3-8253-0809-X , pp. 53-54.
• Walter Grab : Democracy and German foolishness in the student revolt from 1817–1820 . In: A people must conquer their own freedom. Frankfurt 1984, pp. 498-503.
• Ernst Kelchner :  Follen, Karl . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 7, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1877, p. 149. (with additions and corrections by CW Ernst).
• Frank Mehring: Karl / Charles Follen. German-American freedom fighter . Casting 2004.
• Ernst Rose:  Follen, Karl Theodor Christian. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 5, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1961, ISBN 3-428-00186-9 , p. 286 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Michael Zeller : Follens Erbe - A German Story (novel), Oberon Verlag, Bad Homburg 1986.
• Follen, Charles Theodore Christian . In: James Grant Wilson, John Fiske (Eds.): Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography . tape 2 : Crane - Grimshaw . D. Appleton and Company, New York 1887, p. 491 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).

Web links

Commons : Karl  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Karl Follen in the catalog of the German National Library
• Markus Bürgi: Follen, Karl. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Frank Mehring: Follen, Karl Theodor Christian (Charles) . ( Memento from December 25, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) In: Lexicon of the Vormärz Research Forum .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Christoph König (Ed.), With the collaboration of Birgit Wägenbaur u. a .: Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950 . Volume 1: A-G. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, ISBN 3-11-015485-4 , p. 503 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
2. ↑ Friedrich Münch's memory in Hans Heinrich Gerth: Bürgerliche Intellenschaften um 1800 (= critical studies on historical science . Volume 19). Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1976, ISBN 3-525-35970-5 ( limited preview in Google book search).
3. ↑ Alexander Demandt (ed.): The assassination in history. Böhlau, Köln / Weimar / Wien 1996, ISBN 3-412-16795-9 , p. 220 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
4. ^ Friedrich Wilhelm Weitershaus: We are moving to America. In: Communications of the Upper Hessian History Association. Volume 63, p. 192.
5. ^ Harvard Gazette: The Professor who brought the Christmas Tree to Newengland
6. ↑ As a place of the ship disaster one finds in the literature also the Erie lake , like z. B. in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie ADB , Volume 7, p. 149. In: ADB , Volume 36, p. 789, however, this is corrected for Long Island Sound. In: The favor and their relatives . In: Familiengeschichtliche Blätter , 1936, No. 4, by Walter Serlo it says: "... in a ship fire on the journey from New York [sic] to Boston".