Paul Follen

Paul Follen (born May 5, 1799 in Giessen , † October 3, 1844 in Dutzow , Missouri , USA ; also: Paul Follenius ) was a German-American lawyer, writer and farmer.

His father was the judicial officer Christoph Follenius (1759-1833), his mother Rosine Follenius (1766-1799). His father shaped him through a Christian upbringing.

He was the brother of Adolf Ludwig Follen and Karl Follen . His sister Louise had to emigrate to Switzerland with her husband Philipp Friedrich Wilhelm Vogt . Their son, the natural scientist Carl Vogt , finally emigrated to Switzerland after the '48 revolution . Paul was married to Maria Münch, the sister of his friend Friedrich Münch.

During his studies in Gießen in 1817 he became a member of the Christian-German fraternity / honorary fraternity and in 1819 the Gießen general fraternity Germania .

In 1833 the court attorney Follen and his brother-in-law, Pastor Friedrich Münch, founded the Giessener Emigration Society to establish a German-populated federal state in the United States as a model for a future German republic. They managed to bring 500 people who wanted to leave the country to America in 1834. The utopia of one's own state soon had to be given up.

Münch and Follen settled near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers in Dutzow in Warren County (Missouri) as farmers. The place was founded in 1832 by Baron von Bock.

His brother Karl Follen had already planned in 1819 to found a German university in America. He then fled to Basel until he was expelled and emigrated to the USA in 1824.

literature

• Paul Follen and Friedrich Münch: Request and explanation regarding a large-scale emigration from Germany to the North American Free States . Giessen 1833.
• 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. 54-55.