Wartburg Festival

Student procession to the Wartburg Festival 1817 (artist unknown)

Wartburgfest is the name of several, mostly student gatherings, each of which took place at the Wartburg near Eisenach in Thuringia . The best known is the first Wartburg Festival from 1817, to which all later ones referred.

On the occasion of the 4th anniversary of the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig on October 18, 1817 and the upcoming 300th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation , students from almost all Protestant German universities met at the Wartburg in the Grand Duchy of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach in Thuringia. The gathering of around 500 students and a few professors was a protest against reactionary politics and small states and for a nation state with its own constitution. As Martin Luther's refuge in 1521/22, the Wartburg was considered a German national symbol .

Wartburg Festival 1817

background

After the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon , many Germans cherished the hope of a renewal of imperial unity, which after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 proved to be an illusion. The land-class constitutions promised in Article 13 of the Federal Act were only issued slowly or not at all; For example, on May 5, 1816, Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach was one of the first German states to receive a partly old-fashioned, partly modern constitution from Grand Duke Karl August , which was the first in German history to include complete freedom of the press, opinion and assembly. The students of the University of Jena - until then organized in the traditional Landsmannschaften - founded the Urburschenschaft in 1815 in order to exemplify German unity and above all the “virtues of the nation” at the university. Many of them fought in the Wars of Liberation in the Lützow Freikorps or as volunteer hunters .

invitation

Train of students to the Wartburg 1817. Etching by an unknown artist from the 19th century

At Whitsun 1817, members of the primary fraternity of the universities of Jena and Halle decided at a meeting in Naumburg , on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of Martin Luther's posting of the theses on October 31, 1517 and in memory of the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig from October 16 to 19, 1813, students of German universities to invite you to a "National Festival" on October 18, 1817 at the Wartburg. On August 11, 1817, letters of invitation were sent from Jena to fraternities and regional teams at the universities of Berlin , Breslau , Erlangen , Gießen , Göttingen , Greifswald , Heidelberg , Kiel , Königsberg , Leipzig , Marburg , Rostock and Tübingen . In view of the strict isolationist policy of State Chancellor Metternich, no invitations were sent to the students in the Austrian Empire . The invitation said:

"Heaven bless our common striving to become a people who, full of the virtues of their fathers and brothers, through love and unity, overcomes the weaknesses and mistakes of both."

The model for the form of the event were the popular festivals of the French Revolution and the festive events of the gymnastics movement .

The Wartburg was chosen as a location partly because of its proximity to the University of Jena, partly because of the liberal attitude of Grand Duke Karl August - especially because of its importance as a national symbol. The castle was 1521/22 refuge Martin Luther , the papal bull of excommunication and the Edict of Worms for outlaws had explained. By translating the Bible in just eleven weeks during this time - according to the popular myth among the participants - he gave the German language a binding form and set a sign of resistance against any foreign cultural rule.

Course of the festival

Over 450 students from thirteen universities turned up, including those from the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg , which was not invited, while Greifswald was only represented by former students and Königsberg had not received the invitation. Thus about every twentieth German student took part in the festival. More than half of the participants studied for a position in government or church service, 50 percent came from civil servant families. Several professors from the University of Jena also took part, namely the physicians Dietrich Georg von Kieser and Lorenz Oken , the historian Heinrich Luden and the philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries .

Speeches were initially given in the knight's hall of the castle under the motto “ Honor, Freedom, Fatherland ”. The theology student Heinrich Arminius Riemann praised Luther as a German hero of freedom, and Professor Fries vaguely explained his ideas about how German unity could be achieved. Then they sang the chorale Nun danket alle Gott , which has been a “ Prussian hymn” since the Battle of Leuthen in 1757 . The event ended with a final blessing , which is why the historian Étienne François describes it as a mixture of “ Protestant worship and political rally”. Afterwards there was a festive dinner with toasts and cheers for Luther and three prominent victims of the Wars of Liberation, namely Gerhard von Scharnhorst , Ferdinand von Schill and Theodor Körner . Until then, the festival was on the whole well-mannered and rather harmless, despite the emotional and pathetic tones, as the fraternity historian Günter Steiger writes, the “protest without a program. A concrete political objective and orientation was missing. "

Burning of books and symbols

See also : Book burning at the Wartburg Festival in 1817

Issue 195 of Isis magazine with a list of burned items and books

On the nearby Wartenberg , members of the Landsturm had lit several victory fires to commemorate the Battle of Nations, and the students had moved there with a torchlight after the banquet . The fraternity festival management had not included participation in the victory bonfires in the official part of the Wartburg festival. Later the symbolic burning of books and government objects followed. The books that were symbolically burned in the form of labeled balls of waste paper included works that defended small states, criticized the young German national movement and its representatives, or were considered friendly to France. These included, for example, the Code Napoléon or the book Germanomanie by the German-Jewish publicist Saul Ascher (1767–1822), which with the cry "Woe to the Jews, hold fast to their Judaism and want to mock and disparage our folklore and Germanness!" was symbolically burned. Whether the latter was a decidedly anti-Semitic statement is undisputed in anti-Semitism research.

Principles and resolutions of October 18th

In the aftermath of the Wartburg Festival, with the help of Jena professor Heinrich Luden , the thoughts expressed were summarized in a program that the constitutional historian Ernst Rudolf Huber described as “the first German party program”.

The 35 principles and 12 resolutions can be summarized as follows (from Klaus Wessel, 1954; quotations from Herman Haupt, 1913):

• The political division of Germany should give way to political, religious and economic unity.
  • "A Germany is, and a Germany should be and remain." (1st principle)
  • "The doctrine of the division of Germany into Catholic and Protestant Germany is erroneous, wrong, unfortunate." (5th principle)
  • “Tolls, customs duties and trade barriers between German countries, differences in measure, weight, coin (according to their weight and their destination): all these things damage the honor of Germany among foreigners, are in themselves perishable for the spirit of our people, torment them individuals and cause them loss and damage. "(11th principle)

• Germany is to become a constitutional monarchy. The ministers should be responsible to the parliament.
  • “The dignity of a prince is the most sublime on earth and therefore to be honored and respected for the most holy; because it represents the unity of the citizen and the state. "(15th principle)
  • "The will of the prince is not the law of the people, but the law of the people should be the will of the prince." (16th principle)

• All Germans are equal before the law and have the right to a public trial before a jury according to a German code of law.
  • “Freedom and equality are the highest things we have to strive for [...]. But there is no freedom but in the law and by the law, and no equality but with the law and before the law. Where there is no law, there is no equality, but violence, submission, slavery. "(19th principle)
  • "Everyone from whom the state demands civic duties must also have civic rights." (25th principle)
  • "In general, the public administration of justice and the jury in embarrassing cases are the surest guarantee for the just administration of the law." (32nd principle)

• All secret police are to be replaced by the municipal authorities.
  • “The police force can be administered by the commoners as soon as they have a proper institution […]. Secret police are only excused in times of war; in times of peace it proves that tyranny prevails or is sought. [...] whoever serves the secret police at the time of peace is betraying freedom. "(34th principle)

• Security of person and property, the abolition of birth privileges and serfdom are just as constitutionally guaranteed as the special promotion of the hitherto oppressed classes.
  • "All laws have the freedom of the person and the security of property as their object." (20th principle)
  • "The birth is a coincidence." (26th principle)
  • “Privileges are incompatible with justice. Where there are privileged people, there must also be those who are impaired. The right must be matched by duty. Only those who have greater duties can have greater rights in the state. "(27th principle)
  • “The first and most sacred human right, inalienable and inalienable, is personal freedom. Serfdom is the most unjust and despicable thing, an abomination before God and every good person. "(28th principle)
  • “In the proclaimed freedom, the serfs do not have to grow into slavery. Man is only free if he also has the means to determine himself according to his own ends. "(29th principle)

• General conscription (Landwehr and Landsturm) takes the place of the standing armies.
  • “Germany can only be protected from the great power of foreign states by the Landwehr, which rises as a Landsturm in case of need. Standing armies can achieve great victories, but a state can only find solid security in its citizens. The soldier's spirit can attain great fame, but lasting honor can only be won by citizenship. The soldier's spirit may lead to bold deeds; but true heroism, which remains the same in happiness and unhappiness, only emerges from genuine citizenship. "(10th principle)

• Freedom of speech and the press are constitutionally guaranteed.
  • "The right to express one's opinion on public affairs in free speech and in writing is an inalienable right of every citizen." (31st Principle)

• Science should serve life, especially the study of morality, politics and history.
  • “Above all, as students we want to commit ourselves to a serious and level-headed life and serve science faithfully and honestly. But we do not want to indulge in idle learning that has no energy and respects. With particular zeal we want to study all those sciences that are able to purify and strengthen the spirit of people and fatherland and all public relations [...] - morality, politics, history. "(3rd resolution)

• All divisions in the universities should stop, secret leagues should not exist.
  • "We do not want to tolerate that the old divisions, unfortunate replicas of the unfortunate divisions of the fatherland, in compatriots or orders, continue or be established at German universities." (4th resolution)

• Every lad must renounce all small states and foreigners, all caste and despotism.
  • “We never want to use the word fatherland about the country or country in which we were born. Germany is our fatherland; the land where we were born is our home. We also want as much as possible, [...] to avoid everything foreign in language, clothing, manners and customs. "(10th resolution)
  • "When we leave the university and are held in any office, be it high or low, we want the same honestly, honestly, loyal to the prince, surrender to the fatherland, and administer it in such a way that corresponds to the meaning of the above principles. But none of us will ever accept an office that serves a secret police or a position in an extraordinary, unlawful judicial commission and just as little the office of a book censor. "(12th resolution)

consequences

The authorities reacted with alarm and were reminded of the actions of the Jacobins during the French Revolution . The director of the Berlin Police Ministry, Karl Albert von Kamptz , protested sharply to Duke Karl August on behalf of Prussia against the “bunch of slutty students and professors” and demanded that the University of Jena, this “asylum for state criminals”, be closed. The Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III. even thought that an uprising had been called at the Wartburg Festival and demanded that his minister of culture, Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein , forbid student connections.

Flag of the original fraternity from 1816

As a result of the Wartburg Festival, it was agreed to found a general German fraternity as a general association. The Wartburg Festival was also important in determining the German national colors, because the participants' flag was the first to wear the colors black, red and gold . It went back to the uniform colors of the Lützow Freikorps, whose uniform was black with red facings and gold buttons. The Jena fraternity carried a three-lane red-black-red flag with a golden oak branch on the black stripe, which it received on March 31, 1816 and which is now in the Jena City Museum. A replica can be seen in the ballroom at the Wartburg.

The first Wartburg Festival in the media and in literature

Professor Oken, who published the magazine Isis or Encyclopädische Zeitschrift , had taken part in the Wartburg Festival with some other interested professors and then reported on it in his magazine in a multi-page article. Here's how he quoted some student speakers:

“But think, just think about what a student is. Make it clear to yourself that the moment you decide to study, all of Germany is open to you. The student, be he from wherever he may, can find his business and employment in Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Hanover, Saxony, in Swabia, Franconia, Thuringia, Hesse, Mecklenburg, Holstein, on the Rhine or in Switzerland. He no longer speaks the language of his village, his city; he does not understand this or that craft that tied a certain workshop or the clod; he is a universal person! It is a shame not to have made it further through studying than to have remained a Thuringian, a Hessian, a Franconian, a Swabian, a Rhinelander. It is a shame to believe that one has become nothing more than a compatriot provincial. Do you speak provincial languages? Do you live according to provincial customs? No! You turn red that you can only ask such a thing from a student. [...] Not the whites should become blacks, not the black whites, not the Wildhessen Althessen, not the Bavarian Franks, the Thuringian Swabians, the Mecklenburg Lievlanders etc .; but only through your institution you should become what you are all as students, universals. - But universality does not extend to the whole world. You do not learn French, English, Spanish, Russian, Turkish custom and science at the universities; you can and will, (and the German people and their princes) want to become nothing else than educated Germans who are all equal and whose business is free everywhere. "

Oken ran into political difficulties because of this publication and the edition of his magazine was confiscated. In 1819, Oken was even given the choice of either giving up his editorial work or his professorship. However, he did not abandon his magazine and waived the professor's salary.

Heinrich Heine , who had belonged to the respective fraternity in Bonn and Göttingen in 1819/1820 and was not present at the Wartburg, commented some time after the Wartburg Festival:

“On the Wartburg the past croaked its obscure raven song, and by torchlight stupid things were said and done that were worthy of the most stupid Middle Ages! (...) That limited Teutomanism prevailed at the Wartburg, which greeted a lot about love and faith, but whose love was nothing more than hatred of the stranger and whose belief consisted only in unreason, and which in its ignorance could not invent anything better than books to burn! I say ignorance, because in this respect that earlier opposition, which we know under the name of 'the Old Germans, was even greater than the newer opposition, although it is not particularly brilliant for its scholarship. The very person who proposed the book-burning at the Wartburg was also the most ignorant creature that ever did gymnastics on earth and published old German readings: in fact, this subject should have thrown Bröder's Latin grammar into the fire! "

Heine's quote Das was only a prelude, where you burn books, you end up burning people. was not an allusion to the book burning during the Wartburg Festival in 1817. The quote referred to a burning of the Koran during the conquest of Spanish Granada by Christian knights in his allegorical tragedy “ Almansor ” (1821, for the wording see book burning ).

Later Wartburg festivals

Wartburg Festival 1848

The Second Wartburg Festival on June 12, 1848 is less well known than the first Wartburg Festival in 1817. Whitsun 1848 was about the future constitution of the German universities . For this purpose, student representatives from almost all German universities met, which at the time essentially belonged to student associations , but which, however, did not agree with one another. The historian Paul Ssymank divided the participants into a conservative wing, consisting of 400 to 500 members of the old corps , the Wingolf and the Teutonic fraternities , and a left majority wing, consisting of around 600 to 700 student members of the fraternities and corps leaning towards progress , the Finkenschaft and Austrian and South German students.

Inspired by idealism, the desire for academic freedom and against the backdrop of romanticism, the students demanded from the Frankfurt National Assembly that the universities be transferred to national ownership under state funding responsibility in academic self-administration.

Republicans' Wartburg Festival (1929)

In conscious connection with the republican ideals of the first two Wartburg festivals, the Republican Student Cartel and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold organized a so-called "Wartburg Festival of the Republicans" on Pentecost Sunday 1929. The Prussian Interior Minister Albert Grzesinski (SPD) spoke at the rally, with which the organizers wanted to set an example against the hostility to the Republic that is widespread among professors and students .

Wartburg Festival of the German Student Union (1948)

GDR postage stamp for the Wartburg Festival

After the end of the Second World War , another “Wartburg Festival of the German Student Union” took place in Eisenach in May 1948, which, with this name, also claimed the spiritual tradition of the first two Wartburg festivals. However, this event was already marked by the ongoing division of Germany, as a "German Student Day" was taking place at the same time on the occasion of the reopening of the Paulskirche in Frankfurt . This was agreed upon by representatives from all four occupation zones at an Interzonal Student Day in Berlin at the beginning of 1948 and was considered the last preparatory meeting for the foundation of the Association of German Student Unions (VDS), which finally took place in January 1949 . However, the student councils of the Soviet occupation zone, which were already dominated by the SED at that time, demonstratively stayed away from the Frankfurt meeting and instead invited the West German universities to Eisenach. According to the FDJ magazine Forum , around 100 students from the western zones and, for the first time, "fifty representatives of the working youth" also took part in the meeting, as well as several high-ranking party and state representatives from the eastern zone, including the Thuringian Prime Minister Werner Eggerath and Minister of Education Marie Torhorst (both SED).

More Wartburg festivals

Guided by the principles of the original fraternity, the Wingolfsbund regularly celebrated its national festivals in Eisenach from 1850 to 1934. After the dissolution in 1936, a re-establishment after the Second World War was only possible in the western part of Germany. Since the German reunification , both the Wingolfsbund and the German Burschenschaft have held regular Wartburg festivals in Eisenach. These events had previously taken place at various locations in what was then the Federal Republic.

See also: Wartburg festivals of the Wingolfsbund

See also

• Fraternity monument
• Hambach Festival
• Participants in the Wartburg Festival (1817)

literature

1817

• Friedrich Johannes Frommann : The boys' festival on the Wartburg on October 18th and 19th, 1817. Jena 1818. Online .
• Ernst Jung: Wartburg Festival 1817. Departure to German unity. State Center for Political Education, Stuttgart 1991.
• Klaus Malettke (Ed.): 175 years of the Wartburg Festival. October 18, 1817-18. October 1992. Winter, Heidelberg 1992, ISBN 3-533-04468-8 .
• Hans Ferdinand Maßmann : Short and truthful description of the big boys' festival on the Wartburg near Eisenach on the 18th and 19th of the Victory Moon in 1817 (as a digitized version of the edition with many handwritten comments on Google Books).
• Bernhard Sommerlad : Wartburg Festival and Corps students. In: then and now . 24: 16-42 (1979).
• Günter Steiger: Departure. Original fraternity and Wartburg festival. Urania, Leipzig 1967.
• Lutz Winckler: Martin Luther as a citizen and patriot. The anniversary of the Reformation in 1817 and the political Protestantism of the Wartburg Festival. Lübeck and Hamburg 1969 (= historical studies , 408).

1848

• Max Friedländer , Robert Giseke : The Wartburg Festival of the German students in the week of Pentecost in 1848. Reclam, Leipzig 1848.
• Eckhard Oberdörfer: The second Wartburg Festival, the Rostock students and the university reform. In: Einst und Jetzt , Vol. 47 (2002), pp. 73, 80 ff.
• Friedrich Schulze, Paul Ssymank : The German student body from the oldest times to the present 1931. Munich 1932, pp. 264–268.
• Heide Thielbeer: University and politics in the German revolution of 1848. Bonn 1983, ISBN 3-87831-380-2 .

1948

• Jürgen John , Christian Faludi (edit.): “Put back everything that divides!” A source edition for the “Wartburg Meeting of the German Student Union Whitsun 1948” in Eisenach , Steiner, Stuttgart 2010, ISBN 978-3-515-09795-6 .
• Detlev E. Otto: Students in divided Germany. A report on the relations between the student bodies in East and West Germany 1945 to 1958. Association of German Student Unions, Bonn 1959 (here in particular p. 21 f.).

Web links

Commons : Wartburgfest  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Collection of postcards from the Wartburg festivals of the German fraternity
• Collection of postcards from the Wartburg festivals of the Wingolfsbund

Individual evidence

1. ^ Günter Steiger: Departure. Original fraternity and Wartburg festival. Urania, Leipzig 1967, p. 89.
2. ^ Hugo Kühn: The Wartburg Festival on October 18, 1817 , Weimar 1913, p. 15.
3. ↑ Herfried Münkler : The Germans and their Myths , Rowohlt Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2008, p. 318.
4. ↑ To the numbers Günter Steiger: Aufbruch. Original fraternity and Wartburg festival. Urania, Leipzig 1967, p. 82 f.
5. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Wehler : German history of society , vol. 2: From the reform era to the industrial and political "German double revolution" , CH Beck, Munich 1987. p. 335.
6. ↑ Herfried Münkler: The Germans and their Myths , Rowohlt Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2008, p. 318.
7. ^ Étienne François: The Wartburg . In the S. and Hagen Schulze (ed.): German places of memory , vol. 2, CH Beck, Munich 2001, p. 55.
8. ^ Günter Steiger: Departure. Urburschenschaft and Wartburg Festival , Urania-Verlag, Freiburg 1967.
9. ↑ Also on the following Herfried Münkler: The Germans and their Myths , Rowohlt Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2008, p. 319 f.
10. ^ Werner Tress: Wartburg Festival . In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.) Handbook of Antisemitism , Vol. 4: Events, Decrees, Controversies . de Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-598-24076-8 , p. 434 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
11. ^ Werner Bergmann : Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig . In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus , Vol. 2/1: Personen , Berlin 2009, p. 406.
12. ↑ Ulrich Wyrwa : Deutsche Burschenschaften , in: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus , Vol. 5: Organizations, Institutions, Movements , Berlin 2012, pp. 138–140.
13. ↑ Joachim Burkhart Richter: Hans Ferdinand Maßmann - Old German Patriotism in the 19th Century , de Gruyter, Berlin 1992, pp. 77-78.
14. ↑ Peter Kaupp: Burschenschaft und Antisemitismus , online publication of the Society for Burschenschaftliche Geschichtsforschung , Dieburg 2004, pp. 4–9.
15. ^ Ernst Rudolf Huber: German Constitutional History. Since 1789. Volume 1: Reform and Restoration. 1789 to 1830 , 2nd edition, Stuttgart a. a. 1990, p. 722.
16. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Wehler: German history of society , vol. 2: From the reform era to the industrial and political "German double revolution" , CH Beck, Munich 1987. P. 335 f.
17. ↑ Lorenz Oken, in: Isis or Encyclopädische Zeitschrift. 1817.
18. ^ Heinrich Heine: Ludwig Börne . A memorandum. Fourth book, 1840.
19. ^ OV: Wartburg Festival of the Republicans . In: Illustrated Republican Newspaper 22 (1929), p. 340.
20. ^ Wartburg festival of the Wingolfsbund in Eisenach . In: MFB Verlagsgesellschaft mbH Eisenach (ed.): StadtZeit. City journal with information from the Wartburg district . May issue. Frisch, Eisenach 1995, p. 33-34 .