Published: 14 February 2012

Ernst Moritz Arndt was born on 26 December, 1769 on the island of Rügen, which at the time was under Swedish rule. Not long before his son’s birth, Arndt’s father had bought his freedom from serfdom and subsequently achieved prosperity as a large-scale leaseholder and landowner. This prosperity meant that Arndt, after studying theology in Greifswald and Jena, was able to take a one-and-a-half year educational journey through Europe, which he also wrote about (Reisen durch einen Teil Deutschlands, Ungarns, Italiens und Frankreichs in den Jahren 1798 und 1799 - Journeys through a part of Germany, Hungary, Italy and France in 1798 and 1799, published 1804).

After completing his doctorate in Greifswald he became a Privatdozent (associate lecturer) for modern history there and a professor in 1806. His Versuch einer Geschichte der Leibeigenschaft in Pommern und Rügen (A History of Serfdom in Pomerania and Rügen, 1803) provides a critical analysis of the East Elbian feudal system. When Napoleon occupied the region following his victory over Prussia in 1806, Arndt fled to Sweden (1806-1809). His account of this period, Geist der Zeit (Spirit of the Time), was published in Stockholm in two parts, the first in 1806, the second in 1808. In 1812 Arndt responded to the call of the initiator of the Prussian reforms (1807), Karl Freiherr vom Stein, and went to St. Petersburg, where Stein was organizing resistance to Napoleon, who had failed in his attempt to conquer Russia. Accompanied by Russian troops, Stein and his “scribe”, secretary and press officer Arndt went to Königsberg, where they witnessed the beginning of the German Campaign with the deployment of a local militia by the regional parliament. It was the occupation, devastation and plundering of Europe by Napoleon that first radicalized German intellectuals like Arndt and transformed them from adherents of the Enlightenment into nationalists with chauvinistic tendencies. From the beginning of 1813 up until the Battle of Leipzig in October, Arndt published extensively and became widely known through his pamphlets, songs and poems (Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland – What is the German Fatherland). However, the partisan of German freedom soon collided with the leaders of the German restoration: when the fourth part of Geist der Zeit was published in 1818, Arndt was suspended from his new professorship at the newly founded University of Bonn and was not reinstated until 1840. At the age of 80, he made his last appearance on the political stage as a member of the National Assembly in Frankfurt am Main from 1848-49. Arndt died in Bonn on 29 January, 1860.

During the nineteenth century, Arndt’s posthumous fame centered above all on his role as a German patriot and nationalist. However, he was later condemned as a “forerunner of the Third Reich” and as a result was shamefully ignored and all but forgotten after 1945. There is no modern edition of his works. It is only now that a gradual attempt is being made to rediscover the whole Arndt, his deeply emotional commitment to liberty and his early adherence to the values of the Enlightenment, the period from which the text here originates.

Published: 11 February 2012

Johannes Bobrowski was born in 1917 in Tilsit (Sovetsk), the son of a railway official. In Königsberg (Kaliningrad) he attended a high school with Latin and Greek on the curriculum, learnt to play the organ, and in 1936 joined the “Confessing Church”, which opposed the Nazis. He frequently spent his holidays staying with relatives in the Memel Territory, which was under Lithuanian administration. Here, he not only met Johanna Buddrus, who he would marry in 1943, but also became familiar with a multicultural landscape which was later to form an important biographical background to his literary work. As a private in a signals unit, Bobrowski was involved in the Second World War over its entire course, and in 1945 he fell into Soviet captivity as a prisoner of war. After returning to his family, who were now living in (East) Berlin, he worked as an editor in a publishing house from 1950 onwards, and began to develop as a poet, creating a poetic space for himself which he called “Sarmatia”, taking up a name from ancient times. His experience of the war and of the crimes that accompanied it led him to his major literary theme: the Germans and their eastern neighbours.

From 1961 on he published three volumes of poetry, two novels, and several short stories; among other awards, he received the Literature Prize of the Gruppe 47. He was one of the few writers who were respected in both East and West Germany. His poems, short stories and novels are characterized by a fascinating sensuality and a high degree of linguistic precision. Bobrowski died in 1965 at the age of 48.

Published: 07 February 2012

Kai Brodersen was born in 1958. He studied Ancient History, Classical Philology and Protestant theology in Erlangen, Munich and Oxford, PhD 1986 and habilitation in 1995 in Munich. Professor at the University of Mannheim since 1996/97. Visiting professor at several universities in Britain, since 2008 Professor of Ancient Culture and President at the University of Erfurt.

Research on Greek and Roman historiography and geography, on ancient inscriptions, oracles and miracle texts and on the economic and historical impact of the ancient world (including Asterix) (cf www.uni-erfurt.de/antike).

Published: 08 December 2011

Ulrich Sonnenberg, born in Hannover in 1955, lives in Frankfurt am Main. He worked for some years in the German bookstore Tysk Bogimport in Copenhagen. In 1987 Ulrich Sonnenberg, together with Klaus Schöffling, founded the publishing house FVA-Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt GmbH; from 1993 until 2003 he was sales-manager in the publishing house Suhr­kamp/Insel.
Since 2004 Ulrich Sonnenberg has worked as editor and literary translator from Danish and Norwegian, among others he translated works by H. C. Andersen, Herman Bang, Hans Herbjørnsrud, Carsten Jensen, Morten Ramsland and Knud Romer.

Published: 30 October 2011

Kurt Tucholsky was born the son of a Jewish banker on 9 January, 1890, in Berlin. During his childhood, the family spent six memorable years (1893-99) in Stettin on the Baltic Sea coast, which Tucholsky regarded throughout his life as his “homeland”. After completing his schooling in Berlin, he studied law in Berlin and Geneva and was awarded a doctorate of jurisprudence in Jena in 1915. During World War I, Tucholsky spent most of his time behind the lines in Courland and Romania. He kept his distance from the German Revolution of 1918-19, although he did join the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which since 1917 had been more determined in its struggle for peace than the SPD. During the 1920s, Tucholsky, who had already begun writing newspaper articles as a high school student, became one of the most renowned and harshest critics of Prussian militarism and German post-war society and its elites. In innumerable satirical articles for the pacifist Weltbühne (many of which appeared under his famous pseudonyms Peter Panter, Theobald Tiger, Ignaz Wrobel and Kaspar Hauser), the Berliner Tageblatt and Vorwärts and in chansons written for cabaret, he expressed his support the Weimar Republic, democracy and human rights. He regarded the years from 1924 to 1928 as his happiest, when he was living in Paris with his wife Mary Gerold (although this second marriage also ended in divorce). His immigration to Sweden signalled his sense of resignation in the face of the political situation in Germany and his name was included in the first list of those deprived of their citizenship issued by the Nazi regime in August 1933. Tucholsky died in Gothenburg on 12 December, 1935, probably by suicide.

Published: 04 October 2011