Politics, Radicalism and Anglo-German Relations: The Reception of Ernst Moritz Arndt in Early 19th-Century Britain

Abstract

This essay presents the early reception of Ernst Moritz Arndt in Britain. Retrieving this largely forgotten engagement with Arndt, and engagement of Arndt as it turns out, provides two insights. On a more general level it illustrates the influence of political constellations and political expediency on the introduction and reception of authors and texts. On a more specific level, it gives an insight into the engagement of young English liberals with the (radical) political thinking of the German Wars of Liberation, especially with its liberal and spiritual aspects, and its efforts to exert influence in a growing and increasingly powerful public sphere. 1 In its first part the essay focuses on the swift introduction of Arndt's Geist der Zeit 1 (1806) into Britain between 1806 and 1808 through reviews and a partial translation. This introduction occurred in the context of anti-Napoleonic propaganda and was pursued with the clear political aim of promoting the possibility of a common cause between Britain and Germany against Napoleonic hegemony. Promoting such an idea was hampered by a prevalent anti-German bias, which at worst tended to associate German thought with Jacobinism and atheism and at best found German metaphysics, verbosity and sentimentality ridiculous. 2 Arndt (1769-1860) was the son of a liberated (and highly educated) serf from the Pomeranian island of Rügen, which at the time was under Swedish rule. He worked his way up to a professorship at the University of Greifswald (1806), was an avid follower of the momentous political events in France, made his publishing debut with a tract against serfdom and established himself as an academic, poet, publicist, and political activist in the first decade of the nineteenth century. His initial fame rests on the first part of his Geist der Zeit (spring 1806), which saw its second edition within a year, and a third in 1815. Geist der Zeit's subsequent parts followed in 1809, 1813 (together with a second edition of part 2) and 1818.The four volumes provide a commentary on the events and issues of the time, starting with (and occasioned by) the dark period around the Austrian and Prussian defeats by Napoleon and their consequences (parts 1 and 2). Part 3 covers the run-up to the Befreiungskriege to just before Völkerschlacht, and, finally, part 4 castigates the post-Congress of Vienna Restauration. Up to and including part 3 Geist der Zeit is broadly a political call to action against Napoleonic domination in the name of national, social and political reform. Arndt's message is: unite, get rid of French domination and set up a new, (fairly) democratic German nation state. In part 4, after the fall of Napoleon this political message turns (exclusively) against the German princes. The volumes are mixed-genre, containing loosely connected essays, speeches and poems or songs, much of which up to part 3 comes across as a kind of anti-Napoleonic agit prop, but at the same time, and especially in part 1, Arndt tries to work out how something like 'a spirit of the a...