Arndt, ERNST MORITZ

Arndt, ERNST MORITZ, German poet and patriot, was born in the then Swedish island of Rügen, 26th December 1769. The son of a former serf, he yet received an excellent education at Stralsund, Greifswald, and Jena, with a view to entering the ministry; but in 1805, after travelling over great part of Europe, he became professor of History at Greifswald. His Geschichte der Leibes-eigenschaft in Pommern und Rügen (1803) led to the abolition of serfdom; and in his Geist der Zeit (1807) he attacked Napoleon with such boldness, that, after the battle of Jena, he had to take refuge in Stockholm. He was able to resume his functions at Greifswald in 1810; but he resigned the following year, in order to become an active co-operator with the minister, Stein, and other patriots, in stirring up the national feeling of Germany and preparing to throw off the foreign yoke. His songs, poems, and fugitive writings, full of energy and fire, contributed not a little to rouse and sustain the spirit of Germany before and during the war of liberation. His famous song, Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland? and many others, are sung wherever German is spoken. In 1817 he married a sister of Schleiermacher's, and in 1818 became professor of History in the new university of Bonn; but, aiming steadily at constitutional reforms, he was suspended in 1819 for participation in so-called 'demagogic movements,' and was not restored till 1840. He was elected a member of the German national assembly in 1848, but retired from it in 1849. He returned to Bonn, and continued in his fugitive writings to advocate the views of the German national party. Vigorous in mind and body, beloved and revered by the whole German people as 'Father Arndt,' he died at the age of ninety, 29th January 1860. His works comprise an account of the Shetland and Orkney Islands (1826); numerous political addresses to the German nation; some volumes of reminiscences; and his poems (2d ed. 1865). See German lives of him by Langenberg, Baur, and Schenkel, and an English one, with preface by Seeley (1879).