AN UNRECORDED GERMAN PERIODICAL FROM THE TIME OF THE BEYTRAGE ZUR GESCHICHTE DES KRIEGES DER JAHRE 1812 UND 1813

DAVID PAISEY

GERMAN resistance to , fostered by exiles such as Clausewitz and Stein in St. Petersburg as well as by local patriots, burst into renewed life at the retreat from Moscow and gathered strength throughout the year or so of struggle which followed, called in German the Freiheitskriege, wars of liberation from French occupation. A multi- farious underground literature sprang up, aimed at the ending of collaboration with Napoleon by rulers and their administrations and by the large German contingent in the Grande armee. Passionately nationalistic in a pan-German sense, it took the form mainly of small pamphlets, the most successful texts being reprinted many times and in many places, in spite of the close attention of censors and the informants of the French secret police, but usually without evidence of origin or with false imprints.' The bibliography of this material is consequently extremely complicated: surviving editions are widely scattered through many collections, and there is neither an exhaustive study of the field nor a union catalogue of German holdings. To call a periodical from this category recently acquired by the British Library unrecorded is therefore perhaps no very startling claim, but the Beytrdge zur Geschichte des Krieges der Jahre 1812 und 181 j, oder: das erwachte Europa (nos. i -18, each consisting of two quarto leaves, without place or date of publication, but probably 1814)^ do not appear in Joachim Kirchner's Bibliographie der Zeitschriften des deutschen Sprachgebiets bis igoo.,^ nor does the most famous text they contain, 's poem 'Des Teutschen Vaterland' with which no. 3 begins, appear in this edition in Karl Heinz Schafer and Josef Schawe's voluminous Ernst Moritz Arndt, ein bibliographisches Handbuch lydg-igGg:"^ K. H. Schafer has told me that he was unable to find a copy of the Beytrdge in Germany. The periodical shares its sub-title and, as we shall see, some of its content, with another serial which is comparatively well known, even though the history of its printings and reprintings is far from fully recorded. This is Russlands Triumph, oder das erwachte Europa, each issue a substantial octavo anthology of over 100 pages, including reports of recent events as well as political essays and poems, some by names as famous as Arndt, Kleist, and Kotze- bue, though the majority of contributions were published anonymously. Many items were reprints of pamphlets which had already appeared independently: a semi-underground publication paid little attention to copyright law. Arndt wrote in a letter to G. A. Reimer, dated Konigsberg 22 March 1813: 'Es ist in ein russischer Triumphator aufgestanden, 129 der nicht allein viele kleine erschienene Pamphlets - was allerdings erlaubt ist - sondern auch Bucher nachdruckt'.^ Arndt was here objecting to unauthorized reprinting of his book Die Glocke der Stunde in drei Ziigen, first published in St. Petersburg in 1812, which appeared in three instalments in Russlands Triumph, nos. 3, 4, and 5. According to Fritz Lange, who has republished the text of the first six issues from a Berlin edition of 1813/14, with a most useful historical introduction,^ the first numbers were prepared in Riga in collaboration with the 'Russisch-deutsche Legion', a group of German soldiers working with the Russians, and printed there with the imprint 'Deutsch- land 1812'. There were certainly a number of editions, the earliest I have seen being the British Library's copies of nos. i^ and 35 (pressmark 1390.C.38), nos. i, 3, and 4 having the imprint 'Deutschland. 1813' while no. 5 has 'Berlin, bei Friedrich Braunes. 1813'. The absence of nos. 2 and 6 from this set is no doubt due to the attentions of the censors: no. 2 contained the text of a speech by Ernst Raupach critical of the nobility and was brought to the notice of the Prussian Polizeiminister in April 1813, and we know that the entire printing of the bookseller Braunes's edition of no. 6 was ordered to be destroyed.^ A copy of the first six numbers in the library at Gottingen is made up as follows: no. i has the imprint 'Berlin, bei Rudolph Werckmeister. 1813'; no. 2, designated 'Dritte Auflage', has the imprint 'Berlin. 1813'; nos. 3-5 appear identical with the British Library copies described above; no. 6 has no separate title-page or wrapper, and was issued by the Berlin publisher Achenwall & Co. with a general title-page, dated 1814, for all six issues, pre- sented under the new title Das erwachte Europa as 'Erster Band, erstes bis sechstes Heft', and with a general introduction dated December 1813 promising a continuation under the new title. This introduction recounts that the first issue came out in Berlin early in March 1813, after the departure of French and the arrival of Russian troops, when a limited amount of press freedom had been restored, and that several editions of the early numbers had been necessary. Achenwall did indeed go on to produce six more issues oi Das erwachte Europa, the early numbers presumably coming out during 1814, though I have seen only a copy,^ designated 'Zweiter Band, erstes bis sechstes Heft' on the general title-page, dated 1815, and without separate title-pages or wrappers for the individual numbers.^° All editions I have seen of the first six numbers (Russlands Triumph), including the two different editions of no. i in the collections mentioned above, appear to me to be products of the same press, whatever publishers may have been responsible for different issues." No fewer than ten items from the first four issues of Russlands Triumph are reprinted in the first nine issues of our 'new' Beytrdge, and supply well over half their content, three of the longer items having to be spread over several numbers because each comprises only four quarto pages. Leaving out of consideration the brief historical anecdotes, entitled 'Quodlibets', which appear as gap-fillers in the two serials, many being common to both, only one item, an acrostic on the name Dresden (directed against collaborationist Saxony and probably referring to the Napoleonic success in the battle near Dresden on 26-27 August 1813) in the first issue of the Beytrdge, also occurs in the other serial in an issue later than the fourth,'^ but this could well have come from some common source. The dependence

130 of the early numbers of the Beytrdge on Russlands Triumph, however, is too consistent to be the result of chance. Unfortunately, as dating evidence the copied material hardly helps at all. As we have seen, the first number oi Russlands Triumph appeared in Berlin in March 1813, and, with exception of the banned no. 6, the remaining numbers of the first series must have followed swiftly, to judge from Arndt's letter quoted above: no internal evidence contradicts this assumption. Even the banned no. 6, not released to the public until new year 1814, must have predated the epoch-making German victory at Leipzig (16-19 October 1813), since it is not mentioned until the first issue of the new volume of Das erwachte Europa (1814). Leipzig is, however, a terminus post quem for the Beytrdge, since the first number opens with a poem by C. F. Gerlich entitled 'Die drei unvcrgesslichen Tage bei Leipzig'; indeed, no event later than this is mentioned in any of the eighteen numbers. With the tide now decisively turning, retrospection had become an effective instrument of propaganda.^^ The most substantial item in the whole serial is a quite detailed account, published in instalments over nos. 9 to 17, of the joint Prussian and Russian military campaign from April to June 1813. As in Russlands Triumph, there is here a strongly pro-Russian element: no. 18 even has translated extracts from a letter from a Cossack soldier to his commander, said to have been printed in Russian on 22 March 1813 in Kalisz, where a few weeks earher the alliance between and Russia had been concluded. There is also one item of particular English interest, an account in nos. 10 and 11 of a meeting in the City of London Tavern in London on 22 April 1813 to raise money and support for German patriots, addressed by the Duke of Sussex: the report of the occasion in The Times (23 April) is far less circumstantial. Amongst the miscellaneous items worthy of note is a ballad in no. 18 by J. M. Schletzer entitled 'Jager Renz in der Schlacht bey Gorde am 15.Sept. 1813', which tells (unfortunately rather clumsily) the apparently true story of a girl from Potsdam called Leonora Prochaska who joined the volunteer Liitzow'sche Frei- corps disguised as a man, under the name Renz, and who was killed in battle by a French bullet. But the most famous text here is undoubtedly Arndt's poem pubhshed anonymously in no. 3 (fig. i).'4 (Arndt, 1769-1860, was patriot, poet, and historian, and a notable pro- ponent of bourgeois democracy.) What at the time was a direct and fiery expression of nationalism, a call for unity in face of oppression, has become so overlaid by the echoes of its subsequent use, down to the Nazi period, as a rallying-cry of German imperialism, that it is hard to read without a shudder. Even allowing for rhetorical licence and assuming Arndt to have had in mind a kind of revived spiritual (the political one having died so recently), the inclusion of in the constituents of his ideal fatherland, stretching 'so weit die teutsche Zunge klingt', is still ahenating. The poem was written towards the end of January 1813, first published as a single-sheet leaflet in February/ March, probably in Konigsberg, and reprinted very quickly in a large number of more or less underground patriotic anthologies.'^ Its popularity was immediate, but as German . liberation proceeded and national unity against the French invader gave way to the reassertion of particularist interests by German princes and territorial juggling by the e u t f d^ c It a t e r n &. ift t*^ tcutf(f)cn SBfltctUirt) ?. name mir U tl om man tie 9?ebe Muht, 3Iu i^K^en uni) cin / loo am 55dt Me aKolijc aicl)t'^ ^ .i^^" p-min! ncin! 0 ufin! ' <^in S8at

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132 super-powers, one of its stanzas gave such offence to the authorities that it had to be changed or even omitted. This was the sixth stanza, reading originally as follows: Was ist ? So nenne mir das grosse Land ! Ists was der Fiirsten Trug zerklaubt? Vom Kaiser und vom Reich geraubt.'' O nein! o nein! Das Vaterland muss grosser sein.'^ By as early as January 1814,'^ this outspoken attack on the German princes was emasculated in the first of a number of versions directing the criticism elsewhere: that in our Beytrdge solves the problem by omitting the stanza altogether. Though it is followed by a call to arms ('An die Teutschen Fiirsten') copied from Russlands Triumph, no. 3, that can be interpreted as conciliatory in its attitude, even to collaborationist rulers. It seems probable, therefore, that the Beytrdge appeared in 1814, like other toned-down versions of 'Des Teutschen Vaterland'. I am unable to hazard a guess as to the place of pubhcation of the Beytrdge, except to say that it was probably not Berlin. It is perhaps significant that the first nine numbers only are heavily dependent on the first four oi Russlands Triumph, whose various Berlin editions would have kept that city supplied, and suggesting that subsequent numbers of the latter were not available for copying. The absence of an imprint also suggests a region still subject to severe censorship. The British Library copy was bought from a Copenhagen bookseller, which might be a pointer to a North German origin. But before the question can be answered, much specialist work is required on the sources of contributions not from Russlands Triumph, and even on the watermarks in the paper, of which there are several striking examples. It is of course impossible to say at this stage whether more than eighteen numbers were published. I hope that historians will welcome and exploit this small addition to the literature of .'^

I One gets a good impression of the range of this 6 Russlands Triumph 1812 oder das erwachte Europa, ephemeral literature from the centenary publica- eingeleitet von Fritz Lange (Berlin, 1953). Copy tion by Dr. Friedrich Schulze of forty items in in Cambridge University Library. facsimile (proclamations, political and historical 7 No. I includes the text of Czar Alexander's order pamphlets,, songs, newspapers, etc.): Urkunden to his troops issued at Wiina on 6 Jan, 1813, so it der deutschen Erhebung {Leipzig, 1913), of which cannot be simply an unaltered reprint from the the British Library recently acquired a set (press- Riga edition posited by Lange. All the editions mark L.R.42o.e.4). which I have seen appear to bave no textual differences. 3 Bd. I (to 1830), Stuttgart, 1969. 8 Fritz Lange, Ioc. cit,, pp. 14f. 4 , 1971, 806 pp. {Veroffentlichungen des 9 From the Hessische Landes- und Hochschul- Stadtarchivs Bonn., Bd. 8.) bibliothek at Darmstadt. 5 Ernst Moritz Arndt., ein Lebensbild in Briefen, 10 The British Library used to possess a copy of ed. H. Meisner and R. Geerds (Berlin, i8g8), AchenwaWs Das erwachte Europa,Bd. iandBd.2, no. 60. nos. I and 2 (pressmark PP.3443.cb), the eight

133 parts bound in two volumes; unfortunately the think the name fictitious, the possibility should second, containing Bd. i, nos. 5 and 6 and Bd. 2, be borne in mind with material of this nature. nos. I and 2 is lost without trace. 12 Das erwachte Europa, Bd. 2, Heft i, p. 92. n Joachim Kirchner (op. cit., no. 1877a) credits 13 Compare the serial Beytrdge zur Geschichte des Achenwall with the publication of six numbers russisch-franzosischen Feldzuges im Jahre 1812 of Russlands Triumph during 1813, and with a published in Breslau in 1814, Kirchner, op. cit., new edition in 1813/14, but since no location is no, 3991 (copy in the Austrian National Library given for either, I have been unable to check the at Vienna). relationship between them and the editions 14 The words 'Das Echo' do not belong to the poem. described above. He also lists (no, 1884) an Tbey have been carried over in error from no. 2, edition published by Rucker in Berlin of Das which begins with verses with that title. erwachte Europa, Bd, i and 2 (each comprising 15 Schafer and Scbawe, op. cit., nos. 296ff. six numbers) in 1814/15, but again no location 16 Quoted from a Berlin edition of Arndt's FUnf is given. Lieder ftir deutsche Soldaten, published in April/ Braunes, Achenwall, and Rucker were al! May 1813. estabhshed Berlin publishers. Rudolph Werck- 17 Scbafer and Schawe, op. cit., no. 306. meister, however, does not appear in Gustav 18 I am grateful to Karl Heinz Schafer for invaluable Schwetschke's statistical compilation from the information about Arndt, and to Giinter Wie- German book fair catalogues. Codex nundtnartus gand. Director of Kiel University Library, for Germaniae literatae continuatus (HaWe, 1877), and drawing my attention to Lange's edition of though tbis is not by itself sufficient reason to Russlands Triumph.

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