Charles Follen's search for nationality and freedom: Germany and America, 1796-1840

Abstract

Charles Follen's Search for Nationality and Freedom: Germany and America, 1796-1840. By Edmund Spevack. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Pp. viii, 312. $39.95.) Charles Follen presents several difficult challenges to the biographer. The first twenty-eight years of his life, immersed in the Napoleonic Wars and radical German protest against the reaction that followed peace, took place in a setting markedly different from the sixteen years that followed his emigration to the United States, and separate scholarly literatures frame analysis of the distinct phases of his career. For neither period are sources abundant. While in Europe, Follen destroyed personal papers that police might have used against him or his associates. His American letters and diaries furnished material for a lengthy biography by his widow, but diligent research has uncovered relatively few manuscripts. The most extensive contemporary descriptions of him-the police files generated to prosecute him as a subversive and the abolitionist memoirs designed to celebrate him as a hero-both incorporate complex ideological filters as well as a variety of highly charged personal relationships with Follen. Edmund Spevack meets these challenges with impressive determination and erudition. He divides his study evenly between Follen's years in Germany and the United States. In the first three chapters, Spevack situates Follen within movements by students and intellectuals to realize German nationalism. He suggests that Follen's faction contributed significantly to the proclamation of a liberal constitution in HesseDarmstadt in 1820, but he also emphasizes that Follen's endorsement of violent tactics slowed reform momentum by alienating moderate allies and attracting effective suppression. The final three chapters discuss Follen's initiatives in America as a conduit of German culture, a Unitarian minister, and an abolitionist. Spevack sees a strong continuity in this transatlantic transition despite Follen's abandonment of his original plan to found a German enclave and his eventual conclusion that he could never return to participate in European politics. Fourteen years after applauding-and perhaps inciting-the murder of playwright and journalist August von Kotzebue, Follen experienced a conversion to abolitionism upon reading David Walker's Appeal for a black uprising against slavery. Too blunt, rigid, and committed to his cause to cooperate with fellow German nationalists, Follen similarly offended the Harvard administration and his Unitarian congregation with his abolitionism and was at the time of his death, as Spevack observes with nice symmetry, once again in a kind of exile. Apart from its detailed attention to political and personal relationships among German activist groups, Spevack's method is primarily an intellectual history that draws on careful reading of key texts. Follen's draft constitution for a united Germany, his nationalist poetry, his lectures as professor of German language and literature at Harvard, and his theological and antislavery essays come in for close scrutiny, as do many other works by Follen and thinkers he read. For the American chapters, this strategy works especially well in addressing Follen's role in introducing German culture to the United States. Beginning with Follen's German Reader (1826), Spevack traces the construction of a vastly influential canon shaped by Follen's political views and his sense of the potential relationship between Germany and the United States. …