The Unmasking of the “Second Kotzebue”: Background to a Spy Scandal 1831

Abstract

In 1818–1819, a high-profile spy scandal broke out in Germany. The renowned German playwright August von Kotzebue was declared a “Russian spy” and murdered as a “traitor to the Fatherland” amidst a tide of rising anti-Russian sentiment. Twelve years later, in 1831, the publicist Harro Paul Harring initiated a similar press campaign against the poet Carl Friedrich von Schweitzer de Schweigrois, also denounced as a “Russian spy”, an “enemy of the German nation”, and a “second Kotzebue”, against the backdrop of the suppression of the Polish Uprising by the Russian Empire. In the present study, the author considers the spy scandal of 1831 not only as an attempt by Harro Harringa to recreate the 1819 scenario in similar political circumstances, but also as an example of purposeful inflaming of anti-Russian sentiments in the wake of the initiation of public hysteria associated with the search for external and internal enemies of the “German nation” in the context of political processes within Germany. To study the subject, which has never been addressed in the historiography before, the author analyses the sources that have not been consulted before, namely the publications for 1830–1831 in the central and regional German press, primarily of the Kingdom of Saxony and the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, which covered the scandal with the exposure of the “Russian spy” von Schweitzer de Schweigrois, eyewitness accounts, correspondence and memoirs of Harro Harring, as well as a number of indirect sources to reconstruct the biography of his opponent, appointed by German society to the role of “the second Kotzebue”.