Georg Herwegh

Independent activity Russian revolutionary democrats 1817–1875 ○ Natural causes

Vormärz poet of Poems of a Living Man who led the German Democratic Legion into Baden in 1848

Born in Stuttgart in 1817, the son of an innkeeper, he was expelled from the Tübingen seminary and, after clashing with an officer during military service, fled to Switzerland in 1839. His Poems of a Living Man (Zürich, 1841–1843), banned in Prussia, put him at the forefront of the Vormärz revolutionary movement. After the February Revolution of 1848 he became president of the German Democratic Society in Paris and of the German Democratic Legion, and against the advice of Marx and Engels he led the Legion into Baden to aid the Hecker uprising; Württemberg troops beat it at Dossenbach on 27 April. He fled again to Switzerland. In 1863 he became the plenipotentiary in Switzerland of Lassalle's General German Workers' Association, for which he wrote the Bundeslied, and in 1869 he joined the Social Democratic Workers' Party. He died at Lichtental in 1875.

Also known as: Georg Friedrich Rudolph Theodor Herwegh