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Dashing: One of the earliest commemorative portraits of Theodor Körner as a martyr in the struggle for freedom against Napoleon - an intellectual, love poet and playwright as a Prussian national hero (1813)
Photo: bpk / Nationalgalerie, SMB / Jörg P. Anders
On the morning of August 26, 1813, a group of soldiers carried the dead Theodor Körner through the Mecklenburg village of Wöbbelin.
The shirt bloody from the hit of a French bullet, the face very young.
He was laid out on a table decorated with oak leaves and buried under an oak the next day.
"Grow, you freedom of the German oaks / wax up over our corpses!" The 21-year-old had recently written.
His funeral seemed like a production of these lines.
Körner was already a celebrity: with his verses on his lips, thousands had gone to battle;
now his heroic death carried him into even higher spheres.
He became a martyr, the prototype of the soldier ready for ultimate sacrifice.
Countless pictures and devotional objects circulated.
Leyer und Schwert, a collection of his war poems, published in 1814, became a bestseller, and his grave became a place of pilgrimage.
But Körner was not the only, and certainly not the first, poet who extolled fight and death in the name of national liberation.
Many younger authors of the epoch, which is usually summarized in literary histories as German Romanticism, have been involved in clashing war rhetoric for years.
Yet at the turn of the century a completely different attitude had prevailed: war was the source of all evil and destruction, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant read.
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