Wilhelm Marr
Wilhelm Marr
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Wilhelm Marr

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Wilhelm Marr

Friedrich Wilhelm Adolph Marr (November 16, 1819 – July 17, 1904) was a German journalist and politician, who popularized the term "antisemitism" (1881).

Marr was born in Magdeburg in 1819 as the only son of an actor and stage director. He went to a primary school in Hanover, then to a high school in Braunschweig. In Hamburg and Bremen, he was an apprentice in commerce, then he joined his father in Vienna, who had been engaged by the Burgtheater. There he worked as an employee in two Jewish firms. Later, Marr stated that he had unjustly lost his job.

In 1841, he went to Zürich, where he became acquainted with political émigrés (like Georg Herwegh, Julius Fröbel, and August Follen), most of whom were members of the democratic or liberal leftist movements of the early 19th century.

In 1843, Marr was expelled from Zürich under the accusation that he had furthered communist activities. He turned to Lausanne, where he joined Hermann Döleke and Julius Standau, the founders of the secret Léman-Bund, which belonged to the "Junges Deutschland " (Young German Movement). Marr eventually became the head of the secret society and began to lean towards anarchism and atheism, founded another secret society, the "Schweizerischer Arbeiterbund" (Swiss Worker's Union) and edited the "Blätter der Gegenwart für soziales Leben" (Present-Day Papers for Social Life, 1844/45).

In 1845 he was expelled from Lausanne, too, and went to Hamburg. There he became a political journalist and published the satirical magazine Mephistopheles (1847/48–1852). He belonged to the leftists of the radical-democratic "party" and was a delegate to the National Assembly in Frankfurt after the March-Revolution of 1848. After the ultimate failure of the revolution he became, like so many other former revolutionaries, a proponent of the idea of German unification under Prussian leadership.

In 1852, Marr went abroad, to Costa Rica, where he tried to make a living as a businessman. Lacking success, he returned to Hamburg, worked again as a journalist, and in 1854 he married Georgine Johanna Bertha Callenbach, daughter of a Jewish businessman who had renounced his faith.

In 1859, Marr was elected member of the Hamburg Parliament. In an article, in the Courier an der Weser on 13 June 1862, he attacked the elected liberal speaker of the house, the Jewish lawyer Isaac Wolffson [de], accusing him and other Jews of betraying the democratic movement and abusing their emancipation in order to enter the city's merchant class. After extensive public protests, Marr was not reelected in 1862.

Marr's speeches and articles showed first indications of antisemitism in 1848. He was influenced by the Burschenschaft movement of the early nineteenth century, It developed among German students frustrated with the failure of the Congress of Vienna to create a unified state out of all the territories inhabited by the German people. The Burschenschaft rejected the participation of Jewish and other non-German minorities as members, "unless they prove that they are anxious to develop within themselves a Christian-German spirit" (a decision of the "Burschenschaft Congress of 1818"). While they were opposed to the participation of Jews in their movement, similarly to Heinrich von Treitschke later, they did allow the possibility of the Jewish (and other) minorities to participate in the German state if they were to abandon all signs of ethnic and religious distinctiveness and assimilate into the German Volk.

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