National Colours of Germany - Wars of Liberation

Wars of Liberation

Uniforms of the Lützow Free Corps during the German campaign (1813–1814) against French occupation under Napoleon also consisted of a combination of black, red and gold—though mainly for functional reasons: the corps under command of the Prussian major Ludwig Adolf Wilhelm von Lützow was made up of volunteer university students from all over Germany, whose varied clothing was uniformly coloured in black, festooned with common brass knobs and red facings. The Uhlan forces used Red an Black lance pennons.

The Black, Red and Gold resembling the former Imperial colours soon became symbols of the German struggle for freedom, symbolizing the road from servitude (black) through bloody fight (red) to the stars (gold), similar to the per aspera ad astra. This interpretive culture was perpetuated in the memory of venerated martyrs like Theodor Körner. The Red and Black colours with a golden oak leaf cluster were adopted as couleur by the first German national Urburschenschaft student fraternity established on 12 June 1815 in Jena, and publicly displayed on the 1817 Wartburg Festival.

The students' hopes of a national awakening dashed with the implementation of the German Confederation, not a nation state but a loose federation of the German monarchs, who by the 1819 reactionary Carlsbad Decrees banned any fraternity activities. Since then Black, Red and Gold tricolour became a wide-spread symbol of the pursuit of liberty, democracy and liberal unity, thus the colours were used on horizontal tri-colour flags by Lützow veterans and other democratic revolutionaries of the Hambach Festival in 1832, and in the Revolutions of 1848.