Wilhelm Marr - Life

Life

Marr was born in Magdeburg as the only son of an actor and stage director. He went to a primary school in Hannover, 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 claimed that he had unjustly lost his job.

In 1841 he went to Zurich, 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 Zurich 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 - like so many other former revolutionaries - became 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. The couple was divorced in 1873. In 1874 Marr remarried the Jewish Helene Sophia Emma Maria Behrend, who died within the same year. In 1875 there was a third marriage, with Jenny Therese Kornick (whose parents lived in a Christian-Jewish mixed marriage), who bore him a son. In 1877 this marriage was divorced, too; Marr's last wife was Clara Maria Kelch, daughter of a Hamburg working man.

Marr's speeches and articles showed first indications of antisemitism in 1848. He was influenced by the Burschenschaft movement of the early nineteenth century, which developed out of frustration among German students with the failure of the Congress of Vienna to create a unified state out of all the territories inhabited by the German people. The latter 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, like 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.