In 1815 he obtained, in addition to his professorate, the position of secretary to the perpetual deputation of the estates of Schleswig-Holstein. In this capacity he began, by means of memoirs or of articles in the Kieler Blätter, which he founded himself, to appear as an able and zealous champion of the half-forgotten rights of the Elbe duchies, as against Denmark, and of their close connexion with Germany. It was he upon whom the Danes afterwards threw the blame of having invented the Schleswig-Holstein question; certainly his activities form an important link in the chain of events which eventually led to the solution of 1864. So far as this interest affected himself, the chief profit lay in the fact that it deepened his conception of the state, and directed it to more practical ends. Whereas at that time mere speculation dominated both the French Liberalism of the school of Rotteck, and Karl Ludwig von Haller’s Romanticist doctrine of the Christian state, Dahlmann took as his premisses the circumstances as he found them, and evolved the new out of the old by a quiet process of development. Moreover, in the inevitable conflict with the Danish crown his upright point of view and his German patriotism were further confirmed. After his transference to Göttingen in 1829 he had the opportunity of working in the same spirit. As confidant of the duke of Cambridge, he was allowed to take a share in framing the Hanoverian constitution of 1833, which remodelled the old aristocratic government in a direction which had become inevitable since the July revolution in Paris; and when in 1837 the new king Ernest Augustus declared the constitution invalid, it was Dahlmann who inspired the famous protest of the seven professors of Göttingen. He was deprived of his position and banished, but he had the satisfaction of knowing that German national feeling received a mighty impulse from his courageous action, while public subscriptions prevented him from material cares.
After he had lived for several years in Leipzig and Jena, King Frederick William IV. appointed him in October 1842 to a professorship at Bonn. The years that followed were those of his highest celebrity. His Politik (1835) had already made him a great name as a writer; he now published his Dänische Geschichte (1840-1843), a historical work of the first rank; and this was soon followed by histories of the English and French revolutions, which, though of less scientific value, exercised a decisive influence upon public opinion by their open advocacy of the system of constitutional monarchy. As a teacher too he was much beloved. Though no orator, and in spite of a personality not particularly amiable or winning, he produced a profound impression upon young men by the pregnancy of his expression, a consistent logical method of thought based on Kant and by the manliness of his character. When the revolution of 1848 broke out, the “father of German nationality,” as the provisional government at Milan called him, found himself the centre of universal interest. Both Mecklenburg and Prussia offered him in vain the post of envoy to the diet of the confederation. Naturally, too, he was elected to the national assembly at Frankfort, and took a leading part in the constitutional committees appointed first by the diet, then by the parliament. His object was to make Germany as far as possible a united constitutional monarchy, with the exclusion of the whole of Austria, or at least, of its non-German parts. Prussia was to provide the emperor, but at the same time—and in this lay the doctrinaire weakness of the system—was to give up its separate existence, consecrated by history, in the same way as the other states. When, therefore, Frederick William IV., without showing any anxiety to bind himself by the conditions laid down at Frankfort, concluded with Denmark the seven months’ truce of Malmö (26th August 1848), Dahlmann proposed that the national parliament should refuse to recognize the truce, with the express intention of clearing up once for all the relations of the parliament with the court of Berlin. The motion was passed by a small majority (September 5th); but the members of Dahlmann’s party were just those who voted against it, and it was they who on the 17th of September reversed the previous vote and passed a resolution accepting the truce, after Dahlmann had failed to form a ministry on the basis of the resolution of the 5th, owing to his objection to the Radicals. Dahlmann afterwards described this as the decisive turning-point in the fate of the parliament. He did not, however, at once give up all hope. Though he took but little active part in parliamentary debates, he was very active on commissions and in party conferences, and it was largely owing to him that a German constitution was at last evolved, and that Frederick William IV. was elected hereditary emperor (28th of March 1849). He was accordingly one of the deputation which offered the crown to the king in Berlin. The king’s refusal was less of a surprise to him than to most of his colleagues. He counted on being able to compel recognition of the constitution by the moral pressure of the consent of the people. It was only when the attitude of the Radicals made it clear to him that this course would lead to a revolution, that he decided, after a long struggle, to retire from the national parliament (21st May). He was still, however, one of the chief promoters of the well-known conference of the imperial party at Gotha, the proceedings of which were not, however, satisfactory to him; and he took part in the sessions of the first Prussian chamber (1849-1850) and of the parliament of Erfurt (1850). But finally, convinced that for the moment all efforts towards the unity of Germany were unavailing, he retired from political life, though often pressed to stand for election, and again took up his work of teaching at Bonn. His last years were, however, saddened by illness, bereavement and continual friction with his colleagues. His death took place on the 5th of December 1860, following on an apoplectic fit. He was a man whose personality had contributed to the progress of the world, and whose teaching was to continue to exercise a far-reaching influence on the development of German affairs.
His chief works were:—Quellenkunde der deutschen Geschichte nach der Folge der Begebenheiten geordnet (1830, 7th edition of Dahlmann-Waitz, Quellenkunde, Leipzig, 1906); Politik, auf den Grund und das Mass der gegebenen Zustände zurückgeführt (1 vol., 1835); Geschichte Dänemarks (3 vols., 1840-1843); Geschichte der englischen Revolution (1844); Geschichte der französischen Revolution (1845).
See A. Springer, Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann (2 vols., 1870-1872); and H. v. Treitschke, Histor. und polit. Aufsätze, i. 365 et seq.
(F. Lu.)
DAHLSTJERNA, GUNNO (1661-1709), Swedish poet, whose original surname was Eurelius, was born on the 7th of September 1661 in the parish of Öhr in Dalsland, where his father was rector. He entered the university of Upsala in 1677, and after gaining his degree entered the government office of land-surveying. He was sent in 1681 on professional business to Livonia, then under Swedish rule. A dissertation read at Leipzig in 1687 brought him the offer of a professorial chair in the university, which he refused. Returning to Sweden he executed commissions in land-surveying directed by King Charles XI., and in 1699 he became head of the whole department. In 1702 he was ennobled under the name of Dahlstjerna. He wandered over the whole of the coast of the Baltic, Livonia, Rügen and Pomerania, preparing maps which still exist in the office of public land-surveying in Stockholm. His death, which took place in Pomerania on his forty-eighth birthday, 7th of September 1709, is said to have been hastened by the disastrous news of the battle of Poltava. Dahlstjerna’s patriotism was touching in its pathos and intensity, and during his long periods of professional exile he comforted himself by the composition of songs to his beloved Sweden. His genius was most irregular, but at his best he easily surpasses all the Swedish poets of his time. His best-known original work is Kungaskald (Stettin, 1697), an elegy on the death of Charles XI. It is written in alexandrines, arranged in ottava rima. The poem is pompous and allegorical, but there are passages full of melody and high thoughts. Dahlstjerna was a reformer in language, and it has been well said by Atterbom that in this poem “he treats the Swedish speech just as dictatorially as Charles XI. and Charles XII. treated the Swedish nation.” In 1690 was printed at Stettin his paraphrase of the Pastor Fido of Guarini. His most popular work is his Götha kämpavisa om Konungen och Herr Peder (The Goth’s Battle Song, concerning the King and Master Peter; Stockholm, 1701). The King is Charles XII. and Master Peter is the tsar of Russia. This spirited ballad lived almost until our own days on the lips of the people as a folk-song.
The works of Dahlstjerna have been collected by P. Hanselli, in the Samlade Vitterhetsarbeten af svenska Författare från Stjernhjelm till Dalin (Upsala, 1856, &c.).
DAHN, JULIUS SOPHUS FELIX (1834- ), German historian, jurist and poet, was born on the 9th of February 1834 in Hamburg, where his father, Friedrich Dahn (1811-1889), was a leading actor at the city theatre. His mother, Constance Dahn, née Le Gay, was a noted actress. In 1834 the family moved to Munich, where the parents took leading rôles in the classical German drama, until they retired from the stage: the mother in 1865 and the father in 1878. Felix Dahn studied law and philosophy in Munich and Berlin from 1849 to 1853. His first works were in jurisprudence, Über die Wirkung der Klagverjährung bei Obligationen (Munich, 1855), and Studien zur Geschichte der germanischen Gottesurteile (Munich, 1857). In 1857 he became docent in German law at Munich university, and in 1862 professor-extraordinary, but in 1863 was called to Würzburg to a full professorship. In 1872 he removed to the university of Königsberg, and in 1888 settled at Breslau, becoming rector of the university in 1895. Meanwhile in addition to many legal works of high standing, he had begun the publication of that long series of histories and historical romances which has made his name a household word in Germany. The great history of the German migrations, Die Könige der Germanen, Bände i.-vi. (Munich and Würzburg, 1861-1870), Bände vii.-xi. (Leipzig, 1894-1908), was a masterly study in constitutional history as well as a literary work of high merit, which carries the narrative down to the dissolution of the Carolingian empire. In his Urgeschichte der germanischen und romanischen Völker (Berlin, 1881-1890), Dahn went a step farther back still, but here as in his Geschichte der deutschen Urzeit (Gotha, 1883-1888), a wealth of picturesque detail has been worked over and resolved into history with such imaginative insight and critical skill as to make real and present the indistinct beginnings of German society. Together with these larger works Dahn wrote many monographs and studies upon primitive German society. Many of his essays were collected in a series of six volumes entitled Bausteine (Berlin, 1879-1884). Not less important than his histories are the historical romances, the best-known of which, Ein Kampf um Rom, in four volumes (Leipzig, 1876), which has gone through many later editions, was also the first of the series. Others are Odhins Trost (Leipzig, 1880); Die Kreuzfahrer (Leipzig, 1884); Odhins Rache (Leipzig, 1891); Julian der Abtrünnige (Leipzig, 1894), and one of the most popular, Bis zum Tode getreu (Leipzig, 1887). The list is too long to be given in full, yet almost all are well-known. Parallel with this great production of learned and imaginative works, Dahn published some twenty small volumes of poetry. The most notable of these are the epics of the early German period. His wife Therese, née Freiin von Droste-Hülshoff, was joint-author with him of Walhall, Germanische Götter und Heldensagen (Leipzig, 1898).