LEHMANN, PETER MARTIN ORLA (1810-1870), Danish statesman, was born at Copenhagen on the 15th of May 1810. Although of German extraction his sympathies were with the Danish national party and he contributed to the liberal journal the Kjöbenhavnsposten while he was a student of law at the university of Copenhagen, and from 1839 to 1842 edited, with Christian N. David, the Fädrelandet. In 1842 he was condemned to three months’ imprisonment for a radical speech. He took a considerable part in the demonstrations of 1848, and was regarded as the leader of the “Eiderdänen,” that is, of the party which regarded the Eider as the boundary of Denmark, and the duchy of Schleswig as an integral part of the kingdom. He entered the cabinet of Count A. W. Moltke in March 1848, and was employed on diplomatic missions to London and Berlin in connexion with the Schleswig-Holstein question. He was for some months in 1849 a prisoner of the Schleswig-Holsteiners at Gottorp. A member of the Folkething from 1851 to 1853, of the Landsthing from 1854 to 1870, and from 1856 to 1866 of the Reichsrat, he became minister of the interior in 1861 in the cabinet of K. C. Hall, retiring with him in 1863. He died at Copenhagen on the 13th of September 1870. His book On the Causes of the Misfortunes of Denmark (1864) went through many editions, and his posthumous works were published in 4 vols., 1872-1874.
See Reinhardt, Orla Lehmann og hans samtid (Copenhagen, 1871); J. Clausen, Af O. Lehmanns Papirer (Copenhagen, 1903).
LEHNIN, a village and health resort of Germany, in the Prussian province of Brandenburg, situated between two lakes, which are connected by the navigable Emster with the Havel, 12 m. S.W. from Potsdam, and with a station on the main line Berlin-Magdeburg, and a branch line to Grosskreuz. Pop. (1900) 2379. It contains the ruins of a Cistercian monastery called Himmelpfort am See, founded in 1180 and dissolved in 1542; a handsome parish church, formerly the monasterial chapel, restored in 1872-1877; and a fine statue of the emperor Frederick III. Boat-building and saw-milling are the chief industries.
See Heffter, Geschichte des Klosters Lehnin (Brandenburg, 1851); and Sello, Lehnin, Beiträge zur Geschichte von Kloster und Amt (Berlin, 1881).
The Lehnin Prophecy (Lehninsche Weissagung, Vaticinium Lehninense), a poem in 100 Leonine verses, reputed to be from the pen of a monk, Hermann of Lehnin, who lived about the year 1300, made its appearance about 1690 and caused much controversy. This so-called prophecy bewails the extinction of the Ascanian rulers of Brandenburg and the rise of the Hohenzollern dynasty to power; each successive ruler of the latter house down to the eleventh generation is described, the date of the extinction of the race fixed, and the restoration of the Roman Catholic Church foretold. But as the narrative is only exact in details down to the death of Frederick William, the great elector, in 1688, and as all prophecies of the period subsequent to that time were falsified by events, the poem came to be regarded as a compilation and the date of its authorship placed about the year 1684. Andreas Fromm (d. 1685), rector of St Peter’s church in Berlin, an ardent Lutheran, is commonly believed to have been the forger. This cleric, resisting certain measures taken by the great elector against the Lutheran pastors, fled the country in 1668 to avoid prosecution, and having been received at Prague into the Roman Catholic Church was appointed canon of Leitmeritz in Bohemia, where he died. During the earlier part of the 19th century the poem was eagerly scanned by the enemies of the Hohenzollerns, some of whom believed that the race would end with King Frederick William III., the representative of the eleventh generation of the family.
The “Vaticinium” was first published in Lilienthal’s Gelehrtes Preussen (Königsberg, 1723), and has been many times reprinted. See Boost, Die Weissagungen des Mönchs Hermann zu Lehnin (Augsburg, 1848); Hilgenfeld, Die Lehninische Weissagung (Leipzig, 1875); Sabell, Literatur der sogenannten Lehninschen Weissagung (Heilbronn, 1879) and Kampers, Die Lehninsche Weissagung über das Haus Hohenzollern (Münster, 1897).
LEHRS, KARL (1802-1878), German classical scholar, was born at Königsberg on the 2nd of June 1802. He was of Jewish extraction, but in 1822 he embraced Christianity. In 1845 he was appointed professor of ancient Greek philology in Königsberg University, which post he held till his death on the 9th of June 1878. His most important works are: De Aristarchi Studiis Homericis (1833, 2nd ed. by A. Ludwich, 1882), which laid a new foundation for Homeric exegesis (on the Aristarchean lines of explaining Homer from the text itself) and textual criticism; Quaestiones Epicae (1837); De Asclepiade Myrleano (1845); Herodiani Scripta Tria emendatiora (1848); Populäre Aufsätze aus dem Altertum (1856, 2nd much enlarged ed., 1875), his best-known work; Horatius Flaccus (1869), in which, on aesthetic grounds, he rejected many of the odes as spurious; Die Pindarscholien (1873). Lehrs was a man of very decided opinions, “one of the most masculine of German scholars”; his enthusiasm for everything Greek led him to adhere firmly to the undivided authorship of the Iliad; comparative mythology and the symbolical interpretation of myths he regarded as a species of sacrilege.