Collective Practices of De/Mobilization and Commemoration

It was one of the finest evenings of my life, when, on the 18th of October, I joined several thousand merry people to stand on the Feldberg, the peak of the Taunus, and saw the sky reddened all around for a great distance by more than five hundred blazes; for the glow of the fires burning on the highest peaks of the Spessart, the Odenwald, the Westerwald and the Donnersberg was visible to us. The news that came later, that on that evening flames glowed in the farthest reaches of the fatherland, was sweet as well.

Ernst Moritz Arndt offers this comment in the preface to the second edition of his On the Celebrations of the Battle of Leipzig, which appeared in the late summer of 1815. In this text he describes his emotions on the first evening of the “National Festival of the Germans” (Deutsches Nationalfest) which was celebrated in hundreds of towns and villages on 18 and 19 October 1814 to mark the anniversary of the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig. For Arndt, the widely visible fires on the mountaintops linking Germany’s various regions must have been a very remarkable experience, since the initiative for these festive bonfi res as well as the celebration more generally came largely from him and a small circle of likeminded men, including Jahn. They had met in early May 1814 to discuss the next two projects of the nascent national movement, the initiation of “German Societies” (Teutsche Gesellschaften) and the introduction of an annual “Festival of the Battle of Leipzig.”