Ludwig Uhland (b. 1787 Tübingen – d. 1862 Tübingen)

Medievalist, poet and literary scholar

Ludwig Uhland was born into a family of scholars and after studying law in his native Tübingen established himself as a lawyer in that town. He wrote poems and plays even as a young man, some of them with an overt political message. In 1812 he took the unsalaried post of undersecretary to the Justice Minister of Württemberg and moved to Stuttgart. Uhland was chief spokesman of the Assembly of the Estates that Frederick I, King of Württemberg, convened in 1815 in order to present it with a draft constitution. He remained a member of that diet until 1826 and in all that time missed only one of its sessions. So dedicated a parliamentarian was he that he even attended a session on his own wedding day. Wishing to devote more time to his scholarly studies, he no longer stood for election after 1826.

The University of Tübingen appointed Uhland Professor of German Language and Literature in 1829. When a delegation of Stuttgart citizens begged him to once again stand for election in 1832, he obliged them by serving on the state diet until 1838. He made his last appearance on the political stage in 1848, when he stood as a candidate for the National Assembly and won more than 90 per cent of the votes in his native Tübingen. Uhland was a member of the ‘Pre-Parliament’ and belonged to the Committee for the Priority of Petitions and Motions. He did not ally himself with any one faction, but in late November 1848 belatedly joined the Centralmärzverein, an umbrella organisation of moderate democrats.

After the Prussian King Frederick William IV refused to have himself crowned emperor and the great states declared the National Assembly dissolved, the parliamentarians left Frankfurt and on 30th May 1849 met in Stuttgart. There, in an appeal penned by Uhland, the rump parliament called on the people to rally in support of the constitution. On 18th June, Uhland led the remaining deputies on a march through Stuttgart in search of a new meeting place for the assembly. On that occasion, however, the military was sent in to break up the procession, thus putting an end to both Germany’s first national parliament and Uhland’s political career.