Germain Metternich

Germain Franz Metternich (* 5 April 1811 in Mainz; † 13 May 1862 on Tybee Island, Georgia) was the son of Mathias Metternich, one of the leading Mainz Jacobins. Metternich pursued a military career initially, but became involved with the German democratic movement in the southern states of the German Confederation from the beginning of the 1830s onward. He participated in the Hambacher Fest and later in the campaigns of the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states. In 1850 he immigrated to the United States as part of a larger wave of politically active Forty-Eighters, following the defeat of that movement in continental Europe, and remained politically active in his new, democratic homeland. Because of this background, he was particularly concerned with the struggle for of human rights and became involved with both the socialist and the abolitionist movements. At the beginning of the American Civil War he joined the Union Army. He was killed in 1862 by a drunken fellow soldier.

Germain Metternich was born in 1811 in Mayence, the capital of the French Département du Mont-Tonnerre at that time. His father was a university professor, Mathias Metternich, who had been one of the leading Mainz Jacobins during the period of 1792/1793 and vice-president of the Rheinisch-Deutscher Nationalkonvent (Rhenish-German National Convention) in 1793. In his early life, Metternich pursued a military career, rising by the early 1830s at the latest to the rank of a lieutenant of the dragoons for the Grand Duchy of Hesse, before ending his military career in order to take part in the emerging democratic movement in Central Europe. As the head of the Mainz delegation of about 400 citizens he took part in the Hambacher Fest in May 1832, along with the wine merchant Georg Strecker. On 11 June 1832 he helped to organize a Whitsunday celebration in the Niederwald forest, an event with similar political goals and symbolism to the Hambacher Fest. Metternich was imprisoned several times for his political activities during this period, finally being sentenced to a three-year prison term in the Marksburg castle. After having served out his sentence, Metternich went into exile in Switzerland. Later, he returned to Mainz, where he became a leader of the local political Turnerschaft („Freie Turngemeinde“) in 1847. The increasingly radical Turnerschaft was very active in Mainz, both politically and militarily, similar to the organized carnival movement led by the Mainzer Carneval-Verein (Mainz carnival association), another group that was very politically active in the Vormärz period.

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