Ludwig Börne

Origins and early life

Ludwig Börne was born Juda Löw Baruch on 6 May 1786 in the Judengasse, the walled ghetto of Frankfurt, the son of the banker Jakob Baruch, and he grew up under laws that forbade Jews to walk in the public gardens, to leave the ghetto on Sundays or to marry without permission.

Work and career

This fiche states plainly that in 1818 he was baptized a Lutheran and took the name Ludwig Börne, a conversion made to gain access to public life rather than out of belief — he had already been dismissed from a police clerkship in Frankfurt in 1815 simply for being a Jew — and that he continued for the rest of his life to defend Jewish emancipation, having written Für die Juden in 1816 against the reimposition of the old restrictions.

He created German political journalism: his review Die Wage (1818-1821) and his theatre criticism made a literary form out of political opposition at a time when Germany had neither parliament nor free press, and the censors pursued him from state to state. After the July revolution of 1830 he settled in Paris, and from there wrote the Briefe aus Paris, 115 letters that were smuggled into Germany and read as the manifesto of a generation: republican, democratic, contemptuous of princes and of the timidity of German writers, including Goethe, whom he attacked for indifference to freedom.

Later years

He and Heinrich Heine, the two great German Jewish writers of exile, quarrelled bitterly, and Heine's memoir of him after his death is one of the most famous polemics in German letters. Börne died of tuberculosis in Paris on 12 February 1837 and was buried at Père-Lachaise; thousands followed the coffin. The city of Frankfurt, which had refused him a livelihood, later named its Börneplatz after him.