Georg Fein

Georg Fein (1803–1869) was a German democratic journalist, an early German socialist and a liberal nationalist. He was a prominent publicist during the Vormärz period that preceded the Revolution of 1848.

Georg Fein was born on June 8, 1803 in Helmstedt, into a wealthy middle-class family. His brother was the legal scholar Eduard Fein. Like his brother, Georg studied jurisprudence at the universities of Göttingen, Heidelberg, Berlin and Munich, beginning in 1822. As a student he became involved in a radical fraternity that promoted democracy and unification of the German states. Fein was soon in trouble with the authorities and did not complete his law studies.

In 1831 he became an editor of the liberal Deutsche Tribüne (German Tribune). Before it was outlawed in 1832, this was an influential liberal journal. In the early 1830s, Fein participated in several oppositional banquets He also helped organise workers' educational associations and wrote poems and song lyrics addressed to workers.

Fein was soon under police surveillance and was arrested several times. In April 1833, a group of republican conspirators (including the labour leader Karl Schapper) carried out an unsuccessful uprising in Frankfurt, in which Fein was implicated. Facing arrest, he escaped to Switzerland.

In Zurich, Fein became an editor at the Neue Zürcher Zeitung but was forced to resign because his articles were deemed to radical. In 1835 he joined 'Young Germany', a secret society modelled on Mazzini's 'Young Italy' and propagating a similar ideology of democracy, nationalism and social reform. Fein became a member of the Central Committee of Young Germany.

In 1836, Fein was expelled from Switzerland and went to Paris, where he joined the utopian communist 'League of the Banned', founded by Wilhelm Weitling. On its behalf, Fein published the journal Der Geächtete (The Banned). The League was subsequently renamed 'League of the Just' and later, under the influence of Karl Marx, the 'Communist League'. In France, Fein also befriended the exiled poets Heinrich Heine and Georg Büchner. In 1837, Fein was arrested and expelled from France.

For the next seven years, Fein travelled widely across Europe, using a variety of aliases. He went first to London, where he organised a German-language reading circle for workers; subsequently he went to Oslo, Paris, Strasbourg and Switzerland. An inheritance had made Fein independently wealthy. He maintained good contacts with German oppositional figures, and published abroad several writings that had been banned by censors in Germany. Among these was an essay Hoffmann von Fallersleben had intended as an introduction to his Political Poems, together with a lengthy afterword by Fein. Johann Jacoby, a prominent German democrat, is thought to have provided Fein with a copy of the liberal essay Whence and Whither by Theodor von Schön, a former minister in Prussia, which Fein also published with a lengthy afterword.

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