Johann Sophus Felix Dahn (Hamburg 1834 – Breslau/Wrocław 1912) studied law in Munich, where his parents had moved shortly after his birth, and where, after having taken his habilitation in Berlin, he became a lecturer in German law. After a stagnant early period, his academic career took him by way of Würzburg and a professorship in Königsberg (1872) to a chair in Breslau (Wrocław) in 1888; he became rector of that university in 1895 and died in 1912.
As a legal scholar, Dahn was one of the last prominent followers of Grimm’s idea of law as a historical-philological discipline: his main works in this field were a history of kingship among the Germanic peoples (Die Könige der Germanen, 11 vols, 1861-1911), and, above all, the widely-authoritative synthesis on the tribal history of the Migration Period and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Urgeschichte der germanischen und romanischen Völker, 4 vols, 1883). Dahn’s academic interest in early tribal-Germanic history went in tandem with his fervent German nationalism. Having served as a medic in the Franco-Prussian war he commemorated his experiences ecstatically in a series of poems; he was also among the first to hail the white-bearded Wilhelm of Prussia as Barbablanca, the quasi-reincarnation of the semi-mythical dormant Emperor Barbarossa and restorer of Germany’s medieval imperial dignity.
Dahn, a Darwinist, was a firm believer in the anthropological incompatibility between the Germanic, Slavic and Latin “races”. In his Königsberg and Breslau professorships he saw himself as the “outermost champion of German nationality in its eastern marches”, and he was from an early stage a member, and later a committee member, of the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband).
Dahn proclaimed this fervent German ethnolinguistic nationalism, which he had inherited from Wagner and Arndt, prolifically in many patriotic verses (often occasional versified addresses to meetings and associations, like the choral festival in Breslau in 1907), the libretto for Heinrich Hofmann’s opera Armin (1877, on Arminius the Chersucan), and, most of all, in his historical novels. Besides a 13-volume cycle of “Novellas from the Migration Period” (Kleine Romane aus der Völkerwanderung, 1882-1901) the outstanding work is Ein Kampf um Rom, which describes the Ostrogothic attempt and failure to expand from Ravenna to Rome, and the downfall of the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy. Here, as well as in his other writings, Dahn glorifies the Germanic temperament of ruthless, stalwart honour and death-defying battle prowess, preferring the tragic dignity of ruinous annihilation to negotiated compromise with inimical races. Vastly popular for decades after its initial publication in 1876, the novel’s outlook arguably influenced the mindset of its juvenile readers, who were later to form the ideological catchment area of National Socialism: Ein Kampf um Rom applies the Wagnerian idea of an apocalyptic Götterdämmerung to the idea of world-historical racial conflict.
Dahn was married to his erstwhile pupil Therese von Droste-Hülshoff (1845–1929, distantly related to her older namesakes Annette and Jenny), who assisted him in his work and co-authored poems and joint re-tellings of Germanic myth (e.g. Walhall, 1880).
Dahn published his memoirs (Erinnerungen) in 6 volumes between 1890 and 1895.
