The North Frisian Uwe Jens Lornsen (Sylt 1793 – nr Geneva 1838) played a crucial role in the development of the early calls for German unification in the 19th century. He was born on the North Frisian island of Sylt, which then, as part of the Duchy of Schleswig, belonged to the Danish Crown.

Lornsen did not follow the family tradition of whale fishing as a result of Napoleon’s Continental Blockade. Instead, he studied law at Jena, where he befriended Nikolaus Falck (also a North Frisian from a nautical family), and where he was involved in the first Burschenschaft, a hothouse of the national thought of Fichte and Jahn. Lornsen’s enthusiasm for democratic national thought even gave him notions of participating in the wars of independence in Latin America or Greece, fighting for “Freedom and Humanity”; but by 1822 his father persuaded him to settle for a career in the civil service in Copenhagen. In 1830 he was appointed to the post of “Landvogt” of his native island Sylt.

Lornsen, like many of his contemporaries such as Falck and Dahlmann, was irked by the cultural and constitutional ambiguity of his native duchy of Schleswig and its twin Holstein: with a mixed Danish-German population (a German majority in the southern parts, a Danish majority in northern Schleswig), an ambiguously derived personal union with the Danish Crown, and Holstein simultaneously as part of the German Confederation.

As Landvogt, and inspired by the July Revolution of 1830, Lornsen published Ueber das Verfassungswerk in Schleswigholstein in which he elaborated on a possible constitution for a merged, single, self-administering duchy with its own parliament under the Danish Crown – analogously to the Norwegian position under Swedish rule.

The Danish government initially considered Lornsen a harmless eccentric, but, after continued activism, jailed him for a year. Upon his release in 1832, he fled to Rio de Janeiro, with his mental health affected. In Brazil, he continued publishing on the Schleswig-Holstein question. When in 1837 Lornsen learned of his sister’s mental illness, he returned to Europe. Like her, he ended up taking his own life (on the shores of Lac Léman). A final constitutional proposal was published posthumously.

After his death, popular support for his “Schleswig-Holsteinism” increased, both among liberals (who favoured a moderate constitution) and among conservatives (who liked the idea of restoring an ancient charter). The movement spread its ideology through German cultural festivals and gained widespread support among the nationally-minded in Germany proper.

The German-Danish conflict over Schleswig-Holstein, with Danish attempts at constitutional integration in 1848 and 1863, and the German response in the 1848 Frankfurt Parliament and the wars of 1848-51 and 1864, is a matter of historical record. What had started out as Lornsen’s idiosyncratic call for political reforms and regional autonomy eventually led to a Germanification campaign, after 1864, under the new Prussian authorities, who (ironically, but tellingly) put up a monument to Lornsen in 1878.