Hans Ferdinand Massmann (Berlin 1797 – Muskau 1874) became, even in his school days, a fervent adept of the German nationalism of “Turnvater” Jahn and his programme of strengthening the nation’s moral fibre by means of gymnastic exercises. He served during the anti-Napoleonic wars and then enrolled in Jena, where he was a national-democratic activist in the university’s student fraternity (the first of its type, known as the Urburschenschaft) and gymnastics activities. He played a prominent role in the burning of anti-national books at the Wartburg Feast of 1817 and as a result came under government suspicion for seditious activism. In this period he also penned patriotic verse, some of which he published in a collection of 1840 (Armin’s Lieder), and many of which found their way into the songbooks of the student fraternities. One poem/song, Ich hab mich ergeben (1820), gained enough popularity to briefly become the national hymn of the fledgling German Federal Republic in 1949.

Massmann eventually obtained a post at the Munich military academy teaching gymnastics to cadets, and in the course of this appointment pursued his academic interest in early German literature, taking his habilitation in 1827 and gaining an appointment in German philology at Munich University in 1829. In 1833 he was commissioned with a mission to Italy to investigate recently-discovered Gothic fragments, the slowly-progressing edition of which (by Castiglione) provoked impatience among German philologists. Massmann as a result positioned himself as a Gothic specialist, editing newly-discovered Gospel commentaries as Skeireins in 1834, and even writing occasional poetry (on the Wittelsbach Prince Otto as King of Greece) in that extinct language. In this, he anticipated the Gothic interests of Felix Dahn.

Massmann, who had obtained a full professorial chair at Munich in 1835, moved back to Berlin in the more Romantic-National climate of the 1840s, where again he pursued the twin callings of gymnastics propagandism and early German literature. He contributed various editions of older German texts to the book series Bibliothek der gesammten deutschen National-Literatur. An ardent nationalist (he never abandoned his “old German” hairstyle throughout his life), he saw Europe as the site of an eternal conflict between Germanic and Romance nations, and was among of the first to endorse Bandel’s idea of a monument to Arminius as a German national hero.