The Baltic-German journalist Garlieb Helwig Merkel (Lēdurga 1769 – Riga 1850) became a key figure in Latvian nation building as a result of three works published around 1800: the political treatise Die Letten vorzüglich in Liefland am Ende des philosophischen Jahrhunderts (1796), the historical-ethnographic study on Livonian antiquity, Die Vorzeit Lieflands (1798-99) and the novel Wannem Ymanta (1802). These merged criticism of the Livonian landlord system with a novel appreciation of the Latvian serfs.

Merkel, who saw ethnic and language-determinated serfdom in Livonia as a form of colonial slavery, called for radical reforms. In a political climate dominated by the impact of the French Revolution, Die Letten gained some notoriety in Germany and incurred outrage among Livonian landlords. Merkel was forced to spend the years 1796-1806 in Germany, where he remained active in journalism and public debate. In Berlin he published Briefe an ein Frauenzimmer über die neuesten Produkte der schönen Literatur in Deutschland (1800-03) and Ernst und Scherz, continued as Der Freimütige (1803-06). Merkel’s Sämtliche Schriften appeared in two volumes in Leipzig and Riga in 1808.

Following his return to Livonia in 1807, Merkel was editor of Supplementblätter zum Freimütigen (1807), Der Zuschauer (1807-31), Zeitung für Literatur und Kunst (1811-12) and Provinzialblatt für Kur-, Liv- und Estland (1828-32). After the abolition of serfdom in the Baltic region (1816 in Estonia, 1817 in Courland and 1819 in Livonia), Merkel published Die freien Letten und Esten (1820), a pamphlet praising the reform politics of the Russian government. Merkel continued to criticize German politics in Über Deutschland, wie ich es nach einer zehnjährigen Entfernung wiederfand (1818).

Merkel subsequently engaged in educational publications for the Latvian peasantry, e.g. in supporting a bilingual Latvian-German edition (1830) of Heinrich Zschokke’s successful Das Goldmacherdorf. His radicalism lessened Merkel’s authority as a critic in Germany. After retiring from journalism in the 1840s, he wrote his autobiography.

Strongly influenced by the ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder, who became a personal friend, as well as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Merkel idealized Latvian antiquity and mythology as a classless Golden Age. This romanticized view of Latvian mythology and antiquity established both the concept of Latvians as a nation (as opposed to the previous view of ethnic Latvians as a mere peasant underclass) and the master narrative of Latvian history that moved from a pagan Golden Age to 13th-century Christianization and colonization.

Merkel’s rhetoric of merging social (anti-landlordism) and ethnic arguments ensured his influence. Although Latvian translations of his political works were only published in the early 20th century (Aleksandrs Bumanis’s translation of Die Letten was published in 1905 in St Petersburg), his writings had a great impact among Romantic Nationalists such as Krišjanis Valdemars, Juris Alunāns and Auseklis. Also, during the first half of the 19th century, some Latvian adaptations of Merkel’s works circulated in manuscript form among Livonian members of the Moravian religious brotherhood; these added a religious dimension to Merkel’s political arguments. Merkel’s fanciful mythological visions of Latvian antiquity were formative in the development of a Latvian mythology during the second half of the 19th century and indirectly contributed to the construction of a Latvian national epic (Pumpurs’s Lāčplēsis, 1888).