Germain Metternich

Who is Germain Metternich?

Germain Franz Metternich was the son of Mathias Metternich, one of the leading Mainz Jacobins. Metternich pursued a military career initially, but became involved with the German democratic movement in the southern states of the German Confederation from the beginning of the 1830s onward. He participated in the Hambacher Fest and later in the campaigns of the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states. In 1850 he immigrated to the United States as part of a larger wave of politically active Forty-Eighters, following the defeat of that movement in continental Europe, and remained politically active in his new, democratic homeland. Because of this background, he was particularly concerned with the struggle for of human rights and became involved with both the socialist and the abolitionist movements. At the beginning of the American Civil War he joined the Union Army. He was killed in 1862 by a drunken fellow soldier.