Karl Ludwig Sand Murders August von Kotzebue (after 1819)

On March 23, 1819, the student Karl Ludwig Sand (1795-1820) murdered the dramatist and conservative politician August von Kotzebue (born 1761), who had made disparaging remarks about national-democratic student fraternities in his weekly, Literarische Wochenblatt. This event, depicted below in a supplement to the Jena fraternity's Bundeslied, gave Austrian chancellor Clemens Prince von Metternich and the German princes a welcome reason to pass the Carlsbad Decrees, which aimed at persecuting the representatives of the national and democratic movement in Germany, including former anti-Napoleonic fighters. Contemporary lithograph.

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