If you stand at the fish market and look towards Groß St. Martin, you might notice a memorial plaque in the wall. It is dedicated to Robert Blum, a freedom fighter who was born here at the fish market. Robert Blum was born on November 10, 1807 in Cologne, the son of a cooper at the fish market. His father died young and his stepfather barely earned a living for the large family as a journeyman skipper. Blum grew up in poor circumstances and as there was no money to send him to school permanently, he acquired his astonishing education as an autodidact. He tried his hand at various professions before working as a theater usher in his home town. At the beginning of the 1930s, he got a decent job as a secretary at Leipzig’s municipal theater. As a councillor in Leipzig, he gradually gained the respect of the city’s dignitaries. At the same time, he knew how to captivate the crowd with his popular rhetoric. He appeared as a fiery, courageous orator, organized the national freedom movement in Saxony, and in 1848 was elected to the Greater German National Assembly in Frankfurt am Main. A united Germany, but in freedom. For him, a German nation state was only conceivable as a republic, and a united republic was in turn the prerequisite for his real goal – human freedom. Despite all this, Blum remained sensitive to the worsening social problems of the Vormärz. He never forgot where he had come from. In October 1848, he delivered an address of sympathy from the Frankfurt National Assembly to the democrats in Vienna who were openly fighting against the government. He was arrested and sentenced to death. Blum’s execution was not an unfortunate coincidence, but a deliberate decision. Blum’s execution on November 9, 1848 put an end to all democratic hopes, which were not to be reborn until 70 years later, on November 9, 1918.
The most popular politician of his time, Robert Blum, died at dawn from the bullets of an Austrian execution squad. The fatherland did not thank him for his sacrifice. He was revered as a martyr, but Robert Blum, one of the few outstanding German democrats, was soon forgotten.
His last words have been handed down: “I die for German freedom, for which I fought. May the Fatherland remember me.”
