A Brief Karl Peter Heinzen Bio

Heinzen (Karl Peter) German-American poet, orator and politician, b. near Dusseldorf, 22 Feb. 1809. He studied medicine at Bonn, and travelled to Batavia, an account of which he published (Cologne 1842). A staunch democrat, in 1845 he published at Darmstadt a work on the Prussian Bureaucracy, for which he was prosecuted and had to seek shelter in Switzerland. At Zurich he edited the German Tribune and the Democrat. At the beginning of ’48 he visited New York but returned to participate in the attempted German Revolution. Again “the regicide” had to fly and in August ’50 returned to New York. He wrote on many papers and established the Pioneer (now Freidenker), first in Louisville, then in Cincinnati, then in New York, and from ’59 in Boston. He wrote many works, including Letters on Atheism, which appeared in The Reasoner 1856, Poems, German Revolution, The Heroes of German Communism, The Rights of Women, Mankind the Criminal, Six Letters to a Pious Man (Boston 1869), Lessons of a Century, and What is Humanity? (1877.) Died Boston 12 Nov. 1880.