Meyer, Kuno b. December 20, 1858; Hamburg d. October 11, 1919; Leipzig, Saxony
Professor of Celtic philology at Berlin University who engaged in German propaganda efforts among Irish Americans and German Americans in the United States during World War I. Meyer studied German and comparative philology at the University of Leipzig in the early 1880s; he focused on Irish literature and language and graduated with his doctoral dissertation on “Eine irische Version der Alexandersage” (An Irish Version of the Alexander Saga).
In 1884 Meyer took on a lectureship at University College Liverpool (later Liverpool University), where he was to spend the next twenty-seven years of his life. Only in 1911 did he return to Germany to become professor of Celtic philology at Berlin University.Upon the outbreak of the Great War, which he viewed in the context of civilizational conflict between the Anglo-Saxon and the Germanic-Celtic worlds, Meyer proposed to the German government that he travel to the United States to facilitate the collaboration between German American and Irish American organizations with the goal of ensuring American neutrality. This purpose of Meyer’s visit to the United States was camouflaged by his participation in an academic exchange program operated by the Berlin-based Amerika Institut.
Meyer arrived in the United States in November 1914 and remained there until the United States declared war against Germany. He received financial support from the German government. Meyer prepared his mission in close cooperation with Sir Roger Casement, who was on a fundraising tour for Sinn Fein in the
United States in the summer of 1914. Casement and Meyer effectively switched places, for Casement traveled to Germany in the fall of 1914 to rally German military support for a rising in Ireland. Meyer’s Irish American contacts in the United States were the leaders of Clann na Gael, especially Joseph McGarrity.
Meyer’s propaganda activities among Irish and German Americans often took the form of public speeches on Irish history and civilization—and the brutal repression and annihilation of that civilization by British rule.
In the course of some three years, he addressed more than 10,000 people directly at meetings. His itinerary lists, among other stops, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Baltimore, Portsmouth, Buffalo, Norfolk, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Urbana, and Chicago, where he appears to have made his headquarters in 1916.Meyer’s activities received much attention in the Irish American and German American press; The Times of London, however, also covered his public appearances on a regular basis, because Meyer was a well-known figure in British academic circles. Newspapers in the United States widely reported on his private meeting with Theodore Roosevelt at Oyster Bay on December 13, 1914, for Meyer claimed publicly the next day that Roosevelt had said that Germany would win the war.
Upon his return to Germany in the fall of 1917, Meyer became president of the German-Irish Society and lobbied the German government for supporting another rising in Ireland. Following Germany’s defeat in World War I, he founded a Union of Raped Nations collaborating closely with Indian and Egyptian nationalists.
Joachim Lerchenmuller
See also Amerika Institut; World War I
References and Further Reading
Lerchenmuller, Joachim. Keltischer Sprengstoff: Eine wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Studie uber die deutsche Keltologie von 1900 bis 1945. Tubingen: M. Niemeyer, 1997.
Luing, Sean 0. Kuno Meyer 1858—1919: A Biography. Dublin: Geography, 1991.