The Wartburg celebration produced tremendous excitement throughout Germany. The reactionary elements were wild with indignation. They accused not only the managers of the festivity and the Burschenschaft of revolutionary tendencies, but they included in this charge all the young men of the Empire, averring that they had grown up under the influence of the pernicious doctrines of the French Revolution and French armies of occupation, and wanted now to apply those doctrines to the reorganization of German institutions. They also demanded that the organizers of the Wartburg celebration should be prosecuted and punished as traitors. All the conservative and government papers opened a regular war upon the seditious and revolutionary tendencies of the universities, and the agitation reached its climax by the publication of a memorandum addressed by Baron Stourdza, a Russian councillor of state, to the Emperor Alexander, in which he predicted that a bloody revolution would result unless these seditious tendencies were speedily repressed. The Stourdza memorandum had originally been intended for the use of the governments only. The Czar had sent a copy to each European government, but one copy of it had found its way to the office of a Paris newspaper and had been published. The excitement among the German students rose to the boiling-point, and their wrath was concentrated against Russia. It was only too well known that Russia had in her employ a number of spies scattered throughout the German states, who kept her government well posted on the political and social currents. The most prominent of these spies was August von Kotzebue, a man of great literary talent and distinguished as the author of many comedies and dramas, but politically of extreme conservative views. The attacks of the liberal press were therefore mainly directed against Kotzebue, whose reports to the Russian government were supposed to have inspired Stourdza’s memorandum.
At that time there was at Jena a student of the University, of irreproachable character, excellent conduct, not especially distinguished by eminent ability or talent, but inclined to religious and patriotic exaltation. His name was Carl Ludwig Sand; he came from Wunsiedel, the birthplace of the famous German humorist, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter. He had been a volunteer in the war against France and had embraced the doctrines of the Burschenschaft with the greatest enthusiasm. The denunciations of the German students in Stourdza’s memorandum filled him with profound indignation, especially against Kotzebue, whom he blamed as the principal sinner. Moreover the frivolous, half indecent character of many of Kotzebue’s plays had often revolted Sand’s moral sentiment. He considered him a source of corruption for the young men and women of the nation, and when to this wrong the charge of political treason and espionage was added, Sand thought that nothing but death was an adequate punishment for Kotzebue. He considered also that it was not only a moral, but a patriotic duty to inflict upon him that punishment. He knew that the act would cost him his life, but that consideration did not for a moment deter him from undertaking it. He did not consult with anybody about it, but he conceived, planned, and executed it all alone.