Felix Dahn

Felix Dahn (1834 to 1912) was a German law professor, nationalist author, poet and historian. Born in Hamburg, the eldest son of the actors Friedrich and Constanze Dahn, he began studying law and philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and took his doctorate of laws at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin. After his habilitation he became a lecturer of German law at Munich in 1857, an associate professor at Würzburg in 1863 and a professor at Königsberg in 1872, and he moved in 1888 to a full professorship at Breslau, where he was elected rector in 1895. Alongside a large body of specialist legal literature on topics such as trade law and international law, he wrote the multi-volume Prehistory of the Germanic and Roman Peoples of 1883 and popular historical novels such as A Struggle for Rome of 1876, works that shaped German views of the Migration Period and fed the völkisch nationalism of his age.