Education
Rudolf Doehn studied philosophy at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, wrote his Dissertation de speculativo logices Platonicae principio on Plato at the University of Greifswald in 1845, and continued his studies of jurisprudence in Berlin and at the University of Rostock.
Career
He belonged to the Forty-Eighters who participated in the American Civil War as volunteers in the Union Army. Here he became also known as Randolph Doehn. After the defeat of the revolutions of 1848 in the German states he emigrated to the United States in 1854.
In 1860 Doehn was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives.
He belonged to the German volunteers who helped prevent Confederate forces from seizing the government arsenal in Saint Louis during the Camp Jackson Affair. Rudolf Doehn went back to Germany in 1865.
He settled in Dresden and wrote many books about the political system of the United States. and its literature, but published also in Die Gartenlaube. Doehns grand-son Wolfgang Schumann was a writer and journalist.
Membership
Doehn was a member of the Missouri General Emancipation Society, founded by Benjamin Gratz Brown und Charles Doctorate. Drake, who demanded even more consequent measures against slavery as foreseen by Abraham Lincoln in his Emancipation Proclamation of 1862, which excluded border states like Missouri. Doehn was a leading member of some well known poetry groups and movements in Germany.