The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 07 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 600 pages of information about The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 07.

The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 07 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 600 pages of information about The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 07.

Then, leading the way, he went with the couple into the vestry in order to let them out.  And thus the three left the little, quiet, bright village church.  Lisbeth and the Hunter had found each other—­for their lives!

* * * * *

GUTZKOW AND YOUNG GERMANY

By Starr Willard Cutting, Ph.D.  Professor of German Literature, University of Chicago

A group of men, including, among others, Ludwig Boerne, Heinrich Heine, Heinrich Laube, Theodor Mundt, Ludolf Wienbarg, and Karl Gutzkow, dominate the literary activity of Germany from the beginning of the fourth decade to about the middle of the nineteenth century.  The common bond of coherence among the widely divergent types of mind here represented, is the spirit of protest against the official program of the reaction which had succeeded the rise of the people against Napoleon Bonaparte.  This German phase of an essentially European political restoration had turned fiercely upon all intelligent, patriotic leaders, who called for a redemption of the unfulfilled pledges of constitutional government, given by the princes of Germany, in dire need of popular support against foreign invasion, and had construed such reminders as disloyalty and as proof of dark designs against the government.  It had branded indiscriminately, as infamous demagogues, traitors, and revolutionists, all those who, like Jahn, the Turners, and most of the members of the earliest Burschenschaften (open student societies), longed for the creation of a new empire under the leadership of Prussia, or, like Karl Follen (Charles Follen, first professor of German at Harvard), preferred the establishment of a German republic on lines similar to those of the United States of America.  Under a policy of suppression, manipulated by Metternich with consummate skill in the interest of Austria against Prussia and against German confidence in the sincerity and trustworthiness of the Prussian government, the reaction had by arrests, prosecutions, circumlocution-office delays, banishments, and an elaborate system of espionage, for the most part silenced opposition and saved, not the state, but, at any rate, the status quo.  This “success” had incidentally cost Germany the presence and service of some of the ablest and best of her own youth, who spent the rest of their lives in France, England, Switzerland, or the United States.  We Americans owe to this “success” some of the most admirable types of our citizenship—­expatriated Germans like Karl Follen, Karl Beck, Franz Lieber, the brothers Wesselhoeft, and many others.

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The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 07 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.