Georg Weerth is one of the important literary figures of the so-called Vormärz (Pre-March) period before the German Revolutions of March 1848. Yet, for nearly one hundred years after his death, Weerth was almost completely forgotten. His political poetry, satiric and journalistic writing, and active political commitment helped shape the critical consciousness of the German bourgeoisie and contributed to the uprising of 1848; Friedrich Engels praised Weerth as the first and most important poet of the German proletariat. But his poems and narratives are more than political propaganda. No other author in nineteenth-century Germany, with the exception of Heinrich Heine, exhibits a similar command of the satiric and "feuilletonistic" style. The few critics who have interpreted Weerth's work have suggested that his style anticipates that of the twentieth-century playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht.

There are various reasons why Weerth received so little recognition in the century following his...