Sir Walter Scott had many admirers--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe among them--and imitators in Germany, as he had elsewhere. Foremost among the German imitators was Willibald Alexis, who is chiefly remembered for his eight Vaterländische Romane (Patriotic Novels) on the history of the Mark Brandenburg since the Middle Ages. He was also a remarkable literary critic, but his own work was generally ignored by other critics and has also been neglected by literary historians. The best assessments of his writing can be seen in the efforts of his two major rivals, Gustav Freytag and Theodor Fontane who tried to surpass and replace him in the field of the historical novel.

Like Heinrich Heine, Alexis belonged to the literary generation between romanticism and realism that has been characterized as the age of Zerrissenheit (inner strife). He was an astute observer of and participant in the struggles of German...