The authors of the second rank, the rearguard of Young Germany, men like Gustav Kühne, Hermann Marggraff, and Alexander Jung, are in reality his equals. Their gifts lie, like his, partly in the direction of journalism, partly in that of creative authorship. They are men of character, cultivation, and distinct literary ability, animated by the same fundamental ideas as the men in the front ranks.
The reader who takes up Kühne's Weibliche und männliche Charaktere (1838) will be agreeably surprised by the vigour and brilliancy of his delineations, and by his accurate appreciations of public personages. His heroines are those of his school—Rahel, Bettina, Charlotte Stieglitz; but he sees them with his own eyes and describes them with unpretentious enthusiasm. Among the poets, who are the subjects of his laudatory criticism, are not only the great Radicals of a former generation like Shelley, not only all the singers of freedom of his own day, from Anastasius Grün to Karl Beck, but tranquil spirits like Rückert and Chamisso. He is not remarkably original, but he is impartial and unprejudiced.
The same can be said of Hermann Marggraff. Though his book Deutschlands jüngste Litteratur- und Culturepoche (1839), is written in the spirit of Young Germany, its author always reserves his right to perfectly independent judgment. He is a thoughtful, earnest critic and a good writer, always natural, at times brilliant. His errors are much more due to Conservative tendencies than to excessive modernity.
Unless we single out the enfants perdus of this new school—and there are such in every school—it cannot be said that its members gave any real occasion for the violent attacks made upon it. It is not Young Germany, but its assailants, who uniformly show the worst taste and exaggerate most grossly.
Such an assailant was Tieck, now an elderly man. Several of his tales contain thrusts at Young Germany; that in which it is satirised most directly is Der Wassermensch; but the caricature is so overdone that it loses all effect.
Florheim, the representative of Young Germany, is half crazy with enthusiasm for Frenchmen and Jews. He poses as the democrat and friend of freedom in a manner which we should consider foolish in an ordinary schoolboy. He maintains that in every concert programme the Marseillaise ought to have a place, to keep people from forgetting what is the one thing above all others. He would have portraits of the great heroes of liberty, Mirabeau, Washington, Franklin, Kosciuszko, &c., inserted in every printed book, even in cookery books. In every almanac, if he could have his will, July should be printed in red letters, to keep the glorious Revolution of July in ever fresh remembrance. And he hopes that all the truly noble will unite in insisting that the nouns, prince, lord, king, count, squire, &c., shall be written without capital letters, in order to show contempt for their signification.
When the Privy Councillor (Geheimrath), the representative of intelligent Conservatism, asks Florheim how he and his ("Sie, die Sie sich das junge Deutschland nennen"—you who call yourselves Young Germany) hope to carry out their plans and plots against the existing order of things, he answers naïvely: "By perpetual abuse of all that stands in our way." And he goes on to show how it was thus they treated Goethe in the last years of his age—an assertion which is quite contrary to fact—and how, now that they are the "party of movement" and already in possession of the most important newspapers, they are in a position to form an invisible and yet open league spread over the whole of Germany, which shall ruin every author who is not of their way of thinking, and make the reputation of its own members by means of unscrupulous mutual laudations.[6]
The reality was very different from this. The caricature has the double fault of not being like and not being amusing. Mundt took an ingenious revenge some years later by suggesting the performance of Tieck's fairy-tale comedies in Berlin.
[1] A. Strodtmann: H. Heine's Leben und Werke, 1874, ii. 174, &c.