[Illustration: C.T. LESSING KARL LERRECHT IMMERMANN]
It was unavoidable that this spirit produced among the younger men, and especially among the university students, traditionally unaccustomed to patience with restraints, many excesses, absurdities and follies. An extreme and tyrannical nativism, a tasteless archaism in dress, manner, and speech, an intolerant and aggressive democratic propaganda offended and bullied the more conservative. This spirit spread particularly through the agencies of the student fraternities called "Burschenschaften," and the athletic associations, the "Turners," advocated and fostered by Jahn.
Immermann became the mouthpiece of the conservatives among the students, and he went so far as to publish some pamphlets denouncing specific acts of violence of the leading radical fraternity, the "Teutonia." When the university authorities, who to a considerable extent sympathized with the radicals, neglected to act, Immermann addressed a complaint to the King. This move resulted in the dissolution of the accused fraternity and in governmental hostility to all fraternities, and brought the hatred and contempt of the radicals on Immermann.
Immermann acted undoubtedly from sincere motives, yet deserved much of the condemnation he suffered. He had not sufficient vision to penetrate through the objectionable and tasteless externalities of the liberal movement—with which he was unfairly preoccupied even at the time of Die Epigonen, a score of years later—to the greater and enduring core of the aspirations of the modern age. The petty things were too near to his eye and obscured the greater things which were further removed. He thought he upheld a higher principle of morality by applying the principles of von Stein to a new situation; but be failed to see the new, larger morality imbedded in much confusion. History has reversed his judgment.
After completing his studies he received a government appointment in the provincial capital of Westphalia, Muenster. Here, in this conservative old town, began one of the most extraordinary relations between man and woman in modern German literary history. Immermann fell in love with Countess Elisa von Luetzow-Ahlefeldt, wife of the famous old commander of volunteers, Brigadier-General von Luetzow. Elisa, an extremely gifted and spirited woman, had formed a circle of interesting people, in which her husband, a dashing soldier but a man of uninteresting mentality, played a very subordinate part. Immermann and Elisa struggled along against the tyranny of the affinity that drew them together. Immermann wrote a number of dramas, highly romantic, in which the passion and strife within him found varied expression. The play which made him known beyond his immediate circle, was Cardenio and Celinde, the conflict of which was suggested by his own.
Elisa was finally divorced from Luetzow. Immermann was appointed a judge in Magdeburg, and later in Duesseldorf. He asked Elisa to marry him. She refused, but offered to live with him in free companionship. They joined their lives, pledging themselves not to enter other relations. They remained together until 1839, less than a year before Immermann's death, when he married a young girl of nineteen. Elisa left his house in sorrow and bitterness. Immermann characterized his relation to her thus in a letter to his fiancée, in 1839: "I loved the countess deeply and purely when I was kindled by her flame. But she took such a strange position toward me that I never could have a pure, genuine, enduring joy in this love. There were delights, but no quiet gladness. I always felt as if a splendid comet had appeared on the horizon, but never as if the dear warm God's sun had risen."
His life with Elisa in Duesseldorf was rich in friends and works. The sculptor Schadow, the founder of the art school there, the dramatists von Uechtritz and Michael Beer, brother of Meyerbeer, were among his friends. He had intimate relations with Mendelssohn during the years of the latter's stay in Duesseldorf. He tried to assist Grabbe, the erratic and unfortunate dramatist. During three years he was manager of the Duesseldorf theatre, trying many valuable and idealistic experiments. He died August 25, 1840.
The most important of his works are Das Trauerspiel in Tirol, 1826, treating of the tragic story of Andreas Hofer; Kaiser Friedrich II., 1827, a drama of the Hohenstaufen; the comic heroic epic, Tulifaentchen, 1830, a satiric version of an heroic Tom Thumb; Alexis, 1832, a trilogy setting forth the destruction of the reforms begun by Peter the Great; Merlin, 1832; and his two novels, Die Epigonen, 1836, and Münchhausen, 1838-9.
In Die Epigonen, one of the long list of representatives of the species of novels which began with Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Immermann tried to present the development of a young man and a picture of the principal social forces of his period. But he was too imitative in following his great model, and too much confused by subjective preoccupations, to comprehend and to state clearly the substance of the matter.
Only two of his works have enduring value, his mystical tragedy Merlin, and the part of Münchhausen called "Der Oberhof" (The Upper Farm), which deals with the lives and types of the small freehold farmers. Immermann, following Baron von Stein, believed that the health and future of society, endangered by the corrupt and dissipated nobility, rested, on the sturdy, self-reliant, individualistic yet severely moral and patriotic, small peasant. In the main character of the story, the rugged, proud, inflexibly honorable old farmer, who has inherited the sword of Charles the Great, he has drawn one of the most living characters in early modern German fiction. The other figures, too, are full of life and reality. The story has, aside from its importance in the history of the German novel, an enduring value of its own.