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!
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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 Börne, 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.
Wienbarg dedicated in 1834 his Esthetic Campaigns to Young Germany. This term has since then served friend and foe to designate the group of writers of whom we speak. Their slogan was freedom. Freedom from cramping police surveillance; freedom from the arbitrary control of government, unchecked by responsibility to the people; freedom from the narrowing prescriptions of ecclesiastical authority, backed by the power of the state; freedom from the literary restraint of medievalism in modern letters—these and various other brands of freedom were demanded by different members of the school. Just because the birth-throes of modern Germany, which extend over the first seventy years of the nineteenth century, were especially violent during the period under consideration, the program of the school had from the outset a strong political bias. The broad masses of the people were unacquainted with political forms and principles. They were by time-hallowed tradition virtually the wards of their patriarchal princes, sharing with these protectors a high degree of jealous regard for state sovereignty and of instinctive opposition towards any and all attempts to secure popular restraint of the sovereign's will and national unification, that should demand subordination of the single state to the central government. All early attempts to awaken popular interest in social and political reform had fallen flat, because of this helpless ignorance and indifference of public opinion. But the drastic official measures against early agitators proved to be a challenge to further activity in the direction of progress.
[Illustration: KARL FERDINAND GUTZKOW]
The July revolution of 1830 in Paris added fuel to the flame of this agitation in Germany and intensified the interest of still wider masses in the question of large nationality and popular control. Then came, on the twenty-seventh of May, 1832, the German revolutionary speeches of the Hambach celebration, and, on April third, 1833, the Frankfurt riot, with its attempt to take the Confederate Council by surprise and to proclaim the unification of Germany. The resulting persecution of Fritz Reuter, the tragedy of Friedrich Ludwig Weidig, the simultaneous withdrawal or curtailment of the freedom of the press and the right of holding public meetings were most eloquent advocates with the public mind for a sturdy opposition to the conservatism of princes and officials.
No wonder, then, that thinking men, like Heine and Gutzkow, were fairly forced by circumstances into playing the game. No wonder that their tales, novels, and dramas became in many cases editorials to stimulate and guide public thought and feeling in one direction or another. This swirl of agitation put a premium upon a sort of rapid-fire work and journalistic tone, quite incompatible with the highest type of artistic performance. While the Young Germans were all politically liberal and opposed to the Confederate Council and to the Metternich program, they were in many ways more cosmopolitan than national in temper.
The foregoing may serve to show the only substantial ground for the charge of didacticism, frequently lodged by their critics against the writers of the school. For it is beside the mark to speak of their opposition to romanticism as a ground for the charge in question. They were all, to be sure, anti-Romanticists. They declined to view life through roseate-hued spectacles or to escape the world of everyday reality by fairy-tale flights into the world of the imagination. They called upon men to discover by clear-eyed vision not only the beauties but also the defects of contemporary social existence. They would employ literature, not as an opiate to make us forget such defects, but as a stimulant to make us remedy them. Hence their repeated exhortations to use the senses and to trust them as furnishing the best kind of raw material for legitimate art. Hence also their protests against the bloodless abstractions of the Nazarene school of painting and to transcendental idealism in art and literature. They cultivated art, not for its own sake, but for the sake of a fuller, saner, and freer human life. In this sense they were didactic; but they were no more didactic than the Romanticists and the Pseudo-Classicists who had preceded them. In their earnest contention for an organic connection between German life and German art and literature they were hewing more closely to the line of nature and truth than any other Germans since the time of Herder.