Ludolf Wienbarg's conventional place in literary history was defined by a 10 December 1835 decree of the diet of the Deutscher Bund (German Confederation) that banned all his works, along with those of Heinrich Heine, Karl Gutzkow, Heinrich Laube, and Theodor Mundt. The governments of the confederation had invented a conspiracy of writers against everything good and decent, a conspiracy to which they gave the name "Junges Deutschland" (Young Germany)--a term that Wienbarg himself had helped put into circulation. It still survives as a convenient label for the dissident writers of that epoch, though it is now well established that not only was there no conspiracy, there was no real group in the sense of a cohesive movement.

Wienbarg differs from the other Young Germans in two significant ways. For one thing, he was somewhat older; he was closer in generation to Heine, who is more accurately thought of...