SOURCE: Härtl, Heinz. “Bettina Brentano-von Arnim's Relations to the Young Hegelians.” In Bettina Brentano-von Arnim: Gender and Politics, edited by Elke P. Frederiksen and Katherine R. Goodman, pp. 145-84. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Härtl explores the connections between Arnim's work and that of the Young Hegelians, particularly David Friedrich Strauß, and the attacks on both by the Prussian Protestant orthodoxy.

The works of Bettina Brentano-von Arnim that earned her the greatest recognition were published in the years between 1835 and 1844. During that decade the Young Hegelians also published texts “more emancipatory and revolutionary than anything that had ever been kindled in the minds of the German bourgeoisie” (das Freisinnigste und Revolutionärste was jemals vom deutschen Bürgertum hervorgebracht wurde).¹ The year 1835 witnessed not only the publication of Brentano-von Arnim's first book (Goethe's Correspondence with a Child [Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde...