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.