We emerge completely from the quietude and piety of these individualists when we come to a group of men who were distinctively political poets.  Here we find the direct lyric expression of the revolutionary movement.  The first in the field was ANASTASIUS GRUeN (the pen-name of Count Anton von Auersperg, 1806-1876).  This Austrian nobleman boldly attacked the reactionary policy of Metternich in his Saunterings of a Viennese Poet (1831); with biting irony he pictures the fate of the Greek patriot Hypsilantes, broken in health by the “hospitality” of Austrian prison-fortresses, or describes the all-powerful minister-of-state enjoying his social triumphs in the palace ball-room, while Austria stands outside the gate vainly pleading for liberty.  In another collection entitled Debris (1836) there are whole-hearted protests against the political martyrdom of the best patriots, and the oppressive despotism under which Italy groaned, with which Gruen contrasts the blessings of liberty in America.

Anastasius Gruen was the forerunner.  The period of the real dominance of political poetry began with 1840, when a petty official in a Rhenish village, Nikolaus Becker, electrified Germany with a martial poem, The German Rhine, inspired by French threats of war with Prussia and of the conquest of the Rhine territory.  The same events inspired Max Schneckenburger’s Wacht am Rhein, which at the time could not compete in popularity with Becker’s poem, but in later years has quite supplanted it as a permanent national song.  German officialdom, which had looked askance at all political poetry, easily saw the value to the national defense of such patriotic strains, and now encouraged these national singers with gifts and honors.  But political poetry could not be kept within officially recognized bounds.  Inevitably it became partisan and revolutionary in character.  HEINRICH HOFFMANN (who styled himself VON FALLERS-LEBEN after his birthplace; 1798-1874), one of the most prolific lyric poets of Germany, had the knack of expressing the common feeling in poems that became genuine national songs; the most famous of these, Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles (1841), is still sung wherever those who love Germany congregate.  But from this expression of the common German tradition Hoffmann went on to espouse the liberal cause, and he had his taste of martyrdom when he lost his professorship at Breslau because of his ironical Unpolitical Songs (1840-42).  Hoffmann was essentially an improviser, and sang only too copiously in all the tones and fashions of German verse.