The cultivated classes sought a kind of compensation for their exclusion from politics in a frantically exaggerated interest in the theatre. Never had the adoration of a prima donna or a ballet-dancer been carried to such an extreme. In the Berlin of the Twenties every other interest was swallowed up in the question of the superiority of German or Italian music. People thought of nothing but the rivalry between Spontini and Weber. When Börne came to Berlin in 1828, the public mind was so engrossed with the famous singer, Henriette Sontag, that no one remembered anything about Börne, except that he had written an article on her. In his _Letters from Paris_ (in "Härings-Salat") he gives a witty and yet veracious account of how he was met and saluted everywhere with the cry: "This is the man who wrote about Sontag!" Even in 1832, everything--the agitation in France, the Polish defeat, sympathy with the exiled Poles--everything was forgotten in the enthusiasm for the feet of the great _danseuse_ Taglioni, which were then setting out on their triumphal progress through Europe. The chief representative of the reactionary spirit in Prussia, the Hofmarschall and future diplomatist, General Theodor Heinrich von Rochow, writes in May 1832 to von Nagler, the Postmaster-General: "She is to dance, consequently there is great rejoicing, and occupation in abundance.... Taglioni's mimetic grace has dispelled the threatening signs of the times."[6] The word occupation here is significant. The performance did not merely please, it occupied.[7] As regards literature, the generation of that day luxuriated in an idolisation of the octogenarian Goethe, which accepted everything that the aged master wrote or said as wisdom, and beauty, and inspired poetry. All his life long he had had to struggle against hatred and misunderstanding; now the reverence for him verged on the ridiculous; in Berlin it verged on idiocy.[8] In Zelter's _Letters to Goethe_ he writes, on the subject of the latter's _Elpenor_: "Posterity will not believe that the sun of our days beheld the forthcoming of such a work."[9] All those who had obstructed Goethe's path so long as his name still belonged to combatant literature, became his votaries from the moment that that name conveyed undisputed authority, and could be employed as a sort of Conservative and national emblem. Otherwise literature languished. The day of romantic poetical fancy was at an end--Raupach and Müllner ruled the stage, Clauren fiction. Light literature sank deeper and deeper into the slough of vulgarity and pruriency. [1] Biedermann: _Dreissig Jahre deutscher Geschichte_. Prutz: _Zehn Jahre_, i. and ii. [2] Soul and body lose their strength Covering idle by the stove Free beneath the open sky Must the hardy gymnast rove. [3] _Wintermährchen_, Kap. xi.; _Lobgesänge auf König Ludwig_; preface to _Romancero_. [4] Treitschke: _Deutsche Geschichte,_ ii. 383-443. [5] Epigram: