Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 6. Young GermanyBrandes, Georg
History
Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 6. Young Germany
Brandes, Georg
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Naturalism in literature; Romanticism
Some Marburg students in the Twenties had ordered foils from a
manufactory in Solingen, and it was reported that the usual trade-mark,
"Prince," was wanting on these particular foils. The government of
Hesse-Cassel instituted an inquiry for the purpose of discovering if
the omission had been ordered by the students. To the great annoyance
of the police, no cause for accusation was found. "I am sorry for your
statesmen," said the French Minister, Comte de Serre, to the famous
Niebuhr about this time; "they are making war on students."
A specially keen look-out was kept for prohibited combinations among
students. When Arnold Ruge was imprisoned, Herr von Kamptz set the
whole police on the chase after a walking-stick belonging to him, on
which the names of some Jena students were carved, the _corpus delicti_
being finally confiscated in Stralsund. Ruge was tortured by long
pauses between his examinations, having to spend the intervals in a
cell where life was rendered unendurable by vermin. Fritz Reuter had to
expiate the crime of having "worn the German colours in broad daylight"
by imprisonment, first in a miserable hole in Berlin, and after having
been condemned for high treason, in dirty fortress cells. A youthful
political offender in Bavaria was sentenced to fortress-imprisonment
for treason on an indictment of which one of the gravest clauses was
that something resembling a German prince's robe had been found in
his room. Chiefly at the instigation of Austria, thousands of young
Prussians were either imprisoned or driven into exile. In short,
the Liberal middle-class youth of the Germany of those days was as
unprotected by the law and as much persecuted as are, in our days, the
Socialistic youth of the fourth estate of the same country, or the
Liberal youth of Russia.
Political and religious reaction went, as usual, hand in hand. In the
year 1821, the Prussian Government concluded a concordat with the
Pope, which gave the Roman Catholic Church an influence in Prussia
such as would have been unimaginable under Frederick the Great. In
the following year a new liturgy, more nearly resembling the Roman,
was introduced into the Protestant Church. And it is exceedingly
significant that the word Protestantism now fell into disrepute.
By a Ministerial decree of the year 1821, the terms Protestant and
Protestantism were forbidden in Prussia; the censors received orders
not to pass these words, but to substitute the word Evangelical.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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