Literatur im Umfeld der Frankfurter Paulskirche 1848/49 ed. by Robert Seidel and Bernd Zegowitz (review)

During the 1970s there was a flurry of interest in the Young German movement, the most enduring consequence of which was a number of worthwhile reprint editions. The interest faded after a few years, I think because the authors were unable to do for the Literaturwissenschaftler what was wanted of them: they turned out not to be very radical or much concerned with class struggle or violent revolution, but were professional writers battling the Metternichian system for freedom of the press. After a relatively quiet period, the topic was revived under the broader category of the Vormärz, energetically pursued by the Forum Vormärz Forschung associated with the Aisthesis publishing house in Bielefeld. Along with a project together with colleagues at the University of Exeter in England to edit a complete critical edition of Karl Gutzkow, the FVF publishes hefty Jahrbücher and a series of Studien, of which the book discussed here is the twenty-sixth volume. From a stepchild of German literary studies the topic has grown to almost unmanageable proportions.

The current volume is a result of a conference in October 2011 at the University of Frankfurt. As the title indicates, the contributions deal with writing in connection with the Frankfurt parliament of 1848/49 and the brief rump parliament afterwards in Stuttgart. It begins, however, with two studies of personnel, one by Frank Fürbeth and Pierre Krügel of the Germanistenversammlung of 1846 as a precursor of the Frankfurt Parliament, and another by Claudia Lieb of the delegates to the parliament itself. Both bear on the reputation of the National Assembly as a parliament of professors, and both point out that among the academics the philologists were in the minority. Germanist at that time meant anyone researching the Germanic past, and the majority consisted mainly of cultural and legal historians. Only nineteen of those who attended the Germanistenversammlung were elected to the parliament. Sixty percent of the parliamentary delegates had studied law. The philologists, however, were notable by their eminence, beginning with Jacob Grimm. Most of the academics belonged to the radical middle; they were cautious about revolution, opposed to the participation of the uneducated folk in active politics, and inclined to monarchism, though there were radicals and republicans like Arnold Ruge who argued for the abolition of the nobility.

Two papers by Bernd Zegowitz and Bernhard Walcher discuss political poetry. Although they draw from a large body of materials, they tend to focus on the usual suspects, Zegowitz on Herwegh and Anastasius Grün, Walcher on Weerth, Herwegh, Freiligrath, and Kinkel. It is unfortunate that they are evidently unacquainted with Lorie A. Vanchena’s Political Poetry in Periodicals and the Shaping of German National Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (2000), which includes a CD-ROM containing hundreds of examples. Walcher’s paper appears to be incomplete; it ends abruptly and does not deal with Freiligrath as he proposes at the outset. Other writers of political verse treated are Georg Weerth and Moritz Hartmann. Bernd Füllner reviews what we already have known about Weerth’s Leben und Thaten des berühmten Ritters Schnapphahnski, such as that Schnapphahnski is identical with Prince Felix Lichnowsky, whose assassination by a mob on September 18, 1848, was a critical moment in the events of the parliament. As with all admiring accounts of Weerth in our time, there is no mention of his later evolution to a racist colonialist, evident in his letters to Heine from Cuba. Nor does Gabriele von Glasenapp in her discussion of Hartmann’s Reimchronik des Pfaffen Maurizius mention that, in Karl Emil Franzos’s novel Der Pojaz, a soldier in a punishment detail is shot when he is found with the book. But the attention to the Reimchronik and its intimate tangency with current events is welcome, as is the portrait of the then extremely radical Hartmann, who was nearly shot himself as Robert...