Die Ereignisse des Vormärz im Literarischen Schaffen des kompromisslosen Schriftstellers und Publizisten Robert Eduard Prutz

Abstract

Born in Szczecin, Robert Eduard Prutz (1816-1872) enjoyed considerable pop-ularity as a creator of the pre-March period poetry, as a journalist working for HallischeJahrbücher, one of influential publications of that time, and as a literary historian and expert on the history of journalism. Prutz’s life and work coincided with the society’s great dissatisfaction with the ossified absolutist system; literature in the 19th century constituted an important means of communication linking the text, the reader, and the historical context. In the poems and plays completed before the March revolution, the writer aimed at shaping the readers’ awareness, especially in terms of bringing down the feudal system. In this article Prutz’s selected works are used to demonstrate the ways in which he was able to address specific political events and the extent to which a given piece of literature could be treated as political writing. More specifically, several poems and the novel titled Das Engelchen, that refer to specific political events which occurred between the Congress of Vienna and the March Revolution, are analysed.