Georg Herwegh and the Aesthetics of German Unification

Abstract

Georg Herwech was preeminently the German political poet of the 1840's. With youthful arrogance and unstable talent he burst onto the literary and political stage in 1841 with the publication of his Gedichte eines Lebendigen. The contagious excitement generated by this work showed that he both touched and epitomized the revolutionary aspirations of Germany's intellectuals. Gottfried Keller described the immediate impact of Herwegh's work on him: “The new tone struck me like a trumpet blast which suddenly arouses a large camp of the people's army.” And his reaction was typical: Herwegh was feted by literary circles and political coteries impatient for the revolution that his poetry impelled. When the revolution did come in 1848, Herwegh led a battalion into battle, only to flee precipitately in defeat. But the poet outlived his reputation. He spent most of the years after 1848 in exile, growing increasingly estranged from Germany, his infrequent later poetry never equalling the vigor of his first verse. He had lived for revolution, and when that revolution failed he passed the rest of his life in futile and impotent grasping for the past or some imagined future. “They were like the court clock at Versailles, which pointed to one hour, the hour at which the King died,” wrote Alexander Herzen, describing the empty lives of the exiled revolutionaries of 1848 like Herwegh. “And like the clock, they had not been wound up since the death of Louis XVI.”