Young Germany
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Young Germany (Junges Deutschland) was a loose group of German writers which existed from about 1830 to 1850. It was essentially a youth movement (similar to those that had swept France, Ireland and originated in Italy). In many respects it can be seen as a literary school headed by Heinrich Heine, whose aim was to liberate politics, religion, and manners from the old conventional trammels.
At a time of upheaval and political unrest in Europe, "Young Germany" was regarded as dangerous by many politicians due to its progressive viewpoint. In December 1835 the Frankfurt Bundestag banned the publication in Germany of many authors associated with the movement, "namely H. Heine". In their reasoning they explained that the "young Germans" were attempting to "attack the Christian religion in the most impudent way, degrade existing conditions and destroy all discipline and morality with belletristic writings accessible to all classes of readers."
The movement produced poets, thinkers and journalists, all of whom reacted against the introspection and particularism of Romanticism. The Romantic Movement was seen as apolitical, lacking the activism that Germany’s burgeoning intelligentsia required. As a result of the decades of compulsory school attendance in German states, mass literacy meant an excess of educated males which the establishment could not subsume. Thus in the 1830s, with the advantage of the low cost printing press, there was a rush of educated males into the so-called ‘free professions’.
