When in 1834 Ludolf Wienbarg (1802-1872) dedicated his programmatic Ästhetische Feldzüge to the “Junges Deutschland”, with their hymn to freedom, to reality, with their gospel of the “emancipation of the flesh”, the time was therefore ripe to welcome the new word. To the protest against political oppression, which intensified more and more after the Restoration, was added the protest against all that had been the immediate past: against the serene “Olympics” of the classics, against idealistic philosophy, against romanticism. From Federico Schlegel to Gorres, from Adam Müller (1779-1829) to Gentz ​​(1764-1832) the medieval-religious orientation of romantic political thought had prompted many of the most representative men to adhere to the prevailing reactionary spirit. The rebellion was total. All rights belonged to reality. And nothing existed outside of reality. The romance was over. Jungdeutschen the part of denouncer – was condemned, because he had estranged himself from life. And instead everything had to serve life; even poetry. But, in reality, poetry can never be a servant. It is one thing to formulate a program and another to truly create poetry. Wienbarg exhausted himself in the formulated program. Th. Mundt (1808-1861) remained above all a critic. H. Laube (1806-1884) after having been a professor and having served in the castle of Prince H. Pückler-Muskau (1785-1871, the author of the Briefe eines Verstorbenen, 1830), a political condemnation, became a fruitful playwright and novelist expert in plots and effect scenes, until – from that practical man who had basically – become director of the Burgtheater, carried out its most effective activity by promoting a renewal in a realistic sense of the stage art. K. Gutzkow (1811-1878), the idol of the time, in the theater as in the novel, down to the Ritter vom Geist (1850-51) and the anti- Catholic Zauberer von Rom (1858-61), despite the findings of the Roman des Nebeneinander, he remained for all his life the one who always tries “things that are greater than him”. What really took new development, never known before, was journalistic prose, controversy, the art of writing pamphlets: and L. Börne (1786-1837), combative, biting, cutting edge, was the Courier of Germany. Only one among the members of the group was truly a poet: Heine. But he was a complex, multiple personality. Restless spirit, skeptical and dreamer, sensitive and unscrupulous, in continuous abandonment and in continuous recovery of himself, with lightning reactions of the intelligence on the feeling, certainly the center in life that the feeling of one’s anxieties and perennially unsatisfied aspirations, really brought in poetry reality in its immediacy and in its continuous change, where life is passion at the same time and thought, passion at the same time and action. Endowed with an instinctive, extremely pure melodic gift and an exceptional sensitivity for the sensual value of sound in speech, the form has been removed from the simplicity of Volkslied, he created the poetry of life in the momentariness of its fleeting moments: a poem that is now sobbing and now laughter, now sigh and now thrill of voluptuousness, now cynical cry and now dream and sometimes all this together. He gave a language to the ambiguous moods, where life is still budding and already dissolving, in a moment of its becoming, mixed with disparate elements contrasting with each other. And just as there was nothing in the reality of his time to which he remained extraneous, there was no social and political struggle in which he did not want to meddle, no movement of ideas to which he was insensitive, always dominated by the need for new experiences. ; the creator of a new prose, pulsing with blood, hot with sensations, lyrical and controversial, biting and full of effusions, and in continuous renewal of ways and tonalities also succeeded:

According to LOVERISTS, Heine’s influence – although some like F. v. Dingelstedt (1814-1881) have already moved in his footsteps since then – however, it was far-reaching rather than having a direct impact on its time. From the “mattress grave” in which paralysis immobilized him in Paris, his voice reached the homeland altered by the distance. Instead the times were pressing, and the poetry placed by the Jungdeutschen as a semitio of life, became above all the instrument of the revolution. In 1840 N. Becker (1809-1845) composed the Rheinlied ; in the same year M. Sohneckenburger (1819-1849) the Wacht am Rheim ; in 1841, in Helgoland, AH Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1798-1874) the Deutschland über alles. F. Freiligrath (1810-1876), naturally enthusiastic and cordial, trained in the colorful eloquence of the verse on Victor Hugo, became the idealistic interpreter of the movement; Germany Herwegh (1817-1875) brought his tribunal instinct there, coining for the people those phrases that the people understand and that the people need to light up – already the title Gedichte eines Lebendigen (1841-44) is a significant symptom of his style – and he was the instigator to pass from word to action; and a whole crowd of other poets made a chorus there, from the young Dingelstedt and from F. v. Sallet (1812-1843) to Germany Kinkel (1815-1882) who later met Mazzini there in exile in London.