Heroes of the Exile [download pdf]

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Ebook Title : Heroes of the Exile

Ebook Thickness	: 124 Page
Language	: English

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Gottfried Kinkel was born some 40 years ago. The story of his life has been made available to us in an autobiography, Gottfried Kinkel. Truth without Poetry. A Biographical sketch book. Edited by Adolph Strodtmann. (Hamburg, Hoffmann & Campe, 1850, octavo.)

Gottfried is the hero of that democratic Siegwart epoch that flooded Germany with endless torrents of tearful lament and patriotic melancholy. He made his debut as a simple lyrical Siegwart.

We are indebted to Strodtmann the Apostle, whose "narrative compilation" we follow here, both for the diary-like fragments in which his pilgrimage on this earth is paraded before the reader, and for the glaring lack of discretion of the revelations they contain.

"Bonn, February - September 1834"

Like his friend, Paul Zeller, young Gottfried studied Protestant theology and his piety and industry earned him the admiration of his celebrated teachers" (Sack, Nitzsch and Bleck, p. 5).

From the very beginning he is "obviously immersed in weighty speculations" (p. 4), he is "tormented and gloomy" as befits a budding genius. "Gottfried's gloomily flashing brown eyes" "lit upon" some youths "in brown jackets and pale-blue overcoats"; he at once sensed that these youths wished "to make up for their inner emptiness by outer show" (p. 6). He explains his moral indignation by pointing out that he had "defended Hegel and Marheinicke" when these lads had called Marheinicke a "blockhead"; later, when he himself goes to study in Berlin and is himself in the position of having to learn from Marheinicke he characterises him in his diary with the following belletristic epigram (p. 61):

"Ein Kerl ,der spekuliert,

ist wie ein Tier auf dürrer Heide

von einem loosen Geist im Kreis herumgeführt,

und ringsumher ist schöne grüne Weide."

[I tell you a chap who's intellectual

Is like a beast on a blasted heath

Driven in circles by a demon

While a fine green meadow lies round beneath.]