The Germans by Craig Gordon Alexander

Author:Craig, Gordon Alexander [Craig, Gordon Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Germany (West) -- History.
Publisher: Meridian
Published: 1991-05-14T21:00:00+00:00

meine Burschenschaft, a movement that had more clearly articulated aims and a wider political scope. Originating also in Jena, among students who had participated in the war of liberation from Napoleon, the Burschenschaft aimed at replacing the traditional student orders with an interuniversity organization that would devote itself, not to the perpetuation of outworn traditions, but to the moral and political regeneration of Germany and the cause of national unity. The movement spread rapidly and reached its height in 1817 in a national assembly of Burschen at the Wartburg Castle near Eisenach, where student orators made patriotic speeches and attacked princes who were considered to be uninterested in national unification and constitutional reform, and where there was a formal burning of reactionary books and symbols of despotic authority.

The Wartburg ceremony had an exciting effect upon constituted authority. At the conference of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, a member of the Russian delegation, in language that would not have seemed strange in some German newspapers in the late 1960s, described the German universities as "repositories of all of the errors of the century," and the Prussian minister of police echoed him by charging that Jena was a breeding place of Jacobinism. The sentiment for repression was strong even before Karl Ludwig Sand, his head muddled by the doctrines of a radical offshoot of the student movement, murdered the dramatist and sometime Russian agent August von Kotzebue, in the foolish expectation that this would liberate Germany from reaction. After that deed, the Austrian Chancellor Metternich persuaded the German princes to accept the Carlsbad Decrees, which imposed rigid controls on university teaching and student activity and dissolved the Allgemeine Burschenschaft.

In the years that followed, the period sometimes known as the Dema-gogenverfolgung (the persecution of the demagogues), the German governments sought, with varied degrees of energy, to suppress radical political activity in the universities, and all student societies came under close supervision. Yet this concern over student politics was always excessive. Even at the height of its strength, the Allgemeine Burschenschaft was never as comprehensive as its name implied and could not claim to speak for all, or even most, students. After its suppression, there was never again anything approaching a united student movement, for although the Burschenschaft revived in the late 1820s it was, and remained, a shadow of its former self and was moreover only one of several corporations competing for student support. In the agitations that followed the French Revolution of 1830 and again during the revolutions of 1848, student organizations played a very minor role, and as Germany moved toward unification the great majority of the student body became steadily more conservative. In the Bismarck and Wilhel-mine periods, the political tone of the universities was set by the aristocratic student Corps and by the Burschenschaften, now virtually indistinguishable from the Corps in their loyalty to the Crown and their abhorrence of subversion, while the majority of unaffiliated students,

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