The news of Immermann’s death was a hard blow for us 
Rhinelanders, not only because of the poetical but also because of 
the personal significance of this man, although the latter, even 
more than the former, was only just beginning to develop. He 
stood in a special relationship to the younger literary forces which 
have lately emerged on the Rhine and in Westphalia; for in 
respect of literature Westphalia and the Lower Rhine belong 
together, however sharply they have been politically divided up to 
now, and in fact the Rheinisches Jahrbuch provides a common 
rallying point for writers from both provinces. The more the 
Rhine had hitherto kept literature at a distance, the more Rhenish 
poets now tried to figure as representatives of their home province 
and hence acted if not according to one plan, at least towards one 
aim. Such an endeavour rarely remains without a strong personali- 
ty at its centre to which the younger ones subordinate themselves 
without surrendering any of their independence, and Immermann 
seemed to want to become that centre for the Rhenish poets. In 
spite of many prejudices against the Rhenish people he had 
gradually become naturalised among them; he had publicly made 
his peace with the literary present to which all the younger ones 
belonged; a new, fresh spirit had come over him, and his work 
was finding increasing recognition. Hence, the circle of young 
poets who rallied around him and gravitated towards him from 
the surrounding area kept growing; how often did not Freiligrath, 
for example, shut his memorandum and ledgers, when he was still 
writing invoices and current accounts in Barmen, to spend one or 
two days in the company of Immermann and the Düsseldorf 

painters! Thus Immermann came to occupy an important place in 
the dreams’ which were cherished here and there of a Rhenish- 
Westphalian school of poetry; before Freiligrath’s fame matured 
he was the mediating transition from the provincial to the general 
German literature. This had long been no secret to anyone with 
an eye for such relationships and ties; a year ago Reinhold KGstlin, 
among others, drew attention in Europa to the fact that Immer- 
mann was maturing towards a standing similar to that of Goethe 
in his later years. Death has destroyed all these hopes and 
dreams for the future. 

Immermann’s Memorabilien appeared a few weeks after his 
death. Was he, a man in his prime, already mature enough to 
write his own memoirs? His fate says yes, his book says no. 
However, we must not regard the Memorabilien as an old man’s 
final settlement with life, by which he declares his career closed; 
Immermann was rather settling accounts with an earlier, the 
exclusively romantic period of his work, and hence a different 
spirit prevails in this book than in the works of that period. 
Moreover, the events described here had receded so far through 
the great changes of the last decade that even to him, their 
contemporary, history seemed to have finished with them. And yet 
I think I am justified in maintaining that in ten years’ time 
Immermann would have grasped the present and its attitude to 
the war of liberation, on which his work hinges, more profoundly, 
more freely. But for the moment we must take the Memorabilien as 
they are. 

If the earlier romantic, in the Epigonen, had already striven for 
the higher standpoint of Goethe’s plasticity and repose, and 
Miinchhausen already rested firmly on the basis of the modern 
poetic manner, his posthumous work shows even more clearly how 
well Immermann appreciated the latest literary developments. The 
style and with it his vision of things are quite modern; only the 
more thoroughly thought-out content, the stricter arrangement, 
the sharply stamped individuality of character and the albeit 
rather veiled, anti-modern views of the author distinguish this 
book from the mass of descriptions, characters, memoirs, re- 
views, situations, conditions, etc., with which our literature, 
gasping for healthy, poetic fresh air, is suffocated today. Immer- 
mann, moreover, has sufficient tact only rarely to arraign before 
the forum of reflection subjects which are entitled to a different 
tribunal than that of bare reason. 

The present first volume finds its material in the “youth of 
twenty-five years ago” and the influences which dominated it. A 

“bill of lading” prefaces it in which the character of the whole is 
most faithfully outlined. On the one hand, a modern style, 
modern catchwords, and even modern principles; on the other, 
the peculiarities of the author, the significance of which has long 
been dead for a wider circle. Immermann writes for modern 
Germans, as he says fairly bluntly, for those who stand equally far 
from the extremes of Germanism and cosmopolitanism; he has an 
entirely modern conception of the nation and establishes premises 
which would lead logically to autocracy as the people’s destiny; he 
pronounces himself emphatically against that “lack of self- 
confidence, the rage to serve and throw oneself away”* from 
which the Germans suffer. And yet, at the same time Immermann 
has a most inadequately grounded preference for Prussianism and 
the cool indifference with which he speaks of constitutional 
aspirations in Germany reveals only too clearly that he has not yet 
understood the unity of the modern spiritual life at all. One sees 
that the concept of the modern does not appeal to him at all since 
he resists many of its aspects, but nevertheless he cannot dismiss 
the concept. 

The memoirs proper begin with the “Boyhood Reminiscences”. 
Immermann keeps his promise to describe only those moments at 
which “history made its passage through him”.> World events 
grow with the boy’s consciousness and the colossal edifice is raised 
of which he was to witness the fall; at first storming in the 
distance, the waves of history break through the dam of North 
Germany in the battle of Jena, sweep over complacent Prussia, 
making the saying of its great king “aprés moi le déluge” particular- 
ly true of his own state,'"* and at once flood first over Magdeburg, 
Immermann’s home town. This part is the best in the book; 
Immermann is stronger at narrative than reflective writing, and he 
has succeeded excellently in perceiving how world events are 
mirrored in the individual heart. This is also the point at which he 
links himself frankly to progress, even if only for the time being. 
For him, as for all the volunteers of 1813, the Prussia of before 
1806 is the ancien régime of this state, but also, what is now less 
often admitted, the Prussia of after 1806 is a Prussia entirely 
reborn, a new order of things. The rebirth of Prussia is a peculiar 
affair, however. The first rebirth, through the great Frederick, has 
been so praised on the occasion of last year’s jubilee that it is hard 
to understand how an interregnum of twenty years could already 

make another necessary.’ It is also claimed that in spite of the 
double baptism of fire, the old Adam has of late shown new, 
strong signs of life. In the present section, however, Immermann 
spares us the praises of the status quo, hence the point at which 
Immermann’s road diverges from that of the modern day will only 
become clearer in the course of these lines. 

“Until it enters public life, youth is educated by the family, by study, by 
literature. For the generation which we are here considering, despotism was added 
as another, a fourth medium of education. The family cherishes and nurses it, 
study isolates it, literature leads it again into wider fields; despotism gave us the 
beginnings of character.” * 

This is the pattern according to which the reflective part of the 
book is arranged, and which has the great and undeniable merit 
of showing the development of consciousness in its successive 
stages.— The section on the family is quite excellent as long as it 
describes the old family, and it is only regrettable that Immermann 
has not made more effort to combine aspects of light and shade 
into a whole. The remarks he makes here are all most apt. By 
contrast his concept of the newer family shows again that he has 
not yet rid himself of the old prejudice and resentment against the 
phenomena of the last decade. True, the “old-fashioned comfort”, 
the contentment with the family hearth, increasingly give way to ill 
humour, to dissatisfaction with the joys of family life; but against 
that background the philistinism of the patriarchal way of life, the 
halo around the nightcap, are more and more lost, and the causes | 
of the ill humour, almost all of which Immermann emphasises 
quite correctly and only too glaringly, are no more than the 
symptoms of a still struggling, uncompleted, epoch. The epoch 
preceding foreign rule was completed and as such bore the stamp 
of repose, but also of indolence, and carried within it the seeds of 
decay. Our author could have said quite briefly: the reason why 
the newer family cannot fight off a certain sense of discomfort is 
that new demands are being made on it which it does not yet 
know how to reconcile with its own rights. As Immermann admits, 
society has changed, public life has been added as an entirely new 
element; literature, politics, science, all this now penetrates into 
the family more deeply, and it has difficulty in accommodating all 
these alien guests. That is the point! The family still lives too 
much in the old style to be able to come to a proper ‘understand- 

ing with the intruders and be on good terms with them, and here 
indeed a regeneration of the family is occurring; the disagreeable 
process just has to be gone through, and to my mind the old 
family badly needs it. Incidentally, Immermann studied the 
modern family in precisely that part of Germany, on the Rhine, 
which is most mobile and receptive to modern influences, and 
here the discomfort of the transition process came to light most 
clearly. In the provincial towns of interior Germany the old family 
continues to live, move and have its being in the godly shadow of 
the dressing-gown; society still stands where it stood in A. D. 1799, 
and public life, literature, science, are dismissed with calm and 
deliberation, without anybody allowing his comfortable routine to 
be disturbed—The author adds “pedagogical anecdotes” to 
prove what he has put forward about the old family and then 
concludes the narrative part of the book with “Uncle”, a character 
typical of the old days. The education which the adolescent 
generation receives from the family is completed; the young throw 
themselves into the arms of study and literature. Here the less 
successful sections of the book begin. Study touched Immermann 
at a time when philosophy, the soul of all science, and knowledge 
of the ancient world, the basis of everything the young were 
offered, were caught up in a whirlwind revolution, and Immer- 
mann did not have the advantage of being able to follow it up to 
its goal as a student. When it drew to its close, he had long 
outgrown school. Nor does he say much more for the time being 
than that teaching in those days was narrow, and makes up for 
this by dealing with the most influential thinkers of the time in 
separate articles. Speaking of Fichte he obliges with a philosophy 
which would strike gentlemen familiar with the subject as fairly 
peculiar. Here he lets himself be lured into a witty argument 
about a matter which it needs more than a witty and poetic eye to 
penetrate. How our strict Hegelians will. shudder when they read 
the history of philosophy as presented here in three pages! And it 
must be admitted that it would not be easy to discuss philosophy 
in a more dilettante fashion than is the case here. The very first 
sentence, which says that philosophy always oscillates between two 
points, seeking certainty either in the thing or in the ego, was 
clearly written in deference to the fact that Kant’s “thing-in-itself” 
was followed by Fichte’s “1”, and can, with difficulty, be applied to 
Schelling, but in no sense to Hegel—Socrates is called the 
incarnation of thinking and for that very reason the ability to have 
a system is denied him; pure doctrine is said to be combined in 
him with a direct penetration of empiricism, and since it tran- 

scended the concept, this union, it is declared, could manifest itself 
only as a personality, not as a doctrine. Are these not sentences 
which must throw into the greatest confusion a generation that has 
grown up under Hegelian influence? Does not all philosophy end 
where conformity of thinking and empiricism “transcends the 
concept”? What logic can stand its ground where lack of system is 
asserted to be a necessary attribute of the “incarnation of 
thinking”? 

But why pursue Immermann into a sphere which he himself 
only wanted to fly through? Suffice it to say that he can no more 
cope with the philosophical concepts of earlier centuries than he 
can unite Fichte’s philosophy with his personality. By contrast he 
again describes excellently the character of Fichte, the orator of 
the German nation, and the gymnastics enthusiast Jahn. These 
character sketches shed more light on the effective forces and 
ideas by which the youth of the time was influenced than might 
any lengthy discourses. Even where literature forms the theme we 
enjoy far more reading the description of the relationship in 
which the “youth of twenty-five years ago” stood to the great 
poets than the inadequately substantiated demonstration that, 
unlike all its sisters, German literature has a modern, non- 
romantic origin. It will always appear forced to make Corneille 
sprout from a romantic medieval root and to attribute more in 
Shakespeare to the Middle Ages than the raw material which he 
found to hand. Is this perhaps the not altogether clear conscience 
of the erstwhile romantic seeking to reject the charge of continu- 
ing crypto-romanticism? 

The section on despotism, namely, that of Napoleon, will not 
please either. Heine’s worship of Napoleon is alien to the con- 
sciousness of the people, yet nobody will be happy that Immer- 
mann speaks as an insulted Prussian, while claiming the impartiali- 
ty of the historian. He must have sensed that the national German, 
and particularly the Prussian, standpoint needed to be tran- 
scended here; hence he is as cautious as possible in style, adapts his 
viewpoint as closely as possible to the modern and ventures out 
only in minor and incidental matters. Gradually he does become 
bolder, however, admitting that he cannot quite see why Napoleon 
should be counted as a great man, establishing a complete system 
of despotism and showing that in this craft Napoleon was a pretty 
bad tyro and bungler. But this is hardly the right way to 
understand great men. 

Hence, apart from a few ideas which run ahead of his 
convictions, Immermann stands in the main far from the modern 

consciousness. Nevertheless, he cannot be classed with any of the 
parties into which Germany’s spiritual status quo is customarily 
divided. He explicitly rejects the trend to which he seems to stand 
closest, Germanism. The well-known dualism in Immermann’s 
convictions was expressed, on the one hand, as Prussianism, on the 
other, as romanticism. The former gradually lapsed, however, 
especially in Immermann the official, into the most sober, 
mechanistic prose, the latter into unlimited effusiveness. So long as 
he remained at this point Immermann could not achieve real 
recognition and was compelled more and more to realise that not 
only were these trends polar opposites but that they left the heart 
of the nation increasingly indifferent. 

At last he dared a poetic advance and wrote the Epigonen. No 
sooner had this work left the publisher’s shop than it showed its 
author that only his previous tendency had prevented a more 
general recognition of his talent by the nation and the younger 
men of letters. The Epigonen were appreciated almost everywhere 
and occasioned diatribes on the character of their author such as 
Immermann had not been previously accustomed to. The Young 
Literature,? if we may apply this name to the fragments of what 
had never been a whole, was the first to recognise the significance 
of Immermann, and was responsible for his becoming properly 
known to the nation. He had been inwardly resentful at the 
constantly sharpening division between Prussianism and romantic 
poetry, and also at the relatively slight popularity enjoyed by his 
writings, and he had unwittingly impressed more and more on his 
works the stamp of a stark isolation. Now that he had taken a step 
forward and won recognition, a different, freer, more cheerful 
spirit came over him. The old youthful enthusiasm thawed again 
and in Miinchhausen made a start towards reconciliation with the 
practical, reasonable side of his character. The romantic sym- 
pathies which still remained at the back of his mind he appeased 
with Ghismonda and Tristan; but what a difference from his earlier 
romantic poetry, and especially what plasticity compared with 
Merlin! 

Basically, romanticism was only a matter of form for Immer- 
mann. The sobriety of Prussianism saved him from the dreaming 
of the romantic school, but this was also the cause of a certain 

resistance in him to the developments of the time. We know that 
in religious matters Immermann was very liberal; politically, 
however, he was a far too zealous supporter of the government. 
True, his attitude to the Young Literature brought him closer to the 
political aspirations of the century and taught him to view them 
from another aspect; but, as the Memorabilien show, Prussianism 
was still very firmly entrenched in him. Yet precisely in this book 
we find quite a few statements which contrast so strongly with 
Immermann’s basic views and rest so much on a modern basis that 
the significant influence of modern ideas on him is quite unmis- 
takable. The Memorabilien clearly show their author’s endeavour to 
keep pace with his time, and who knows whether the current of 
history might not eventually have undermined the conservative 
Prussian dam behind which Immermann kept himself entrenched. 

And now one more remark! Immermann says that the character 
of the epoch which he describes in the Memorabilien was primarily 
youthful; youthful motives were given play and youthful moods 
were voiced. Is that not also true of our epoch? The old 
generation has died out in literature, and youth has seized hold of 
the word. Our future depends more than ever on the growing 
generation, for this generation will have to decide contradictions 
of ever-heightening intensity. The old may complain about the 
young, and it is true that they are most disobedient; but just let 
them go their own way: they will find their bearings, and those 
who get lost have only themselves to blame. For we have a 
touchstone for the young in the shape of the new philosophy; they 
have to work their way through it and yet not lose the enthusiasm 
of youth. He who is afraid of the dense wood in which stands the 
palace of the Idea, he who does not hack through it with the 
sword and wake the king’s sleeping daughter with a kiss, is not 
worthy of her and her kingdom; he may go and become a country 
pastor, merchant, assessor, or whatever he likes, take a wife and 
beget children in all piety and respectability, but the century will 
not recognise him as its son. You need not therefore become Old 
Hegelians and throw around “in and for itself”, “totality”, and 
“thisness”, but you must not fight shy of the labour of thinking, 
for only that enthusiasm is genuine which like the eagle is afraid 
neither of the dull clouds of speculation nor of the thin, rarefied 
air in the higher regions of abstraction when it is a question of 
flying towards the sun of truth. And in this sense the youth of 
today has indeed gone through Hegel’s school, and in the heart of 
the young many a seed has come up splendidly from the system’s 
dry husk. This is also the ground for the boldest confidence in the 

present; that its fate depends not on the cautious fear of action 
and the ingrained philistinism of the old but on the noble, 
unrestrained ardour of youth. Therefore let us fight for freedom 
as long as we are young and full of glowing vigour; who knows if 
we shall still be able to when old age creeps upon us!