BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

parliamentary government. 7 The nationalist student movement had been suppressed under the
1819 Carlsbad Decrees, which implemented the “Metternich system” of strict censorship,
espionage and university supervision after corps member Karl Sand’s assassination of reactionary
writer and journalist August von Kotzebue. Whether or not the murder of this once enormously
popular writer poisoned English minds against the Burschenschaften, a significant body of
opinion likely held that the suppression of the universal Burschenschaft movement allowed
German nature to return to its “inherent” morality and propriety. 8 Descriptions of fanaticism and
rowdy behavior overwhelmed any admiration for the student corps’ patriotic spirit or defense of
academic freedom. In fact, criticism tended to focus on the superficial aspects of the Burschen
phenomenon as a departure from more benign circumstances, regardless of philosophical
complexities or socio-political realities prompting Burschenschaft ideology. 9 In 1824 the Liberal
Edinburgh Review characterized the typical German student as arrogant, holding “ludicrously
erroneous ideas of honour,” and defending only the supposed “academic” freedoms to act and
dress contrary to custom and to “besot himself with beer and tobacco.” Such “disorderly
Teutonic youths” treated outsiders with contempt, lacked humility and discipline in comparison
with “sober” British students or their own fellow German citizens, and wasted their academic
7 “Young Germany” originally connoted a very positive image of cultured Anglophile
German liberals who wanted to see Germany move toward parliamentary reforms. But the
designation could also signify the more raucous nationalism of the German student-corps and
could be used interchangeably with “New Germany” to stress a rising potential military,
economic and imperial menace.
8 See Howitt, Life in Germany, 92, 94.
9 Such as, for example, student leader Karl Follen’s use of religion as an integrating factor
for the movement, or his pessimistic distrust of all government as a means of justifying alienated,
dispossessed intellectuals in a corporative system. See Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of
Freedom (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 268-69.
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