Students on the Barricades: Germany and Austria, 1848

German students in the nineteenth century, like Americans in the twentieth, had periods when serious study was fashionable, other periods when the great thing was collegiate life, rare ones of military enthusiasm, less rare times of romantic artiness, and occasional violent periods of social concern. They went through moods of academic exclusiveness and moods of devotion to the rights of man. Sometimes their reforming zeal was turned toward their own institutions, and sometimes they were out to change the wide world. Sometimes these moods seem to have succeeded each other almost at random, but it is possible to trace a pattern leading up to their highest moment of political involvement, in 1848. It turned out to be the last such moment before 1918, but it was one in which all their passion for liberty and for solidarity with the underprivileged reached a tremendous climax.