Young Germany (Junges Deutschland) was a loose group of German writers which existed from about 1830 to 1850. It was essentially a youth movement (similar to those that had swept France, Ireland and originated in Italy). In many respects it can be seen as a literary school headed by Heinrich Heine, whose aim was to liberate politics, religion, and manners from the old conventional trammels.

The movement produced poets, thinkers and journalists, all of whom reacted against the introspection and particularism of Romanticism. The Romantic Movement was seen as apolitical, lacking the activism that Germany’s burgeoning intelligentsia required. As a result of the decades of compulsory school attendance in German states, mass literacy meant an excess of educated males which the establishment could not subsume. Thus in the 1830s, with the advantage of the low cost printing press, there was a rush of educated males into the so-called ‘free professions’.

See also:

• Young Poland