THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
to make intelligible their conduct in the movements which preceded the revolutionary upheavals of the year 1848.
The patriotic heart loved to dwell on the memories of the “holy Roman empire of the German nation,” which once, at the zenith of its power, had held leadership in the civilized world. From these memories sprang the Kyffhäuser romanticism, with its dreams of the new birth of German power and magnificence, which had such poetic charm to German youth: the legend telling how the old Kaiser Friedrich Barbarossa was sitting in a cave of the Kyffhäuser mountain in Thuringia, in a sleep centuries long, his elbows resting on a stone table and his head on his hands, while a pair of ravens were circling around the mountain top; and how one day the ravens would fly away and the old kaiser would awaken and issue from the mountain, sword in hand, to restore the German Empire to its ancient glory. While cherishing such dreams we remembered with shame the time of the national disintegration and the dreary despotism after the Thirty Years' War, when German princes, devoid of all national feeling, always stood ready to serve the interests and the ambitions of foreign potentates—even to sell their own subjects in order to maintain with the disgraceful proceeds the luxuries of their dissolute courts; and with equal shame we thought of the period of the “Rheinbund,” when a number of German princes became mere vassals of Napoleon; when one part of Germany served to keep the other part at the feet of the hated conqueror, and when Emperor Francis of Austria, who had been also emperor of the hopelessly decayed empire of Germany, laid down in 1806 his crown, and German Emperor and German Empire ceased even to exist in name.
Then came, in 1813, after long suffering and debasement, the great popular uprising against Napoleonic despotism, and
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