Karl Gutzkow

News of the 1830 July Revolution at Paris had moved him deeply, and the general atmosphere of radicalism pervading Europe at that time, and perhaps more specifically a reading of the Life of Jesus by David Friedrich Strauss, influenced Gutzkow in the composition of this first novel, which exalts the agnosticism and emancipated views of the heroine, Wally.

[2] The book incorporates many ideas that Gutzkow had recently absorbed from French writers, notably Henri de Saint-Simon, particularly the latter's theory of the emancipation of the flesh.

Of his numerous other plays, the majority by c. 1910 were neglected; but a few had obtained an established place in the repertory of the German theatre, especially the comedies Zopf und Schwert (1844), Das Urbild des Tartüffe (1847), Der Königsleutnant (1849) and the blank verse tragedy, Uriel Acosta (1847).

[2] After the success of Die Ritter vom Geiste, Gutzkow founded a journal on the model of Dickens' Household Words, entitled Unterhaltungen am häuslichen Herd, which first appeared in 1852 and continued until 1862.

To this period belong the historical novels Hohenschwangau (1868) and Fritz Ellrodt (1872), Lebensbilder (1870–1872), consisting of autobiographic sketches, and Die Söhne Pestalozzis (1870), with a plot founded on the story of Kaspar Hauser.

[3] His strong controversial purpose obscured his artistic genius, but his work profoundly influenced the popular thought of c. 1910 Germany, and gives one of the best pictures we have of the intellectual life and the social struggle of his generation and nation.

[4] His comedy in 5 acts Zopf und Schwert (1844) received two adaptations; in 1926 Aafa-Film made the movie Sword and Shield, and Edmund Nick used it for his operetta Über alles siegt die Liebe (Love Conquers Everything, 1940), libretto by Bruno Hardt-Warden [de].