Vormärz
Upon Napoleon's final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, the European powers, led by the Austrian state chancellor Prince Klemens von Metternich and British foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh, implemented the Conservative Order, thereby reversing the massive changes brought by the French Revolution, with the aim of recreating the pre-revolutionary balance of power.
After the "French period" in large German territories including the Rhineland, the implementation of the Napoleonic Code, and the Prussian reforms, the movement towards a constitution and a parliamentary system could be delayed, but not reversed.
When the 1819 assassination of August von Kotzebue by student activist Karl Ludwig Sand created appropriate pretext, the Bundesversammlung responded to the growing influence of the Burschenschaften by issuing the Carlsbad Decrees, which censored the press, curtailed academic study of liberalism, and restricted public discussion of such ideas as national unity and wider suffrage.
Though many activists like Ernst Moritz Arndt, Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Hans Ferdinand Massmann, Georg Büchner, Fritz Reuter, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, Carl Theodor Welcker and Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker were arrested or retired into private life, liberal ideals enjoyed resurgence in the French July Revolution of 1830, which was followed by insurrections in the Prussian capital, Berlin, and in the German states of Saxony, Hanover, Hesse, and Brunswick.
After the Greater Poland Uprising of 1846, the trial against the insurgents around Ludwik Mierosławski at the Berlin Kammergericht gained large interest, and the defendants had to be pardoned by King Frederick William IV of Prussia during the March revolution due to public pressure.
On the other hand, the establishment of the Prussian-dominated Zollverein customs union, though formed to address economic concerns, was widely seen by national-liberal circles as a decisive step towards a (Lesser) German unification.
Franz Schubert another transitional composer wrote over 600 lieder including two famous song cycles; Winterreise and Die schöne Müllerin.
Other notable composers from this era include Felix Mendelssohn, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Carl Maria von Weber, Franz Liszt and Robert Schumann.
