The wider group included Willibald Alexis, Adolf Glassbrenner, Gustav Kühne, Max Waldau and Georg Herwegh.
Among the many things they advocated were: separation of church and state, the emancipation of the Jews, and the raising of the political and social position of women.
During December 1835 the Frankfurt Bundestag banned the publication in Germany of many authors associated with the movement, namely Heine, Gutzkow, Laube, Mundt, and Wienbarg.
In their reasoning, they explained that the Young Germans were attempting to “attack the Christian religion in the most impudent way, degrade existing conditions and destroy all discipline and morality with belletristic writings accessible to all classes of readers.” The ideology produced poets, thinkers and journalists, all of whom reacted against the introspection and particularism of Romanticism in the national literature, which had resulted in a total separation of literature from the actualities of life.
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.