German moderates and radicals were ill-prepared to function as a unit, carrying through their revolution of 1848 in order to produce a united constitution-based nation. Their Frankfurt Parlament has been unfairly blamed for the fiasco. Failure was rooted in the socioeconomic situation of the early nineteenth century, on the verge of the Industrial Age. Vestiges of the guild system, along with rigid class structure, official surveillance, and inappropriate education all contributed to the leaders' incomprehension of principles of political accommodation. The radicals lacked the basis of effective labor organization. German unity was threatened by chauvinism and by Austria's intervention. Hostility of various factions opened the way to the conservatives, whose vindictiveness caused many a Forty-Eighter to seek a new life in the United States.
"Although seen through the prism of Forty-Eighter immigration to the United States, this book is about Europe; it exposes the smoldering unrest that resulted in periodic flame-ups which in turn smoked out thousands of high-quality young idealists for the good of America's nineteenth-century needs. What is phenomenal about this superb volume is its scope: Concentrating on Germany and its supply of the resulting immigrants, the author flashes brilliantly twenty to thirty years backward and forward in time; it sweeps geographically out to the horizons of Europe including all nations on Germany's periphery only to zero back into the German heartland where the wide scope of socioeconomic issues conditioned the political revolutions that erupted in 1848. This highly readable, deeply insightful labor of love belongs on the shelf of every library worthy of the name, as well as in the hands of anyone probing the history, political science, economic, or genealogical backdrop of the U.S. immigration from Germany. I recommend it with highest enthusiasm!" (La Vern J. Rippley, St. Olaf College, German Department)
"Randers-Pehrson portrays masterfully the jigsaw pieces that in their totality represent the sociopolitical context as well as the events, institutions, and leading personalities of the revolutionary years 1848 and 1849 in the thirty-nine German states. The multifaceted complexities that ultimately doomed successful reform of the political and social structure of the German nation in the mid-nineteenth century are presented chapter by chapter, leaving the reader with a bittersweet understanding of what might have been at that time and what might have been prevented from happening in twentieth-century Germany." (William Keel, Professor of German, University of Kansas, and Editor, Yearbook of 'German-American Studies')
"Randers-Pehrson portrays masterfully the jigsaw pieces that in their totality represent the sociopolitical context as well as the events, institutions, and leading personalities of the revolutionary years 1848 and 1849 in the thirty-nine German states. The multifaceted complexities that ultimately doomed successful reform of the political and social structure of the German nation in the mid-nineteenth century are presented chapter by chapter, leaving the reader with a bittersweet understanding of what might have been at that time and what might have been prevented from happening in twentieth-century Germany." (William Keel, Professor of German, University of Kansas, and Editor, Yearbook of 'German-American Studies')