This assertion opens an article entitled “Patriotic Novels” that appeared in the most important national-liberal cultural journal, Die Grenzboten, in 1852, penned by one of its two editors, presumably Julius Schmidt. The essay intensively elucidates the function of the historical novel and its relationship to historiography on the one hand and prose literature on the other. The author – who interestingly enough equates the historical novel with the “patriotic novel,” that is, assumes that it mainly treats the writer’s own national history – recognizes the importance of the genre but regards it as a “lower art form.” For him, the historical novel’s main task was “to recreate for us, based on earlier research, the manners of the past era in all respects.” Only such an approach, he believed, could produce works “that arouse in the imagination and sentiments anything approaching the impression engendered by free creation.” The author of this contribution was clearly convinced that the chief object of novels was to address the imagination and emotions.

Not just Die Grenzboten, but also other cultural and literary magazines intensely discussed the form and function of the historical novel that became popular in the 1820s. From that time, novelists and literary critics negotiated the new genre’s position in the literary world. Today, Benedikte Naubert is considered the founder of the historical novel that emerged in German in the late eighteenth century. Up to her death in 1819, she published more than 50 such works, most of them anonymously, many of which were translated into English and French. Her books influenced the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, whose Waverley (1814) and subsequent novels made the genre so popular across Europe that it experienced its first literary heyday in the 1820s and 1830s.