Georg Herwech was preeminently the German political poet of the 1840's. With youthful arrogance and unstable talent he burst onto the literary and political stage in 1841 with the publication of his Gedichte eines Lebendigen. The contagious excitement generated by this work showed that he both touched and epitomized the revolutionary aspirations of Germany's intellectuals. Gottfried Keller described the immediate impact of Herwegh's work on him: “The new tone struck me like a trumpet blast which suddenly arouses a large camp of the people's army.” And his reaction was typical: Herwegh was feted by literary circles and political coteries impatient for the revolution that his poetry impelled. When the revolution did come in 1848, Herwegh led a battalion into battle, only to flee precipitately in defeat. But the poet outlived his reputation. He spent most of the years after 1848 in exile, growing increasingly estranged from Germany, his infrequent later poetry never equalling the vigor of his first verse. He had lived for revolution, and when that revolution failed he passed the rest of his life in futile and impotent grasping for the past or some imagined future. “They were like the court clock at Versailles, which pointed to one hour, the hour at which the King died,” wrote Alexander Herzen, describing the empty lives of the exiled revolutionaries of 1848 like Herwegh. “And like the clock, they had not been wound up since the death of Louis XVI.”

Universal suffrage is a commonplace in today's political world. In modern Western states it seems self-explanatory that there should be a general right to vote, or at least the pretense of such a right; and it is rather the exception to universal suffrage that requires explanation—at best as a quaint local peculiarity, at worst as a sign of pigheadedness or paranoia. In our era of bland populism, it is easy to forget the nineteenth century's passion over suffrage matters. But passion there was: from the sanscullottes of the 1790's to the suffragettes of the 1910's, no decade of the nineteenth century, no part of the Atlantic world was entirely free from this all-important question. Indeed suffrage issues erupted regularly whenever and wherever internal political tensions ran highest. Anti-Bourbon agitation in Restoration France, Chartist demands in England, Negro emancipation in the United States, demands for reform of Bismarckian Germany's Prussian heartland—these issues spanned the century, and they all contained at least some taint of the suffrage question. The European revolutions of 1848–49 came roughly at the mid-point of this century-long suffrage debate, and these revolutions too raised in various ways the issue of the right to vote. And one of the most interesting discussions of the franchise question came in February and March of 1849, when Germany's abortive constitutional convention, the Frankfurt National Assembly, turned its attention to an Electoral Law for the lower house of the projected national representative body.

On November 12, 1918, three days after Germany had been declared a republic in Berlin, the Provisional National Assembly of the German population of Austria unanimously declared in Vienna that “German-Austria is a constituent part of the German Republic.” Had the declaration been accepted as more than a statement of intent, diplomatic relations between the two independent states would have been replaced by German-Austrian participation in the German government. In fact, the two governments continued to function independently and relations between them were conducted primarily through their respective foreign ministries despite the declaration of union (Anschluss). Moreover, just as conflicts between Berlin and Vienna had plagued the alliance between the German and Austro- Hungarian empires during World War I, disagreements about the Anschluss marred relations between the new German and Austrian republics in the weeks following the armistices of 1918. While the governments in both capitals desired the unification of the two states, there was discord between them about the procedure to follow to secure it. During the winter of 1918–19 Berlin and Vienna narrowed the differences between them about questions of tactics, but fundamental disagreement about the ultimate importance of Anschluss was never completely overcome. An examination of the disagreement between the two governments and its partial resolution may shed light on the complexity of the Anschluss issue, both as a problem of the peace settlements of 1919 and as background to the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938.