Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from University Library of Autobiography: Including All the Great Autobiographies and the Autobiographical Data Left by the World's Famous Men and Women
Marie Therese kept no journal of those later years after 1815, when the remnants of her family had been restored to power, her uncle being king as Louis XVIII and she herself married to a royal prince. But other writers have told us that she never forgot - as alas how could she forget - that even in extreme old age, as late as 1850, she still lived in the horror of the past, still trembled at the memory of those childhood days, of which she tells with such simple and convincing childishness.
Of German biographies of this period we have two noted ones. They show us much of the internal conditions of Ger many in that Metternich's Age of reaction which followed after 1815. The German peasants and city folk had fought heroically and freed their country from Napoleon; but they won no personal freedom as a reward. All power went back again to the old nobility and the old petty German princes, one of whom declared that they had turned back the clock, and made his people resume the same costumes, the same occupations, and even, so far as he could manage - it, the same thoughts as had been theirs before the outbreak of 1789.
The conditions of this strange period of repression, we find pictured in the autobiographies of Friedrich Froebel and Heinrich Heine. Froebel was the founder of much of our modern method of education. He was a wild, rambling genius who found it no easy task to accommodate himself to the restrictions of the day and grumbled much at them - as the reader may gather for himself.
Heine was a poet. He is. Commonly included among Ger many's greatest poets, though indeed he lived but little in Germany. As soon as practical, he escaped from the grinding repression of his native land and established himself in Paris. He became almost a citizen of the world, a man without a country. A cynic, many people have called him; but there is a depth of sorrow in his satiric epigrams that hints that all his cynicism is only grief at the weakness and unworthiness he finds around him, a secret hope that man might yet prove worthy of a better fate than that of bowing down to German princelings. Heine's narrative is at once beautiful and witty and most sad, a triumph of poetic autobiography.
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