In no other country outside France, however, did the Saint-Simonian doctrine arouse greater interest than in Germany.15.9 This interest began to show itself surprisingly early. Already the first Organisateur seems to have reached a considerable number of readers in that country.15.10 Some years later it seems to have been Comte's pupil Gustave d'Eichthal who, even before his similar efforts in England, on a visit to Berlin in 1824, succeeded in interesting several people in Comte's Système de politique positive, with the result that a fairly detailed review, the only one the book ever received in any language, appeared in the Leipziger Literatur-Zeitung.15.11 And in Friedrich Buchholz, then a well-known political writer, d'Eichthal gained Comte a warm admirer, who not only in a flattering letter to Comte expressed complete agreement,15.12 but who also in 1826 and 1827 published in his Neue Monatsschrift für Deutschland four anonymous articles on Saint-Simon's work, followed by a translation of the concluding part of the Système industriel. 15.13
It was, however, only in the autumn of 1830 that general interest in the Saint-Simonian movement awoke in Germany; and during the next two or three years it went like wildfire through the German literary world. The July revolution had made Paris once more the center of attraction for all progressives, and the Saint-Simonians, then at the height of their reputation, were the outstanding intellectual movement in that Mecca of all liberals. A veritable flood of books, pamphlets, and articles of the Saint-Simonians15.14 and translations of some of their writings15.15 appeared in German and there was little that could not be learned about them from German sources. The wave of excitement even reached the old Goethe, who subscribed to the Globe (probably since its liberal days) and who, after he had warned Carlyle as early as October, 1830, ``to keep away from the Société St. Simonienne, ''15.16 and after several recorded conversations on the subject, in May 1831, still felt impelled to spend a day reading to get at the bottom of the Saint-Simonian doctrine.15.17
The whole German literary world seems to have been agog for news about the novel French ideas and to some, as Rahel von Varnhagen describes it, the Saint-Simonian Globe became the indispensable intellectual daily bread.15.18 The news about the Saint-Simonian movements appears to have been the decisive factor which in 1831 drew Heinrich Heine to Paris,15.19and, as he later said, he had not been twenty-four hours in Paris before he sat in the midst of the Saint-Simonians. 15.20 From Par is he and L. Boerne did much to spread information about the Saint-Simonians in German literary circles. Another important source of information for those who had stayed behind, particularly the Varnhagens, was the American Albert Brisbane, then not yet a Fourierist, but already spreading socialist ideas on his travels.15.21 How profoundly these ideas were affecting the Young German poets Laube, Gutzkow, Mundt, and Wiebarg has been well described by Miss E. M. Butler in her book Saint-Simonian Religion in Germany, where with much justification she describes the whole Young German school as a Saint-Simonian movement.15.22 In their short but spectacular existence as a group between 1832 and 1835 they persistently, if more crudely than their French contemporaries, applied the Saint-Simonian principle that art must be tendentious, and in particular popularized their feminist doctrines and their demands for the ``rehabilitation of the flesh.''15.23