Heinrich Laube’s European Moment

ABSTRACT Despite his apparent prominence as one of the five ‘Young German’ writers whose work was banned by the Bundestagsbeschluß of December 1835, Heinrich Laube is an author whose Vormärz publications are underresearched and inadequately contextualized. This essay seeks to reconstruct a European moment in the work of Laube, beginning with his 1832 book on the Polish November Uprising, and ending with the publication of extracts from the novel trilogy Das junge Europa in August Lewald’s literary journal Europa in 1837. The essay argues that Laube’s European moment has been effaced by state censorship and self-censorship, and by the academic politics that have denied Laube scholarship an adequate historical-critical edition of his works.