Here, as we saw above, he met Friend Arnold and from him he learnt not only his philosophy but also a very useful method of self-enrichment. Just as Arnold sought to assimilate the ideas of his opponents in the course of polemicising against them, so Heinzen learned to acquire ideas new to him by reviling them. Hardly had he become an atheist than with all the zeal of the proselyte he immediately plunged into a furious polemic against poor old Follen because the latter saw no reason to become an atheist in his old age. Having had his nose rubbed in the Swiss Federal Republic our healthy commonsense developed to the point where it desired to introduce the Federal Republic into Germany too. The same commonsense came to the conclusion that this could not be done without a revolution and so Heinzen became a revolutionary. He then began a trade in pamphlets which in the coarsest tones of the Swiss peasant preached immediate revolution and death to the rulers from whom all the evils of the world stem. He sought out committees in Germany who would drum up the cost of printing and distributing these pamphlets and this led naturally to the growth of a begging industry on a large scale in the course of which the party workers were first exploited and then reviled. Old Itzstein could tell a story or two about that. These pamphlets gave Heinzen a great reputation among itinerant German wine salesmen who praised him everywhere as a bonny little fighter.
From Switzerland he went to America. Here, although his Swiss rustic style enabled him to pass as a genuine poet he nevertheless managed to ride the New York Schnellpost to death in no time at all Having returned to Europe in the wake of the February revolution he sent despatches to the Mannheimer Zeitung announcing the arrival of the great Heinzen and he also published a pamphlet to revenge himself on Lamartine who together with his whole government had refused to acknowledge him as an official representative of the American Germans. He still did not wish to go to Prussia as he still feared for his head despite the March Revolution and the general amnesty. He would wait until the nation summoned him. As this did not happen he resolved to stand in absentia for the Hamburg constituency to the Frankfurt Parliament: his hope was that he would compensate for being a bad speaker by the loudness of his voice -- but he lost the election.
Arriving in London after the collapse of the Baden uprising he fell into a rage with the young people who knew nothing of this great man of before the revolution and of after the revolution, and who caused him to sink into oblivion. He had always been nothing more than l'homme de la veille or l'homme du lendemain , he was never l'homme du jour or even de la journée. As the authentic exploding silver had still not been discovered new weapons had to be found to combat the reaction. He called for two million heads so that he could be a dictator and wade up to the ankles in blood -- shed by others. His real aim was, of course, to create a scandal; the reaction had brought him to London at its own expense, by means of an expulsion order from England it would now, so Heinzen hoped, expedite him gratis to New York. The coup failed and its only consequence was that the radical French papers called him a fool who shouted for two million heads only because he had never risked his own. To complete the picture it should be pointed out that his bloodthirsty article had been published in the Deutsche Londoner Zeitung owned by the ex-Duke of Brunswick -- in return for a cash payment, of course.
Gustav and Heinzen had admired each other for a considerable time.
Heinzen praised Gustav as a sage and Gustav praised Heinzen as a fighter.
Heinzen had scarcely been able to wait for the end of the European revolution so that he could put an end to the "ruinous disunity in the democratic German emigration" and to re-open his pre-revolutionary business.
He called for discussion of a draft programme of the German Revolutionary Party. This programme was distinguished by the invention of a special ministry "to cater for the all-important need for public playgrounds, battlegrounds"(minus hail of bullets) "and gardens", and was notable also for the article abolishing "the privileges of the male sex especially in marriage" (and also in thrusting maneuvers [Stosstaktik] in war, see Clausewitz). This programme was actually no more than a diplomatic note from Heinzen to Gustav as no-one else was clamouring for it. And instead of the hoped for unification it brought about the immediate separation of the two warriors. Heinzen had demanded that during the "revolutionary transition period" there should be a single dictator who would moreover be a Prussian and, to preclude all misunderstandings, he added: "No soldier can qualify as dictator."Gustav, on the other hand, argued for a triumvirate comprising two Badeners and himself Moreover, Gustav found that Heinzen had included in his prematurely published programme an "idea" stolen from him. This put an end to the second attempt at unification and Heinzen, denied recognition by the whole world, receded into obscurity until, in Autumn 1850, he found English soil too hot for him and sailed off to New York.
