T he Great Industrial Exhibition inaugurated a new epoch in the Emigration. The great throng of German Philistines that flooded into London during the summer, felt ill at ease in the bustle of the great Crystal Palace and in the even larger town of London with its noise, its din and its clamour. And when the toil and the labour of the day, the dutiful inspection of the Exhibition and the other sights had been completed in the sweat of his brow, the German Philistine could recover at his ease with Schärttner at the Hanau or Göhringer at the Star, with their beery cosiness, their smoke-filled fug and their public-house politics.
Here "the whole of the fatherland could be seen" and in addition all the greatest men of Germany could be seen gratis. There they all sat, the members of parliament, the deputies of Chambers, the generals, the Club orators of the halcyon days of 1848 and 1849, they smoked their pipes just like ordinary people and debated the loftiest interests of the fatherland day after day, in public and with unshakeable dignity. This was the place where for the price of a few bottles of extremely cheap wine the German citizen could discover exactly what went on at the most secret meetings of the European cabinets. This was the place where he could learn to within a minute when "it would all start". In the meantime one bottle after another was started and all the Parties went home unsteadily but strengthened in the knowledge that they had made their contribution to the salvation of the fatherland. Never has the Emigration drunk more and cheaper than during the period when the solvent masses of German Philistines were in London.
The true organisation of the Emigration was in fact this tavern organisation presided over by Silenus-Schärttner in Long Acre which experienced its heyday thanks to the Exhibition. Here the true Central Committee sat in perpetual session. All other committees, organisations, party-formations were just trimmings, the patriotic arabesques of this primeval German tavern society of idlers.
In addition the Emigration was strengthened numerically at the time by the arrival of Messrs. Meyen, Faucher, Sigel, Goegg and Fickler, etc.
Meyen was a little porcupine who had come into the world without any quills and who under the name Poinsinet, was once described by Goethe in this way:
"In literature, as in society, one often encounters such curious little mannikins. Endowed with some small talent they endeavour always to claim the attention of the public and as they can easily be seen through by all they are the source of much amusement. However, they always manage to profit sufficiently. They live, produce, are mentioned everywhere and are even accorded a favourable reception. Their failures do not disconcert them;they regard them as exceptional and look to the future for greater success.
Poinsinet is a figure of this sort in the French literary world. It goes almost beyond belief to see what has been done with him, how he has been fooled and mystified and even his sad death by drowning in Spain does not diminish the ridiculous impression made by his life, just as a frog made of fireworks does not attain to dignity by concluding a lengthy series of sputters with a loud bang." [58]
Writers contemporary with him pass on the following information: Eduard Meyen belonged to the "Resolute" group which represented the Berliner intelligentsia as against the mass stupidity of the rest of Germany. He too had a Maybug Club in Berlin with his friends Mügge, Klein, Zabel, Buhl etc. Each of these maybugs sat on his own little leaf [ Blättchen -- "leaf" and "newspaper"]. Eduard Meyen's paper was called the Mannheimer Abendblättchen and here, every week, after enormous efforts, he deposited a small green turd of correspondence. Our Maybug really did progress to the point where he was about to publish a monthly periodical; contributions from various people landed on his desk, the publisher waited but the whole project collapsed because Eduard after eight months in cold sweat declared that he could not finish the prospectus. As Eduard took all his childish activities seriously he was widely regarded in Berlin after the March Revolution as a man who meant business. In London he worked together with Faucher on a German edition of the Illustrated London News under the editorship and censorship of an old woman who had known some German twenty years before, but he was discarded as useless after he had attempted with great tenacity to insert a profound article about sculpture that he had had published ten years previously in Berlin. But when, later on, the Kinkel-emigration made him their secretary he realised that he was really a practical homme d'état and he announced in a lithographed leaflet that he had arrived at the "tranquillity of a point of view". After his death a whole heap of titles for future projects will be found among his papers.
Conjointly with Meyen we must necessarily consider Oppenheim , his co-editor and co-secretary. It has been claimed that Oppenheim is not so much a man as an allegorical figure: the goddess of boredom it is reported, came down to Frankfurt on Main and assumed the shape of this son of a Jewish jeweller. When Voltaire wrote: "Tous les genres vent loons, exceptélegenre ennuyeux" , he must have had a premonition of our Heinrich Bernhard Oppenheim. We prefer Oppenheim the writer to Oppenheim the orator. His writings may be avoided, but his spoken delivery -- c'est impossible. The pythagorean metempsychosis may have some foundation in reality but the name borne by Heinrich Bernhard Oppenheim in former ages can no longer be discovered as no man ever made a name for himself through being an unbearable chatterbox. His life may be epitomised by its three climactic moments:
Arnold Ruge's editor -- Brentano's editor -- Kinkel's editor.
