W ith his capture a new epoch opened in Kinkel's life and at the same time there began a new era in the history of German Philistinism.
The Maybug Club had scarcely heard the news of his capture than they wrote to all the German papers that Kinkel, the great poet, was in danger of being summarily shot and exhorting the German people, especially the educated among them, and above all the women and girls to give their all to save the life of the imprisoned poet. Kinkel himself composed a poem at about this time, as we are told, in which he compared himself to "Christ, his friend and teacher", adding: "My blood is shed for you." From this point on his emblem is the lyre. In this way Germany suddenly learned that Kinkel was a poet, a great poet moreover, and from this moment on the mass of German Philistines and aestheticising drivellers joined in the Farce of the Blue Flower put on by our Heinrich von Ofterdingen.
In the meantime the Prussians brought him before a military tribunal.
For the first time after a long interval he saw his opportunity to try out one of those moving appeals to the tear ducts of his audience which -- according to Mockel -- had brought him such applause earlier on as an assistant preacher in Cologne. Cologne too was destined soon to witness his most glorious performance in this sphere. He made a speech in his own defence before the tribunal which thanks to the indiscretion of a friend was unfortunately made available to the public through the medium of the Berlin Abendpost. In this speech Kinkel "repudiates any connection between his activities and the filth and the dirt that, as I well know, has latterly attached itself to this revolution".
After this rabid revolutionary speech Kinkel was sentenced to twenty years detention in a fortress. As an act of grace this was reduced to prison with hard labour and he was removed to Naugard where he was employed in spinning wool and so just as formerly he had appeared with the emblem first of the rucksack, then the musket and then the lyre, he now appears in association with the spinning wheel. We shall see him later wandering over the ocean accompanied by the emblem of the purse.
In the meantime a curious event took place in Germany. It is well known that the German Philistine is endowed by Nature with a beautiful soul. Now he found his most cherished illusions cruelly shattered by the hard blows of the year 1849. Not a single hope had become reality and even the fast-beating hearts of young men began to despair about the fate of the fatherland. Every heart yielded to a lachrymose torpor and the need began to be felt for a democratic Christ, for a real or imagined Sufferer who in his torments would bear the sins of the Philistine world with the patience of a lamb and whose Passion would epitomise in extreme form the unrestrained but chronic self-pity of the whole of Philistinism. The Maybug Club, with Mockel at its head, set out to satisfy this universal need.
