The name is absent

Wilhelm Heinse (1749-1803), Karl Philipp Moritz (1727-1793),
Friedrich Leopold von Stolberg (1750-1819), the two Forsters
(Johann Reinhold F., 1729-1798, and Johann George A. F., 1754-
1794), the two von Humboldts (Wilhelm von H., 1767-1835, and
Alexander von H., 1769-1859), and Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-
1860).

To this list should be added the name of Johann Gottfried
Seume (1763-1810)² whom Goethe, in reviewing the work of an-
other traveler, called “a more important voyager.”³ Similarly, in
1819, when E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) in the Lebensansichten
des Katers Murr, without caring to give a name, referred to “the
example of a brave officer. . . , who had walked from Leipzig to
Syracuse, without once having his boots repaired,”⁴ he could ex-
pect his German readers to know immediately that he meant
Seume. Later, at the beginning of this century, Professor August
Sauer (1855-1926) called Seume “not just the widely read intelli-
gent reporter and versatile author . . . the clever narrator of
contemporary events and the untiring moralist . . . the intrepid
wanderer and admired travel writer, but primarily . . . the great
Stoic driven hither and thither on land and sea. . . .”⁵ It is with
Seume, “the widely-read intelligent reporter and versatile author,”
that this study will deal, with “the clever narrator of contemporary
events” as affecting the English and England.

It was the fate of George Forster, Arndt, and Seume to become
directly involved in the social and political conflicts of their times—
in Seume’s case, the American Revolution, the Polish Insurrection
of 1794, and indirectly the French Revolution and the Napoleonic
wars. The last quarter of the eighteenth century was one of strife
and conflicting allegiance in all areas of public life, and while
Forster died prematurely in exile defending the Rights of Man be-
fore Bonaparte’s rise to power, Arndt and Seume ten years later
vigorously proclaimed German liberal nationalism in the face of
French imperialism.® Seume, the political theorist, who stoutly
declared himself a republican whose destiny twice placed him in a
position where he had to take up arms against liberty,⁷ as well as
Seume, the Aufklarer, who speaks out against fiction in favor of
serious historical writing (Spaziergang, W, I, 156), is indubitably
as much a spokesman of the age and its public opinion as are men
of greater literary stature.

A large portion of Seume’s work alludes to England because of
her domineering role towards the end of the century both in
literature and politics, and perhaps because Seume’s unfortunate

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