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Most Germans went first to Great Britain to witness and describe what in comparison to the conditions in the German petty principalities was very progressive in its industrial advancement, free trade, extraordinary wealth-creation, very advanced civil rights and parliamentary democracy and to hold it up as a model to the Germans. Some then added on a trip to Ireland, which after all was a part of the political entity "The United Kingdom", to see, as they thought, more of the same. Instead they came face to face with the most abject poverty any of them had ever experienced, including the professional ethnographer Johann Georg Kohl, who had been all over Europe and as far as Siberia. For the Vormärz authors this raised questions as to why "John Bull's other island", as George Bernhard Shaw would much later call Ireland, was so utterly neglected

Hartmann and his Prague friends, whether German-Gentile or German-Jewish, rallied enthusiastically to the cause of what at first was a reawakening of suppressed Bohemic cultural nationalism and a move towards across-fertilisation of the two main lingual cultures (Czech/German) andthe three main ethnicities (Czech/German/Jewish) of the country. They soon saw themselves as a "Jungböhmische Bewegung" to correspond to Young Germany. The Prague writer Rudolf Glaser founded a literary journal called 'Ost und West' for the express purpose of bringing together German and Slavic literary impulses under the Goethean motto: "Orient und Occident sind nicht mehr zu trennen". With Bohemia as the bridge, 'Ost und West' published German translations from all the Slavic languages including Pushkin and Gogol, contributions by German writers sympathetic to the cause of emerging nations like Heinrich Laube, Ferdinand Freiligrath, Ernst Willkomm, but above all the Prague circle of Young Bohemians like Alfred Meissner, Isidor Heller, Uffo Horn, Gustav Karpeles and Ignatz Kuranda. Also Hartmann made his literary debut in the journal with a love poem entitled "Der Drahtbinder", and featuring a subtitle which was in keeping with the spirit of the times: "nach einem slavischen Lied".