『我が生涯 第1巻』

By spring 1849, I knew my artistic career in Dresden was finished, and I drifted in a dull, restless haze, waiting for the pressure of political events to set me free. Tension was boiling across Germany, and I found myself half-hoping, half-dreading that the coming clash would swallow up my personal fate entirely. Then Liszt wrote: he was staging Tannhäuser in Weimar, the first production outside Dresden, and had invited Tichatschek to the first two performances. Tichatschek returned saying it was a success, and Liszt sent me a gold snuffbox I would use for years. He invited me to come for a third performance in mid-May, and I took leave from the theatre to go.

I barely had time to make plans before the storm broke. On May 1 the reactionary Beust ministry dissolved the Saxon Chambers, and my friend Röckel, who had been a deputy, lost his immunity from arrest. I helped him flee across the Bohemian border, and promised to keep his radical newspaper Volksblatt running to support his family. I was still setting type for the paper’s next issue on May 3 when the uprising I’d half-expected finally ignited. Emergency deputations, nightly mob protests, union meetings: the signs were everywhere. That afternoon I attended a Vaterlands-Verein committee meeting as Röckel’s representative, and saw immediately that the moderate leaders were utterly out of their depth, panicking at the militant energy of the working class crowds. I left with a young painter named Kaufmann, and as we reached Postplatz, the bells of St. Ann’s Church began to clang the alarm of revolt. Kaufmann cried out “Good God, it has begun!” and vanished; I never saw him again. The bell’s clang, the strange yellow-brown light that washed over the square like the eclipse I’d seen in Magdeburg years prior, filled me with a giddy, almost playful excitement. I stopped at Tichatschek’s house first, laughing at his wife’s terror as I advised her to hand his hunting rifle over to the Vaterlands-Verein for safekeeping, then wandered to the Old Market, where I ran into the opera singer Schröder-Devrient, just back from Berlin, furious that troops had fired on crowds in “peaceful Dresden.” She begged me to help stop the bloodshed, and I would later learn she was charged with sedition for her protests.