《我的生平——第一卷》

Unrest soon hit Leipzig itself, when students clashed with police and a group were arrested in a street brawl. Wagner joined a mass student march to the University’s Paulinum building to demand their release; Rector Krug met them bareheaded to announce the prisoners had already been freed, but the crowd’s revolutionary energy did not dissipate. Rumors spread that a corrupt magistrate was protecting a local brothel, and the crowd turned to exact “popular justice.” Wagner got caught up in the frenzy, smashing furniture alongside his fellow students, driven not by moral outrage but by the intoxicating pull of the mob’s rage. The next night, lower-class residents copied the students’ example and began attacking employers and wealthy townsfolk. With no soldiers in the city and the police disorganized, the authorities deputized the students to guard property, and Wagner found himself living out his schoolboy fantasies as part of Leipzig’s unofficial student militia, stationed at town gates and patrolling merchant grounds, feted by the town council. He ingratiated himself with leading students, especially after his brother-in-law’s printing press was targeted in the unrest, and celebrated weeks of raucous hospitality with the university’s most notorious rowdies.

When the Easter vacation arrived and most regular club members left town, Wagner was left among “wandering students”: expelled rowdies from other German universities who had taken refuge in Leipzig during the unrest. He formed close bonds with Gebhardt, a supernaturally strong man, and Degelow, a fiery, sharp-tongued seasoned duelist whose dry wit made him a legend. Through them he met Schroter, an older, witty Hanoverian who introduced him to Heinrich Heine’s poetry, the first real friend Wagner felt he had ever had. Wagner joined a sham “Freshman’s Club” at St. Thomas’s to fast-track his student status, but the masters refused to recognize his credentials, so he dropped out and matriculated at the university as a Studiosus Musicae, then raced to earn his place in the popular Saxonia club before the regular members returned.