Politics
Hoffmann from early on had liberal leanings, meaning he supported German unity under a constitutional monarchy, democratic elections, freedom of the press, and equal rights for all male citizens including Jews (whose emancipation had suffered setbacks in many German states after "liberation" from Napoleonic rule). As a member of the city's legislative assembly he was (according to his own testimony) instrumental in opening the sessions to the public. His sense of equality was such that he founded a club ("Bürgerverein") which expressly inivited (male) members of all walks of life, including the uneducated and Jewish citizens. Also, he left his freemason's lodge after antisemitic tendencies took hold there. Seized with patriotic-democratic sentiment during the early days of the German 1848 revolution, he became a member of the Frankfurt preliminary national assembly that prepared the elections, but was soon disillusioned by the divisive and dogmatic, unproductive discussions that followed.
Read more about this topic: Heinrich Hoffmann (author)
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“The one thing sure about politics is that what goes up comes down and what goes down often comes up.”
—Richard M. Nixon (19131995)
“Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.”
—Peggy Noonan (b. 1950)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)