Gottfried Kinkel - Revolutionary

Revolutionary

In 1848, with his wife and Carl Schurz, he started a newspaper, the Bonner Zeitung, mostly devoted to following revolutionary activities, but also providing the traditional material such as musical and theatrical reviews that people expected then from a full-service newspaper.

Kinkel joined the armed rebellion in the Palatinate in 1849, believing himself to be acting legally in obedience to the directives of the Frankfurt Parliament. In a battle he was wounded and arrested and later sentenced to life imprisonment. Although the authorities originally sentenced him to be incarcerated in a fortress where he would have been able to pursue some semblance of his professional activities, Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia found this sentence to be illegal since he was not sentenced to death and “graciously” commuted it to lifetime imprisonment in a reformatory where his head was shaved, and he had to wear prisoner's garb and spend his time spinning wool. He was eventually transferred to Spandau in Berlin, where his friend and former student Carl Schurz helped him escape the prison at Spandau and reach London, England in November 1850.