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In Die Epigonen, one of the long list of representatives of the species of novels which began with Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Immermann tried to present the development of a young man and a picture of the principal social forces of his period.
Immermann first thought of writing a new Münchhausen in 1821, the year of his satirical comedy, The Princes of Syracuse, which contains the embryonic idea of this "history in arabesques."
In his Merlin he treated a conflict which was fundamentally similar to that of Grillparzer's Libussa. Yet Grillparzer, much more one-sided than he, possessed the true Romantic-mystic quality, whereas Immermann had to elaborate his symbolism with the patchwork of careful, allegoric analysis.
Immermann, following Baron von Stein, believed that the health and future of society, endangered by the corrupt and dissipated nobility, rested, on the sturdy, self-reliant, individualistic yet severely moral and patriotic, small peasant.
Karl Lebrecht Immermann was born in Magdeburg, in April, 1796. His father, who held a good position in the Civil Service, was a very severe and domineering man; his mother, imaginative and over-indulgent. Karl's childhood and early youth were uneventful. After passing through the regular course of preparatory education in a "Gymnasium," he entered, in 1813, the University of Halle.
Immermann wrote a number of dramas, highly romantic, in which the passion and strife within him found varied expression. The play which made him known beyond his immediate circle, was Cardenio and Celinde, the conflict of which was suggested by his own. Elisa was finally divorced from Luetzow. Immermann was appointed a judge in Magdeburg, and later in Duesseldorf. He asked Elisa to marry him.
But one day Münchhausen, the prince of liars and chief of swindlers, accompanied by his servant, Karl Buttervogel, the Sancho Panza of the story, comes to the castle. His presence enlivens; his interminable stories, through which Immermann satirizes the tendencies of the time, delight at first, then tire, then become intolerable.
It is in the fact that he united in himself the principal factors which made up the complexion of his age, to an extraordinary degree, that he has his strongest claim upon the sympathetic and studious interest of the modern age. In them, Immermann tried to embody the dominant moral and intellectual tendencies, as he saw them in history and his own times.
Here, in this conservative old town, began one of the most extraordinary relations between man and woman in modern German literary history. Immermann fell in love with Countess Elisa von Luetzow-Ahlefeldt, wife of the famous old commander of volunteers, Brigadier-General von Luetzow.
This move resulted in the dissolution of the accused fraternity and in governmental hostility to all fraternities, and brought the hatred and contempt of the radicals on Immermann. Immermann acted undoubtedly from sincere motives, yet deserved much of the condemnation he suffered.
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