Andreas Lenz

Andreas Lenz, a 48er, is a literary figure imagined by Stefan Heym who wrote about his hero’s role in the Baden Revolution and his death in the Civil War. The novel based on fictitious Lenz Papers and called alike has autobiographic traits.  Nearly 100 years later than Hecker, Struve and Sigel Heym had to emigrate to the States not because he was a persecuted revolutionary but a Jew. There are parallels but also important differences between his and Lenz's life cycle but this is a different story. Heym took the tombstone of a Captain Andrew Lenz in Gettysburg as a starting point for the book he wrote in English in 1964 while resident in the German Democratic Republic.

Lenz, soldier, poet, ballad-monger and womanizer during Baden's Revolution served in the Civil War as Colonel in Carl Schurz's Regiment. On July 3, 1863, under fire in Gettysburg he writes a letter to his pregnant wife just before he died: The parallel [between the Civil War in Baden and this one] goes deep. It lies in the issues, clouded as they may appear, different as they may present themselves in a small German Grand Duchy and in the United States, fourteen years later. Now, after the emancipation proclamation, the revolutionary character of this civil war has become undeniable; the faint bugles of our skirmishes along the Neckar, of the battle at Waghäusel, and of Rastatt are finding a resounding echo today among the boulders of cemetery Ridge, from Little Round Top in the south to Culp’s Hill at the other end of the position, and across no man’s land at Seminary Ridge where the forces of slavery have assembled.  [Heym05].

In merging his German origin and his American education Stefan Heym is spanning an arch between the Baden Revolution and the Civil War,