Why encumber themselves with this pushy, opinionated, conceited, publicity-seeking soixante-huitard (sixty-eighter)—and a German, to boot?
As Adam Michnik told Mr Kurlansky: "I can recognise a sixty-eighter in a second.
The reign of Cuza, a forty-eighter, was a crucial stage in the achievement of independent statehood.
In the 1850s forty-eighters led the struggle for the union of Moldavia and Walachia, which they regarded as an essential preliminary to independence.
In Moldavia the prince quickly put down their agitation for reform, but in Walachia more-radical "forty-eighters" established a provisional government to carry out reform and prevent foreign intervention.
Forty-eighters, as the revolutionaries were known, made up a significant portion of the German-American population; chief among them was Carl Schurz, who supported Lincoln, was elected a senator from Missouri, and served as Rutherford B. Hayes's Secretary of the Interior.
The "Forty-Eighters," as they came to be known, brought with them their commitments to participatory democracy and radical reform.
Yet the libertarian impulse of the sixty-eighters was also a driving force behind his own work.
In Quentin Tarantino's fictional western on slavery, "Django Unchained," perhaps by the articulate German bounty hunter posing as a dentist (Christoph Waltz's character isn't pure fantasy; many "Forty Eighters," refugees from the failed 1848 revolution in the German states, were political radicals and staunchly antislavery).
Out in St . Louis we visit the Forty-Eighters -- reviled as the "Damned Dutch" by the Missouri secessionists -- refugees from the failed revolution against the monarchs of the German Confederation, who discovered in the slaveholders "exactly what they had come here to escape: a swaggering clique of landed oligarchs, boorish aristocrats obstructing the forces of modernity and progress".
