Time at University & Fraternities @museum.de

M: "Everything here is different from back home, the people are livelier, more enlightened [...] there are calls for freedom of the press [...], even jury trials, and Jena seems to be a centre for the liberals; all the banned newspapers are publicly read out loud here in the pubs to resounding applause."

F: After an initial stay in Rostock, which he found boring and confining, Reuter moved to the student city of Jena in Thuringia, where a freer spirit prevailed. Reuter was full of enthusiasm, though even there, he only displayed moderate interest in pursuing the law degree on which his father insisted. But he enjoyed student life to the full.

M: And that included, above all, the fraternities that met in the pubs. Reuter – who'd been made aware of the fraternities' cause by his grammar school teacher Karl Horn – joined one called Germania. This Jena fraternity demanded freedom of the press, the abolition of the estates and the overthrow of the monarchy and a united Germany.

F: When Reuter realised the scope and explosive nature of those demands, he resigned from the fraternity after just six months. In February 1833, he also turned his back on Jena. A wave of repression was about to be launched. And in April, after the storming of Frankfurt's Konstablerwache watch house by revolutionary students had failed, an out-and-out hunt for those decried as rabble-rousers began throughout Thuringia.

M: Reuter was safe in Mecklenburg. But he wanted to continue his studies, and in the winter semester of 1833, he started looking for a new university.