Vol. X of the historical-critical edition of Eichendorff's works contains his historical political writings. Some of these texts have only been re-discovered recently and are published here for the first time in a genetic form. The textual material, most of which was not published during the author's lifetime, sheds new light on Eichendorff. The texts demonstrate that he was not the unworldly romantic as which he has often been presented in literary history, but that he took an active interest in the turbulent political events of his time. Thus, his final dissertation for his study of law from 1818/19 deals with the consequences of secularisation, and contemporary events led him to write a variety of essays on the constitutional question and press law at the beginning of the 1830s.
