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The movement produced poets, thinkers and journalists, all of whom reacted against the introspection and particularism of Romanticism. The Romantic Movement was seen as apolitical, lacking the activism that Germany’s burgeoning intelligentsia required. As a result of the decades of compulsory school attendance in German states, mass literacy meant an excess of educated males which the establishment could not subsume. Thus in the 1830s, with the advantage of the low cost printing press, there was a rush of educated males into the so-called ‘free professions’.