The opportunity to bind the loyalty of those classes participating in the political debate to the individual German states was lost in the years following the War of Liberation and the Congress of Vienna. This became apparent immediately after the war. The enormous collective spiritual impetus was followed by disenchantment and the poetry gradually faded. Above all it was the Volunteers, mainly students and artisans, who had been drawn into the war with unprecedented enthusiasm and were driven not only by a considerable need for action, a search for excitement and for a new adventurous existence, but who also attempted to equate their experiences with the words of their songs, words such as ‘God’, ‘Freedom’, ‘Fatherland’, ‘Germany’, ‘Altar’, ‘Dedicated’, ‘Volk’ and ‘Holy’. These songs, sung and composed by them, gave rise to a new forcible and direct language, which summoned up vistas of sworn companionship and harmony, of readiness for sacrifice and a quasi-religious transcendence of the individual into the nation as a whole. The taking of Paris and the final victory over Napoleon at Waterloo marked a sudden end to this intoxication; the young people were supposed to become sensible, to return to their lecture halls, their counters and workshops. They were supposed to trust in the wisdom of the bureaucratic and princely authorities, now conferring in Vienna about how to restore Europe's ancient order, how to talk away the young Germans' dream of the unity and freedom of their Fatherland, and, in the eyes of many, how to betray it. On the economic side too, there were problems.