Written four years before the 1848 Revolution, Heine's Deutschland can be enjoyed as a funny read. In this "verse travelogue" Heine comments on the homeland he sees again after years of exile. Bull's-eyeing a number of targets--bourgeois lethargy, rampant Prussianism, phoney medievalism, German idealist philosophy--Europe's wittiest poet delightfully introduces the reader to "Germany's current ferment"--and to the idea that the value system of the German middle class helped to maintain social injustice and political oppression.