Along with the Grimm Brothers and August Spies, Gottlieb Theodor Kellner stands out as a harbinger of progressive politics in mid-nineteenth-century Hessen. Kellner was born in Kassel in 1819 where, in the wake of the revolutionary events of 1848, he became the founder of the satirical weekly Die Hornisse (The hornet). Forced to leave his hometown and country for political reasons (having been put under military arrest for treason in the building on the banks of the Fulda that today is the Haus der Jugend), Kellner moved to the US in the 1850s, eventually becoming editor-in-chief of the Philadelphia Demokrat, a leading German-language paper that ceased publication in 1918.