He at once joined the Burschenschaft, which had been organized ten years previously and now concealed itself under the name Waffenverbindung (weaponry association).
Other events conspired to make Heine loathe this period of his life: he was expelled from a student fraternity for anti-Semitic reasons and he heard the news that his cousin Amalie had become engaged.
He was influenced by the Burschenschaft movement of the early nineteenth century, which developed out of frustration among German students with the failure of the Congress of Vienna to create a unified state out of all the territories inhabited by the German people.
Here he was a member of the political students' club, or German Burschenschaft, and in 1833 was arrested in Berlin by the Prussian government and interned at Fort Silberberg in Silesia.