In the first half of the 19th century there was a revolt in the central state of Hesse, led by Georg Büchner, the well-known German writer, and a fellow rebel, Pastor Weidig. Büchner wrote a kind of declaration of peasant rights against the tyranny of the landholders of the time, and once that declaration was made public, Büchner escaped to Strasbourg, and then to Zurich where he was killed in 1937, at the age of 23.