The reference is to German or “true socialism” which was widespread in Germany in the 1840s, mostly among petty-bourgeois intellectuals. The “true socialists” – Karl Grün, Moses Hess, Hermann Kriege – substituted the sentimental preaching of love and brotherhood for the ideas of socialism and denied the need for a bourgeois-democratic revolution in Germany. Marx and Engels criticised this trend in the following works: The German Ideology, Circular Against Kriege, German Socialism in Verse and Prose and Manifesto of the Communist Party.