“Neue Rheinische Zeitung”

* Cologne, July 10. Yesterday eleven compositors of our newspaper and Herr
No. 41, July 11, 1848
Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
Clouth were subpoenaed as witnesses to appear on Tuesday, July 11, before the
examining magistrate’s office. The matter still concerns ascertaining the
author of the incriminated article. We recall that at the time of the old
“Rheinische Zeitung,” at the time of censorship and the Arnim ministry,
when they sought to ascertain the sender of the famous “Marriage Bill,” they
proceeded neither to house search nor to the interrogation of the compositors
and the printer’s owner. Since then we have certainly experienced a revolution,
which has the misfortune of being recognised by Herr Hansemann.

We must once more return to the “Reply” of State Prosecutor Hecker of July 6.
Herr Hecker gives us the lie in this reply with regard to one or another
utterance attributed to him. We perhaps now have the means in hand to
correct the correction, but who guarantees us that in this unequal struggle
the answer will not once again be given with §222 or §367 of the Penal Code?
Herr Hecker’s reply ends with the following words:
“The defamations or insults contained in the article (dated Cologne, July 4)
against Chief Public Prosecutor Zweiffel and the gendarmes who carried out
the arrest will receive their appreciation in the legal investigation that will be
instituted on that account.”
Their appreciation! Did the black-red-gold colours find their “appreciation”
in the “legal investigations” instituted under the Kamptz ministry!
Let us look up the Penal Code. We read §367:
“Whoever in a public place, or in an authentic and public document, or in a
printed or unprinted writing which has been posted, sold or distributed,
accuses any person of such facts as, if true, would expose the person to
whom they are imputed to criminal or correctional police prosecution, or even
only to the contempt or hatred of the citizens, is guilty of the crime of
defamation.”
§370. “If the fact constituting the subject of the accusation is proved true in
the legal manner, the author of the accusation shall be free from all
punishment. Only such proof as proceeds from a judgment or from any other
authentic document shall be regarded as legal proof.”
To elucidate this paragraph we add §368:
“Consequently, the author of the accusation shall not be heard in his defence
with the request to admit proof thereof; nor can he adduce as an excuse
that the evidence or the fact is notorious, or that the accusations which gave
rise to the prosecution have been copied or extracted from foreign papers or
other printed publications.”
The imperial era with its whole refined despotism shines out of these
sections.
According to ordinary common sense, someone is defamed when he is
accused of fictitious facts; but in the extraordinary sense of the Penal Code,
he is defamed when real facts are thrown at him, facts which can be proved,
but only not in an exceptional manner, only not by a judgment, by an official
document. Miraculous power of judgments and official documents! Only
convicted, only officially certified facts are true, are real facts. Has any code
of law ever more grievously defamed the most ordinary common sense? Has
bureaucracy ever thrown up a similar Chinese wall between itself and the
public? Shielded by this section, officials and deputies are inviolable like
constitutional kings. These gentlemen may commit as many facts “which
expose them to the hatred and contempt of the citizens” as they see fit, but
these facts may not be spoken, written, or printed under penalty of the loss of
civil rights, together with obligatory imprisonment and fine. Long live the
freedom of the press and speech tempered by §§367, 368, 370! One is
unlawfully imprisoned. The press denounces the unlawfulness. Result: The
denunciation finds its “appreciation” in a “legal investigation” for
“defamation” of the honourable official who committed the unlawfulness,
unless a miracle happens and a judgment has already been passed yesterday
on the unlawfulness he commits today.
No wonder that the Rhenish jurists and among them the people’s
representative Zweiffel voted against a Polish commission with absolute
powers! From their standpoint the Poles had to be condemned for
“defaming” the Colomb, Steinäcker, Hirschfeld, Schleinitz, Pomeranian
Landwehr men and old Prussian gendarmes to forfeiture of their civil rights
together with obligatory imprisonment and fine. Thus the peculiar
pacification of Posen would be most gloriously crowned.
And what a contradiction, with reference to these §§ of the Penal Code,
to christen the rumour of the threat of finishing off “the 19th of March, the
clubs and the freedom of the press” a defamation! As if the application of
§§367, 368, 370 of the Penal Code to political speeches and writings were
not the real definitive dispatch of the 19th of March and the clubs and the
freedom of the press! What is a club without freedom of speech? And what is
freedom of speech with §§367, 368, 370 of the Penal Code? And what is the
19th of March without clubs and freedom of speech? To suppress freedom of
speech and press by deed, is there any more striking proof that only
defamation could invent the intention of this deed? Take care not to sign the
address drawn up yesterday at the Gürzenich. The public prosecutor’s office
will “appreciate” your address by instituting a “legal investigation” for
“defamation” of Hansemann-Auerswald, or is it only the ministers who may
be defamed with impunity, defamed in the sense of the French Penal Code,
this code of political slavery hewn in lapidary style? Do we have responsible
ministers and irresponsible gendarmes?
It is not, therefore, the incriminated article that can find its appreciation
through the application of the sections on “defamation in the legal sense,”
defamation in the sense of a despotic fiction that outrages healthy common
sense. What can find its appreciation in it are solely and exclusively the
gains of the March revolution, the high point the counter-revolution has
reached, the boldness with which the bureaucracy may bring out and assert
the weapons still to be found in the arsenal of the old legislation against the
new political life. This application of the calumny article in attacks on people’s
representatives—what a splendid means to withdraw the gentlemen from
criticism and the press from the jury!
Let us pass from the charge of defamation to the charge of insult. Here
we encounter §222, which runs:
“When one or more persons in authority in the administrative or judicial
sphere suffer in the exercise of their official duties, or on account of such
exercise, any insult by words aimed at attacking their honour or their
delicacy, the person who has insulted them in this manner shall be punished
with imprisonment from one month to two years.”
Herr Zweiffel was functioning, when the article of the “Neue Rheinische
Zeitung” appeared, as a people’s representative in Berlin and by no means
as a person in authority in the judicial sphere at Cologne. Since he was not
exercising any official duties, it was factually impossible to insult him in the
exercise of his official duties or on account of that exercise. The honour and
delicacy of the gendarmes, however, would only be under the protection of
this section if they had been insulted by words (par parole). But we have
written and not spoken, and par écrit is not par parole. What then remains?
The moral, to speak with more circumspection of the lowest gendarme than
of the first prince, and in particular not to venture to lay hands on the highly
irritable gentlemen of the public prosecutor’s office. We once again draw the
attention of the public to the fact that the same persecutions have begun
simultaneously in various places, namely in Cologne, Düsseldorf, and
Koblenz. A strange method of chance!