Karl Marx

The Situation in Prussia

From the English.

["New-York Daily Tribune" Nr. 5548 vom 1. Februar 1859]

Berlin, January 11, 1859

You know the German proverb: “Where there is nothing, the emperor loses his right” [in the “N.-Y. D. T.” in English and German], and this law of nothingness, which commands even so mighty a personality as an emperor, cannot, of course, be flouted by your correspondent. Where nothing happens, there is nothing to report. This is the deeper reason that has induced me to place an embargo for some weeks on my dispatches from the “capital of intelligence”, the central residence, if not of secular power, at least of the “world spirit” [“world spirit”: in the “N.-Y. D. T.” in German]. The first phase of the Prussian movement ended with the general elections, while the second begins tomorrow with the opening of the Diet. As I gather from a batch of German-American newspapers sent to me, many American sons of Teut have adopted my views on the situation here, which I developed in earlier contributions, without indicating the source from which they drew their wisdom; these views of mine have in the meantime been fully confirmed by the slovenly and sluggish – I cannot say progress of things, but rather their worm-like crawling forward, without legs, belly to the ground, as Dr. Johnson of pedantic memory would presumably have called it. German miles are longer than those of any other nation, but the steps with which the Germans pace off the ground are all the shorter, and quite considerably so. It is for this very reason that they always dream in their fairy tales of seven-league boots, which give the lucky

possessor the ability to cover a league with every stride.

The past ten years in the history of this country have been judged so one-sidedly (to use a favourite word of the Germans, who, like Buridan’s scholastic ass, are so many-sided that they are stuck in a fix every moment) that a few general reflections do not appear out of place. When the king with the brainless head ascended the throne, he was full of chimeras from the Romantic school. He wanted to be king by the grace of God and at the same time a popular king; wanted to be surrounded by an independent aristocracy in the midst of an all-powerful bureaucratic administration; wanted to be the supreme lord of the barracks and at the same time a man of peace; wanted to promote the rights of the people in the medieval sense and at the same time oppose all aspirations of modern liberalism; wanted to revive ecclesiastical faith and at the same time boast of the intellectual superiority of his subjects; in a word: he wanted to play the medieval king and act as King of Prussia – this miscarriage of the eighteenth century! Yet from 1840 to 1848 everything went wrong. The country Junkers [Landjunker: in the “N.-Y. D. T.” German], having placed their hopes on the crowned collaborator of the “Politisches Wochenblatt”, which had preached day in, day out that the prosaic rule of the schoolmaster, the sergeant, the policeman, the tax collector and the learned mandarin must be grafted with the poetic rule of the aristocracy, saw themselves compelled to receive the secret sympathies of the king instead of real concessions. The bourgeoisie, still too weak to venture upon active steps, felt obliged to trot along behind the theoretical army led by Hegel’s disciples against the religion, the ideas and the politics of the old world. In no earlier period was philosophical criticism so bold, so powerful and so popular as in the first eight years of the rule of Frederick William IV, who wished to replace the “shallow” rationalism introduced by Frederick II into Prussia with medieval mysticism. Philosophy owed its power during this period exclusively to the practical weakness of the bourgeoisie; because the bourgeois were unable to storm the decrepit institutions in reality, they had to give precedence to the bold idealists who stormed against them in the realm of thought. Ultimately, the romantic king himself, like all his predecessors, was only the visi-

ble hand of an ordinary bureaucratic government, which he sought in vain to embellish with the tender sentiments of a bygone age.

The revolution, or rather the counter-revolution that emerged from it, gave things an entirely new face. The country Junkers transformed the private whims of the king into practical advantages, and succeeded in thrusting the government back into an earlier time – not behind 1848, not behind 1815, but even behind 1807. The timid, romantic aspirations were over; in their place appeared a Prussian Upper House; mortmain [Tote Hand] was restored, the patrimonial jurisdiction of the Junker flourished more luxuriantly than ever, exemption from taxation again became a hallmark of the nobility; police and officials had to bow and scrape before the nobles, all influential posts were reserved for the scions of the landed aristocracy and the petty nobility; the enlightened officials of the old school were driven out, to be replaced by subservient parasites from the ranks of rent-masters and estate owners; and all the freedoms won by the revolution: freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, constitutional representation – all these freedoms were not abolished, but perpetuated as privileges of the aristocratic class. If, on the other hand, the bourgeoisie had fostered the philosophical movement in the past period, the aristocracy now rooted it out and put Pietism in its place. Every enlightened professor was expelled from the university, and the viri obscuri [obscurantists], the Hengstenbergs, the Stahls and tutti quanti [their like] seized hold of all educational institutions in Prussia, from the village school to the university seminary in Berlin. The police and administrative machinery was not smashed, but transformed into a pure instrument of the ruling class. Even freedom of trade had to serve, and just as the concession system was made a powerful instrument of favouritism, intimidation and corruption, so the artisans in the large towns were once again forced into guilds, corporations and all the other extinct forms of a bygone epoch. Thus the boldest dreams of the king, which had remained dreams during the eight years of his absolute regime, were all realised thanks to the revolution and shone forth during the eight years from 1850 to 1857 as tangible realities in the broadest daylight.

But the medal has a reverse side. The revolution had scattered

the ideological illusions of the bourgeoisie, and the counter-revolution had put an end to its political pretensions. Thus it was thrown back on its real branches of acquisition – trade and industry –, and I do not believe that any other people during the last decade has made such a relatively immense leap in this direction as the Germans, and particularly the Prussians. Anyone who saw Berlin ten years ago would not recognise it today. From a stiff parade ground it has been transformed into the bustling centre of German machine-building. If one travels through Rhenish Prussia and the Duchy of Westphalia, one is reminded of Lancashire and Yorkshire. If Prussia cannot boast an Isaac Péreire, it nonetheless possesses hundreds of Mevissens at the head of more crédits mobiliers than the German Federal Diet counts princes.

The passion to become rich, to get ahead, to open new mines, to erect new factories, to build new railways and above all to invest money in joint-stock companies and to speculate in shares, became the passion of the day and seized all classes, from the peasant to the prince with the coronet who had once been an immediate prince of the Empire. Thus the days when the bourgeoisie wept in Babylonian captivity and hung its humiliated heads were the very days when it became the real power in the land, where even the haughty aristocrat transformed himself in the depths of his soul into a profit-hungry, money-grubbing stock-exchange jobber. If you want an example of how speculative philosophy has turned into commercial speculation, cast a glance at the Hamburg of 1857. Did not the speculative Germans there prove themselves masters in the field of swindling? To be sure, this upward development of the Prussian bourgeoisie, which was reinforced by the general rise in commodity prices and the consequent general fall in the fixed incomes of their bureaucratic rulers, was naturally accompanied by the ruin of the petty bourgeoisie and the concentration of the working class. The ruin of the petty bourgeoisie during the past eight years is a general phenomenon that can be observed throughout Europe, but nowhere so pronounced as in Germany. Does this phenomenon require any explanation? I answer with one word: Look at today’s millionaires who were poor devils only yesterday. For a have-nothing to become a millionaire overnight, a thousand $1,000-owners must have been turned into beggars during the day. The magic of the stock exchange accomplishes such things in a trice, quite apart from the slower methods by which modern industry

centralises wealth. In Prussia, therefore, during the past ten years, along with the bourgeoisie, a discontented petty bourgeoisie and a concentrated working class have developed.

It is time to send off this letter, although I have not yet completed my “Rundschau” [“Rundschau”: in the “N.-Y. D. T.” in German], as the “Neue Preußische Zeitung” calls this kind of retrospective survey.