Engels to Richard Stegemann  
in Tübingen  
(Draft)  

[London] 5 May 85

Dear Sir,

After careful consideration I definitely cannot comply with your wish.

Either the work you desire is brief, and then it can contain only assertions on my part and will remain assertoric and belletristic.

Or I must provide evidence, and then it becomes a book, and that cannot serve you, and I cannot write that incidentally and occasionally either; my material is far too voluminous for that.

Besides, there is also the objection to making me the more or less morally responsible co-editor of a work I know only from your short description.

Moreover the thing would be – within the permissible space – quite useless. My strongest assurances would leave the half-educated philistines, against whose prejudice you wish to work, utterly cold. The people who say that Marx “died friendless” must above all believe that I do not exist at all. And then declarations on my part are supposed to work magic?

The old wives’ tales invented by the vulgar-democratic emigration of 1850–59 and further spun out by the paid Bonapartist agent Karl Vogt – *il lui a été remis en 1859 – frs. 40,000*, say the Tuileries papers! – are perhaps more in vogue in your region than anywhere else, because the Swabian People’s Party is the direct heir of that emigration democracy and one or other of its leaders an intimate of the said Vogt. Since Marx already settled all that in *Herr Vogt*, there is no reason for me to go back into it just now, of all times. So enormously much has been lied about Marx without his deeming it worth the trouble to reply. The time may come when it becomes necessary for me to do this for him, but then it will be my own affair to choose time, place, and modus operandi. And then it will just be said again that I too am “heartless”.

In any case, at this moment I do not have the time to do anything in this direction that would correspond to the purpose and satisfy my own requirements for such a work. My whole time is taken up with editing Marx’s manuscripts, and I am unquestionably acting in his spirit when, in view of this duty, I treat all the philistine cackling with contempt.

With great respect and devotedly yours