"Neue Rheinische Zeitung" – The Political Trial

The Political Trial

["Neue Rheinische Zeitung" No. 218, 10 February 1849]

From Weimar
, 3 February. Under this date the following is sent to the Frankf[urt] J[ournal]:

“The days are now at last approaching in which our first jury court here is to pronounce its verdict on the political investigations before it. After the opening of the proceedings had been postponed from week to week, it is now, as one hears, at last definitively fixed for the 15th of this month. The sittings will be opened with the trial against the leaders of the democratic party arrested here and in Jena in October of last year: Dr. Lafaurie, Candidate Rothe, Student Amelung, Dr. Otto, and the writer Jäde. These are almost the only ones, out of the masses arrested in those days, against whom the public prosecutor has been able to find material for an indictment at all. The investigation against the writer Deinhard of this town, who was also arrested at the time, has yielded so little that the public prosecutor, after Deinhard had sat for two months in the insalubrious dungeons of our criminal court, was not even able to frame an indictment against him. Candidate Lange of Jena, who was likewise captured at that time, suffered four haemorrhages in the dungeon at Weimar and was then taken, half dead, to his parents at Jena, where he died shortly afterwards, on 7 January of this year, after having been examined there again by the criminal court for three consecutive days. Our jurors, however, will be astonished when the proceedings present to them, instead of the widely disseminated and discussed allegedly high-treasonous plans, the simple, petty facts on which the charges against the above-named are based.”

(At its next victory, the people will hopefully not, as in March, be so foolish or forgetful as to leave all its torturers in office and honours. Rather, as may be fairly safely assumed, it will hasten to subject the whole gang of reactionary officials, and among them first of all the bloodthirsty hypocrites of the law, also called “judges”, to a half-year’s investigation in Pennsylvania prisons and then to employ them for further treatment in railway and highway construction.)