Reply by Hugo Wesendonk

* Cologne. Mr. Wesendonk sends us a statement which we reproduce here – with the exception of a concluding remark entirely irrelevant to the matter, concerning the house of Frau von Hatzfeldt –:

No. 219, 11 February 1849.
Supplement
Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

Mr. Editor!
Your newspaper contains in No. 213 a brief report on my activities here since March of last year. – I esteem the sharp criticism in your paper none the less because it keeps just as strict a watch over all parties and all persons. But – I would commend a little more truth in the facts to your correspondent. Thus you are this time given several untruths about me:
It is untrue that I appeared as a Republican at the time of the Pre-Parliament and then changed after the Pre-Parliament. On the contrary, it was precisely after the Pre-Parliament that I declared myself a Republican. Yet I found and still find no contradiction with this conviction in the fact that I also sought to bring democracy to bear in the existing monarchy. I was elected to Frankfurt, and there I fought for the republican form of state at the founding of the Germany not yet in existence. Your correspondent seems to see a change in this. I do not know by what right? –
Four months ago I came here for a short visit. – One day one could read on every street corner: “this evening, meeting of the people’s club; agenda: difference between the red and the white republic”. Towards ten in the evening I found at home an invitation, with the request to give a lecture on this difference, as well as on the Frankfurt barricade fight. As I did not appear, this lecture did not take place. Whether in this lecture that was never delivered, or in some other way, I appeared to your correspondent as a “Red”, he offers no explanation. He merely asserts that I appeared to him as such.

Moreover, I am prepared to come to an understanding with him about the red colour.
Your correspondent further attacks a statement on the octroyed constitution allegedly made by me in the Düsseldorfer Zeitung. Strangely enough, this statement does not exist at all, except in the imagination of your correspondent.
Finally, you are told that my programme as a candidate for the Second Chamber did not please. What the programme consisted of, your correspondent did not write.
But if, as he explains in No. 214, he means by that the recognition of the constitution of 5 December last year, then he has foisted a programme upon me which I have nowhere set forth. I have declared, and declare, that I would consider it a political mistake to repeat in Berlin the motion I expediently moved in Frankfurt, to declare the constitution null and void. But that I do not recognise the constitution as legally valid, and that on this question I would answer with the previous question, or in the event with “No”, I have likewise repeatedly stated.
I request you, Mr. Editor, to grant this reply a place in the same part of your paper in which you published the report. The reply which you criticise in No. 214, without communicating it, is alien to me.
Düsseldorf, 8 February 1849.
Wesendonk.

We note that the article under attack dealt primarily with an assessment of the political conduct of Mr. Wesendonk. That Mr. Wesendonk himself may hold a different view from that of our correspondent is easy to understand, and Mr. Wesendonk has the right to hold and express this different opinion. But it is no less understandable that this divergent expression of opinion decides nothing in the matter itself.
(The Editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.)