* Cologne, 10 February. With the best will, we were unable last week (No. 219, 11 February 1849, second edition, *Neue Rheinische Zeitung*) to take account even of our best friends, our nearest neighbours. Other business – familiar to all – kept us out of breath. Let us now hasten to make up for what we have missed, and let us turn our gaze first to the neighbouring publicists.

The Division of Labour at the *Kölnische Zeitung*

The division of labour is carried out at the *Kölnische Zeitung* with a rare ensemble. Let us disregard the more remote parts of the paper, the third and fourth pages, where the noble Wolfers sings the praises of Belgium and does his utmost to get Henry V back onto the throne of his ancestors and to have a constitution “on the Belgian model” octroyed; let us confine ourselves to the frontispiece, the first page. Here our friend Schücking occupies the little back parlour and there displays, for the connoisseur, the newest products of his doctrinaire fantasy and his fantastic doctrinairism, in prose and in verse. Who does not know the interesting “Political Conversations” in which the talented author laboured to peel – he says so himself – a Mephistopheles out of the pigskin of a German professor and brought to light only a Wagner? Upstairs from the back parlour, however, on the first floor, Herr DuMont opens his spacious political salons, and here it is the great men Brüggemann and Schwanbeck (not to be confused with Weißbrodt) who do the honours of the house. Brüggemann for the thinking part, for the rescuing of the principle in all shipwrecks, for the preservation of the legal ground despite all earthquakes, for the elegiac genre, for swan songs and requiems. Schwanbeck for the declamatory part, for the sublime lyrical, for moral indignation, for the dithyramb and the storm. Drunk with enthusiasm his phrase rises to the highest heights of Olympus, and if its step is not always secure, it yet remains ever rhythmical, and indeed it is to him we owe almost all the involuntary hexameters in which the *Kölnische Zeitung* is so rich.

The first who meets us today is that very same soaring Schwanbeck. He enlightens us, Cologne, 7 February, on the afterpains of absolutism and the afterpains of the revolution.

The great Schwanbeck pours out the whole cup of his wrath over the Prussian people, because it either did not vote at all or voted badly.

“This National Assembly is supposed to put the finishing touch to the construction of a constitutional-monarchical state, and yet – who still doubts that some in it will undermine this construction, because they are no longer monarchical, the others, because they are still absolutist but not yet constitutional, both because they are simply not constitutional-monarchical? From the opposite poles the storms will then blow, a done-away-with past will struggle with a distant, perhaps never attainable future, and – who knows whether in the process the present will not be lost!”

Let us observe the tremendous forceful style that wrests itself into existence from these classical lines. Every sentence a gnarled, compact whole, every word stamped with the seal of moral indignation. Let us picture as vividly as possible the struggle between the “done-away-with past” and the “distant, perhaps never attainable future”. Who does not seem to see how the “perhaps never attainable future” is nevertheless caught up with by the “done-away-with past”, how the two, like Furies, fall to tearing each other’s hair, and how, while the storms blow from the opposite poles, precisely because the one is unattainable and the other done away with, the present gets more and more lost!

Let us not think this petty. For if we are permitted a judgement on such great men, we must say: with Brüggemann the thought is accustomed to running away with the style, with Schwanbeck, on the other hand, the style runs away with the thought.

And indeed, in virtuous indignation, whose style would not run away when one sees how an assembly to which not only the King of Prussia but even the *Kölnische Zeitung* itself has given the mission of putting the finishing touch to the construction of a constitutional-monarchical state, how such an assembly should be formed of people who, for the said well-meaning purpose, are sitting either too far left or even much too far right? Particularly when “from the opposite poles the storms blow” and the *Kölnische Zeitung*’s “present is lost”!

Bad enough for the *Kölnische Zeitung* when the people elect deputies who do not want what, according to the *Kölnische Zeitung*, they “ought” to want; worse still for the people, however, if they mock the Cassandra voice of a Schwanbeck and, instead of a constitutional-monarchical model man from the “great centre of the nation”, elect people who are either no longer monarchical or not yet constitutional. *Tu l’as voulu, George Dandin!* Schwanbeck will exclaim mournfully when the mighty conflict between the done-away-with future and the perhaps never attainable past devours the present!

“In other words, the symptoms of reaction and the symptoms of a new, or rather a permanent, revolution have not failed to appear.”

After this remarkable acquisition, Cassandra Schwanbeck casts a glance at Austria. This glance at Austria is seeing with Schwanbeck. Austria is his second fatherland; here he once burned with indignation at the tyranny of the Viennese demagogy, here he now devours Magyars, here at last the sublime dithyrambist is overcome by a gentler feeling, a faint pang of conscience at the summary-court amnesties of powder and lead. Hence the tender glance that the prophetic seer casts across to Austria in each of his leading articles.

“What has changed now? (in Austria, that is.) Unboundedness of bureaucracy, of democracy, of military power have relieved one another, and in the end everything has remained the same!”

Sad result of revolutions, melancholy consequence of the fact that peoples will never listen to the voices of unrecognised Cassandras!

“In the end everything has remained the same!” The traditional, inherited Metternich government is certainly different in some respects from the present counter-revolutionary military rule, and, in particular, the good-natured Austrian people of Metternich’s time is a quite different people from the present revolutionary, teeth-gnashing people; moreover, in all history up to now counter-revolution has always led only to a much more thorough-going, bloodier revolution; but what does that matter? “in the end everything has remained the same” and despotism remains despotism.

The philistine pub-politicians who make up “the great centre of the German nation”, to use a Schwanbeck expression, those worthy souls who, at every momentary counter-blow, cry out: What good has rebellion done, we are just where we were before; these profound experts on history, who never see further than two steps ahead, will be delighted when they find that the great Schwanbeck stands on exactly the same standpoint as themselves.

After this unavoidable glance at Austria, Cassandra goes back over to Prussia and prepares for a glance into the future. The elements of reaction and the elements of revolution are duly weighed against each other. The Crown and its servants, Wrangel, the states of siege (along with pious wishes for their lifting), the Prussian Leagues are subjected one after the other to a thorough examination. Then it continues:

“Yet with all that, we must confess to ourselves that the number of our reactionaries does not exactly weigh heavily in the balance. Worse is it that the great centre of the people has been so thoroughly accustomed to absolutism that it simply cannot find its way into self-government, and that – out of sheer laziness. You, who stayed away in such masses from those elections ... you are the true absolutists! ... In the whole world there is no more disgusting sight than a people that is too lazy for a free political life.”

“Great centre of the German people”, thou art not worthy of thy Schwanbeck!

This “centre of the people”, which “is too lazy for a free political life”, turns out later to be none other than the bourgeoisie. A painful confession; barely sweetened by the simultaneous self-indulgence of moral indignation at this disgraceful “indolence” of the great centre of the nation!

“But matters stand far worse with regard to the afterpains of the revolution. Our people is richer than we could have suspected in enthusiastic and fantastic natures, in skilful demagogues (a naïve confession!), and in thoughtless crowds who possess not a trace of political education. Only the year 1848 was to show us what massive elements of anarchy were scattered about in this quiet, justice-loving, thoughtful people, how an obscure itch for revolutions gained ground, and how the comfortable means (to be sure, much ‘more comfortable’ than writing profound leading dithyrambs in the *Kölnische*!) of revolutionising was to pass as a panacea...”

While the “centre” is too lazy, the periphery, the “rabble”, the “thoughtless crowds”, are too industrious. The “skilful demagogues”, united with the “massive elements of anarchy”, cannot fail, in the face of the “laziness” and “indolence” of the bourgeoisie, to arouse sombre forebodings in the soul of a Schwanbeck!

„So ist nun einmal der naturgemäße Gang: der Stoß ruft den Gegenstoß hervor.“
With this further great thought-achievement, which must still serve as the theme for several florid variations, Cassandra passes to the conclusion and draws up the following balance-sheet:5
“The straight road to genuine free political life is only reached where the great centre of the nation, the vigorous and intelligent bourgeoisie, has become sufficiently united and powerful to make these aberrations to the right and to the left an impossibility. Before us lies a North German paper in which ... it is written: ‘...the bourgeoisie has already now gained the upper hand over10 both extremes of the Left and the Right, and to this party alone belongs the future!’ We fear that this jubilation is still premature; if proof is wanted, well, ‘the elections in Prussia will furnish it’.”
That is the great, morally indignant dirge of the latest Cassandra upon the perversity of this wicked world which refuses to march in time with the Kölnische Zeitung. That is the result of Schwanbeck’s researches into the “bygone past”, the “distant, perhaps never attainable future” and the “present” called into question: the real, decisive struggle is waged not between the feudal-bureaucratic monarchy and the bourgeoisie, nor between the bourgeoisie and the people; it is waged between the monarchy and the people, between the absolutists and the republicans; and the bourgeoisie, the constitutionalists, withdraw from the field of battle.
Whether the bourgeoisie has really withdrawn from the struggle, whether it has done so out of idleness or out of weakness, and what the elections in Prussia prove—upon this we shall here enter into no further glosses. Enough, the Kölnische Zeitung admits that in the present struggle the bourgeoisie no longer stands in the front rank, that it is no longer its interests that are at stake, that the struggle is waged for absolute monarchy or republic.
And now let the Neue Rheinische Zeitung since November of last year be compared, and let it be said whether we have not in every number and on every occasion, at the time of the Viennese counter-revolution, at the time of the Berlin counter-revolution, at the time of the octroying, set forth, whether we have not in the long article “The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution” and in several articles prior to the indirect elections expounded at length, how it was the weakness and cowardice of the German bourgeoisie that made the counter-revolution possible, and how the counter-revolution for its part thrust the bourgeoisie aside and made the direct struggle between the

remnants of feudal society and the extreme peaks of modern society, between monarchy and republic, inevitable! What we developed three months ago as historically necessary from the course of the German revolution, of that the Kölnische Zeitung develops a faint and nebulous presentiment as the 5 result of haruspicial divination-snufflings in the entrails of the election urn of 5 March. And this faint, nebulous presentiment passes for such a discovery that it is forthwith served up piping hot to the benevolent public for its enjoyment in the whole bloated and tumescent form of a Δ -leading article. Naive woman of Cologne!