Cologne, 3 February [1849] 

Dear Dronke, 

Your letter,.passed on to me by Engels, I shall answer briefly as 
follows: 

1. As regards your coming here: When I wrote ‘Don’t come to 
Germany until I write to you’, Kratz had told me that your case 
was not yet quite settled.” 

2. Later I wrote to Kapp instead of to you because Kapp was 
bombarding me with threatening letters. The draft I gave Kapp 
wasn’t honoured by Korff. In the meantime I had declared at the 
shareholders’ meeting that either Korff or I must resign from the 
paper.* Moreover, during this period Plasman had again sequestered 
the postage money, and the paper, as Engels discovered on his 
arrival, was expecting to announce its insolvency any day. 

3. As regards the Meyerbeer business, I know nothing whatever 
about it. You will appreciate that in a situation in which the 
compositors were daily rebelling over a few talers, I would hardly 
have spurned 150 talers. 

4. As regards my letter about Kapp, I was justified in writing it. 
During the most ghastly period of all, Kapp was threatening to 
attack us publicly. If you put yourself in our situation at that time, 
you will understand my vexation. As regards Weerth’s comment 
(which, by the by, referred not to you, but to Imandt, who was 
writing to us incessantly), this is the first I have heard of it. 

5. As regards the 25 talers remitted on 14 January, these were 
dispatched to you in the presence of witnesses via Ewerbeck’s 
address. The Post Office here will provide information about this 
tomorrow. Nota bene: Kapp received 15 talers from me at the same 
time. 

6. As regards my not answering, Lupus will testify that I wrote 
to "you frequently. : 

7. If the tone of one of my letters was waspish, this was, a) 
because I was going through an atrociously bad patch with the 

4 Neue Rheinische Zeitung