"Neue Rheinische Zeitung" – The March Association

The March Association

["Neue Rheinische Zeitung" No. 243, 11 March 1849]

*
Cologne, 10 March. The Frankfurt so-called "March Association" of the Frankfurt so-called "Reich Assembly" has the impudence to send us the following lithographed letter:

"The March Association has resolved that a list of all papers which have opened their columns to us be drawn up and communicated to all associations with which we are in contact, so that through the said associations action may be taken to ensure that the papers in question are preferentially favoured with relevant
announcements.

In communicating the drawn-up list to you herewith, we deem it unnecessary to draw your attention to the importance of the paid
‘advertisements’
of a paper as a source of sustenance for the whole enterprise.

Furthermore, the Central March Association has resolved to recommend to the associations the Teutsches Volksblatt, a democratic-constitutional journal, edited by Herr Dr Eisenmann, appearing in
Würzburg,
for their kind support, since the same is in danger of succumbing to the competition of anti-democratic papers, as the editor declares himself unable to add new sacrifices to those already made.

Frankfurt, end of February 1849

The Executive Committee of the Central March Association"

On the attached list of these papers which “have opened their columns to the March Association” and are to be preferentially favoured with “relevant announcements” by the supporters of the “March Association”, there appears, moreover marked with an honouring star, also the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

We hereby declare to the gauche and extremely gauche members of this so-called “March Association” of the ci-devant <former> “Reich Assembly”, that

the Neue Rheinische Zeitung has never lent itself as the organ of a parliamentary party, least of all a party of the Frankfurt farcical Reich Club, that the columns of our paper have never been opened to the so-called “March Association” of this club, just as the Neue Rheinische Zeitung knows no “March Association” at all. If, therefore, the “March Association” in its lithographed report designates our paper as one of its organs alongside the papers that have truly opened their columns, this is a simple calumny against the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and a tasteless piece of braggadocio on the part of the “March Association”. The patriotic philistines of the “March Association” will no doubt be able to reconcile this with their “conscience”.

The “March Association’s” appeal to our paper is, however, rendered yet more sanctimonious by the “resolution” of the association to recommend the “democratic-constitutional” journal (teutsche journal: Teutsches Volksblatt) of “Dr Eisenmann”. Who would not be moved by the sad fate of the great “teutsche” arch-sufferer Eisenmann? What philistine does not feel the blow that “Dr” Eisenmann, who sold his prison memoirs for 12,000 gulden to the “democratic-constitutional” King of Bavaria, can no longer make any “new sacrifices” but is in danger of succumbing to the bookselling “competition” of the ordinary, non-octroyed anti-March Association papers? We leave it to the arithmetic of the patriots to inquire into what deep neglect the Teutsches Volksblatt must have fallen, if the 12,000-gulden sufferer and five-thaler deputy Eisenmann is compelled to appeal for public “support”. In any case, things must have gone far, very far, with the “democratic-constitutional” Eisenmänner when they fabricate a begging letter from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the very paper that alone in Germany has pursued the “shameless, shabby beggars” of patriotism and of the Reich beggar assemblies.

To the filthy remark of the profit-mad, competition-hounded patriot about the “importance of the
paid
advertisements of a paper as the
source of sustenance for the whole
enterprise” we naturally have no answer. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung, in this as in everything else, has always differed from the patriots in that it has never regarded political movements as a branch of knightly industry or a source of sustenance.