Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 1852

Heroes of the Exile

NOTE: Passages marked between [ ] square brackets
were crossed out by Marx in the final draft.

I

"Singe, unsterbliche Seele,

der sündigen Menschen Erlösung [2]

[Sing, immortal soul

the redemption of fallen

mankind] — through Gottfried Kinkel.

Gottfried Kinkel was born some 40 years ago. The story of his
life has been made available to us in an autobiography, Gottfried Kinkel.
Truth without Poetry. A Biographical sketch-book. Edited by Adolph
Strodtmann. (Hamburg, Hoffmann & Campe, 1850, octavo.)

Gottfried is the hero of that democratic Siegwart [3] epoch that flooded Germany
with endless torrents of tearful lament and patriotic melancholy. He made his
debut as a simple lyrical Siegwart.

We are indebted to Strodtmann the Apostle, whose "narrative compilation" we
follow here, both for the diary-like fragments in which his pilgrimage on this
earth is paraded before the reader, and for the glaring lack of discretion of
the revelations they contain.

"Bonn, February — September 1834"

"Like his friend, Paul Zeller, young Gottfried studied
Protestant theology and his piety and industry earned him the admiration of his
celebrated teachers" (Sack, Nitzsch and Bleck, p. 5).

From the very beginning he is "obviously immersed in weighty speculations"
(p. 4), he is "tormented and gloomy" as befits a budding genius. "Gottfried's
gloomily flashing brown eyes" "lit upon" some youths "in brown jackets and
pale-blue overcoats"; he at once sensed that these youths wished "to make up
for their inner emptiness by outer show" (p. 6). He explains his moral
indignation by pointing out that he had "defended Hegel and Marheinicke" when
these lads had called Marheinicke a "blockhead"; later, when he himself goes to
study in Berlin and is himself in the position of having to learn from
Marheinicke he characterises him in his diary with the following belletristic
epigram (p. 61):

"Ein Kerl ,der spekuliert,

ist wie ein Tier auf dürrer Heide

von einem loosen Geist im Kreis herumgeführt,

und ringsumher ist schöne grüne Weide."

[I tell you a chap who's intellectual

Is like a beast on a blasted heath

Driven in circles by a demon

While a fine green meadow lies round beneath.] [4]

Gottfried has clearly forgotten that other verse in which Mephistopheles
makes fun of the student thirsting for knowledge:

"Verachte nur Verstand und Wissenschaff!"

[Only look down on knowledge and reason!] [5]

However, the whole moralising Student Scene serves merely as an
introduction enabling the future Liberator of the World to make the following
revelation (p. 6).

Listen to Gottfried:

"This race will not perish, unless a great war comes.... Only
strong remedies will raise this age up from the mire!"

"A second Flood with you as a second and improved edition of
Noah!" his friend replied.

The light brown overcoats have helped Gottfried to the point where he can
proclaim himself the "Noah in a new Flood". His friend responds with a comment
that might well have served as the motto to the whole biography.

"My father and I have often had occasion to smile at your
passion for unclear ideas!"

Throughout these Confessions of a Beautiful Soul [6] we find repeated only one
"dear idea", namely that Kinkel was a great man from the moment of his
conception. The most trivial things that occur to all trivial people become
momentous events; the petty joys and sorrows that every student of theology
experiences in a more interesting form, the conflicts with bourgeois conditions
to be found by the dozen in every consistory and refectory in Germany become
world-shaking events from which Gottfried, overwhelmed by Weltschmerz, fashions
a perpetual comedy.

[Thus we find that these confessions consistently present a double aspect
— there is firstly the comedy, the amusing way in which
Gottfried interprets the smallest trivia as signs of his future greatness and
casts himself in relief from the outset. And then there is the
rodomontade, his trick of complacently embellishing in retrospect
every little occurrence in his theologico-lyrical past. Having established
these two basic features we can return to the further developments in
Gottfried's story.]

The family [of his "friend Paul" leaves Bonn and] returns to
Württemberg. Gottfried stages this event in the following manner.

Gottfried loves Paul's sister and uses the occasion to explain that he has
"already been in love twice before"! His present love, however, is no ordinary
love but a "fervent and authentic act of divine worship" (p. 13). Gottfried
climbs the Drachenfels together with friend Paul and against this romantic
backcloth he breaks into dithyrambs:

"Farewell to friendship! — I shall find a brother in
our Saviour; — Farewell to love — Faith shall be my bride; —
Farewell to sisterly loyalty — I am come to the commune of many thousands
of just souls! Away then, O my youthful heart, learn to be alone with your God;
struggle with him until you conquer him and force him to give you a new name,
that of Holy Israel which no-one knows but he who receives it! I give you
greetings, you glorious rising sun, image of my awakening soul!" (p. 17).

We see how the departure of his friend gives Gottfried the
opportunity to sing an ecstatic hymn to his own soul. As if that were not
enough, his friend too must join in the hymn. For while Gottfried exults
ecstatically he speaks "with exalted voice and glowing countenance", he
"forgets the presence of his friend", "his gaze is transfigured", "his voice
inspired", etc. (p. 17) — in short we have the vision of the Prophet
Elijah as it appears in the Bible complete in every detail.

"Smiling sorrowfully Paul looked at him with his loyal gaze
and said: 'You have a mightier heart in your bosom than I and will surely
outdistance me — but let me be your friend — even when I am
far away.' Joyfully Gottfried clasped the proferred hand and renewed the
ancient covenant" (p. 18).

Gottfried has got what he wants from this Transfiguration on the
Mount. Friend Paul who has just been laughing at "Gottfried's passion for
unclear ideas" humbles himself before the name of "holy Israel" and
acknowledges Gottfried's superiority and future greatness. Gottfried is as
pleased as Punch and graciously condescends to renew the ancient covenant.

The scene changes. It is the birthday of Kinkel's mother, the wife of Pastor
Kinkel of Upper Cassel. The family festival is used to proclaim that "his
mother, like the mother of our Lord, was called Mary" (p. 20) — certain
proof that Gottfried, too, was destined to be a saviour and redeemer. Thus
within the space of twenty pages our student of theology has been led by the
most insignificant events to cast himself as Noah, as the
holy Israel, as Elijah, and, lastly, as Christ.

*

Inevitably, Gottfried, who when it comes to the point has
experienced nothing, constantly dwells on his inner feelings. The Pietism that
has stuck to this parson's son and would-be scholar of divinity is well adapted
both to his innate emotional instability and his coquettish, preoccupation with
his own person. We learn that his mother and sister were both strict Pietists
and that Gottfried was powerfully conscious of his own sinfulness. The conflict
of this pious sense of sin with the "carefree and sociable joie de vivre" of
the ordinary student appears in Gottfried, as befits his world-historical
mission, in terms of' a struggle between religion and poetry. The pint of beer
that the parson's son from Upper Cassel downs with the other students becomes
the fateful chalice in which Faust's twin spirits are locked in battle. In the
description of his pietistic family life we see his "Mother Mary" combat as
sinful "Gottfried's penchant for the theatre" (p. 28), a momentous conflict
designed to prefigure the poet of the future but which in fact merely
highlights Gottfried's love of the theatrical. The harpy-like puritanism of his
sister Johanna is revealed by an incident in which she boxed the ears of a
five-year-old girl for inattention in church — sordid family gossip whose
inclusion would be incomprehensible were it not for the revelation at the end
of the book that this same sister Johanna put up the strongest opposition to
Gottfried's marriage to Mme. Mockel.

One event held to be worthy of mention is that in Seelscheid Gottfried
preached "a wonderful sermon about the wilting wheat".

*

The Zelter family and "beloved Elise" finally take their
departure. We learn that Gottfried "squeezed the girl's hand passionately" and
murmured the greeting, "Elise, farewell! I must say no more". This interesting
story is followed by the first of Siegwart's laments.

"Destroyed!" "Without a sound." "Most agonising torment!" "Burning brow."
"Deepest sighs," "His mind was lacerated by the wildest pains", etc. (p.
37).

It turns the whole Elijah-like scene into the purest comedy, performed for
the benefit of his "friend Paul" and himself. Paul again makes his appearance
in order to whisper into the ear of Siegwart who is sitting there alone and
wretched: "This kiss is for my Gottfried" (p. 38).

And Gottfried at once cheers up.

"My plan to see my sweet love again, honourably and not
without a name, is firmer than ever" (p. 38).

Even amid the pangs of love he does not fail to comment on the
name he expects to make, or to brag of the laurels he claims in advance.
Gottfried uses the intermezzo to commit his love to paper in extravagant and
vainglorious terms, to make sure that the world is not deprived of even his
diary-feelings. But the scene has not yet reached its climax. The faithful Paul
has to point out to our barnstorming maestro that if Elise were to remain
stationary while he continued to develop, she might not satisfy him later
on.

"Oh no!" said Gottfried. "This heavenly budding flower whose first leaves
have scarcely opened already smells so sweetly. How much greater will be her
beauty when... the burning summer ray of manly vigour unfolds
her innermost calix!" (p. 40).

Paul finds himself reduced to answering this sordid image by
remarking that rational arguments mean nothing to poets.

"'And all your wisdom will not protect you from the whims of
life better than our lovable folly' Gottfried replied with a
smile" (p. 40).

What a moving picture: Narcissus smiling to himself! The gauche
student suddenly enters as the lovable fool, Paul becomes Wagner [7] and admires the great man;
and the great man "smiles", "indeed, he smiles a kind, gentle smile". The
climax is saved.

Gottfried finally manages to leave Bonn. He gives this summary of his
educational attainments to date.

"Unfortunately I am increasingly unable to accept
Hegelianism; my highest aspiration is to be a rationalist, at the same time I
am a supernaturalist and a mystic, if necessary I am even a Pietist
(p. 45).

This self-analysis requires no commentary.

"Berlin, October 1834-August 1835."

Leaving his narrow family and student environment Gottfried
arrives in Berlin. In comparison with Bonn, Berlin is relatively metropolitan
but of this we find no trace in Gottfried any more than we find evidence of his
involvement in the scientific activity of the day. Gottfried's diary entries
confine themselves to the emotions he experiences together with his new
compagnon d'aventure, Hugo Dünweg from Barmen, and also to the minor
hardships of an indigent theologian: his money difficulties, shabby coats,
employment as a reviewer, etc. His life stands in no relation to that of the
public life of the city, but only to the Schlössing family in which Dünweg
passes for Master Wolfram [von Eschenbach] and Gottfried for Master
Gottfried von Strasbourg (p. 67). [8] Elise fades gradually from his heart and he
conceives a new itch for Miss Maria Schlössing. Unfortunately he learns of
Elise's engagement to someone else and he sums up his Berlin feelings and
aspirations as a "dark longing for a woman he could [call] wholly his
own.

However, Berlin must not be abandoned without the inevitable climax:

"Before he left Berlin Weiss, the old theatre producer, took
him once again into the theatre. A strange feeling came over the youth
as the friendly old man led him into the great auditorium where the busts of
German dramatists have been placed and with a gesture towards a few empty
niches said meaningfully:

'There are still some vacant places!'"

Yes, indeed, there is still a place vacant awaiting our
Platenite [9] Gottfried who
solemnly allows an old clown to flatter him with the exquisite pleasure of
"future immortality".

"Bonn, Autumn 1835 — Autumn 1837"

"Constantly balancing between art, life and science, unable
to reach a decision, active in all three without firm commitment, he resolved
to learn, to gain and to be creative in all three as much as his indecision
would permit" (p. 89).

Having thus discovered himself to be an irresolute dilettante
Gottfried returns to Bonn. Of course, the feeling that he is a dilettante does
not deter him from taking his Licentiate examination and from becoming a
Privatdozent at the university of Bonn.

"Neither Chamisso nor Knapp [10] had published the poems he had sent them in their
magazines and this upset him greatly" (p. 99).

This is the public debut of the great man who in private circles
lives on intellectual tick on the promise of his future eminence. From this
time on he definitely becomes a hero of dubious local significance in
belletristic student circles until the moment when a glancing shot in Baden
suddenly turns him into the hero of the German Philistines.

"But more and more there arose in Kinkel's breast the
yearning for a firm, true love, a yearning that no devotion to work could
dispel" (p. 103).

The first victim of this yearning is a certain Minna. Gottfried
dallies with Minna and sometimes for the sake of variety he acts the
compassionate Mahadeva [11] who allows the maiden to worship him while he
meditates on the state of her health.

"Kinkel could have loved her had he been able to deceive
himself about her condition; but his love would have killed the
wilting rose even more quickly. Minna was the first girl that could understand
him; but she was a second Hecuba and would have borne him torches and not
children, and through them the passion of the parents would have burnt down
their own house as Priam's passion burned Troy. Yet he could not abandon her,
his heart bled for her, he was indeed wretched not through love, but
through pity."

The godlike hero whose love can kill, like the sight of Jupiter,
is nothing but an ordinary self-regarding young puppy who in the course of his
marriage studies tries out the role of the cad for the first time. His
revolting meditations on her health and its possible effects on children become
the occasion for the base decision to prolong the relationship for his own
pleasure and to break it off only when it provides him with the excuse for yet
another melodramatic scene.

Gottfried goes on a journey to visit an uncle whose son has just died; at
the midnight hour in the room where the corpse is laid out he stages a scene
from a Bellini opera with his cousin, Mlle. Elise II. He becomes engaged to
her, "in the presence of the dead" and on the following morning his uncle
gladly accepts him as his future son-in-law.

"Now that he was lost to her forever, he often thought of
Minna and of the moment when he would see her again. But he was not afraid as
she could have no claims on a heart that was already bound" (p. 117).

The new engagement means nothing but the opportunity to bring
about a dramatic explosion in his relationship with Minna. In this crisis we
find "duty and passion" [12] confronting each other. This explosion is produced
in the most philistine and rascally way because our bonhomme denies Minna's
legal claims upon his heart which is already committed elsewhere. Our virtuous
hero is of course not at all disturbed by the need to compound this lie to
himself by reversing the order of events in the matter of his "bound heart".

Gottfried has plunged into the interesting necessity of being forced to
break "a poor, great heart".

"After a pause Gottfried went on: 'At the same time, Minna, I
feel I owe you an apology — I have sinned against you — the hand
which I let you have yesterday with such feelings of friendship, that hand is
no longer free — I am engaged!'" (p. 123).

Our melodramatic student takes good care not to mention that
this engagement took place a few hours after he had given her his hand "with
such feelings of friendship".

"Oh God! — Minna — can you forgive me?" (loc.
cit.)

"I am a man and must be faithful to my duty — I may
not love you! But I have not deceived you" (p. 124).

After re-arranging his duty after the fact it only remains to
produce the unbelievable. He dramatically reverses the whole relationship so
that instead of Minna forgiving him, our moral priest forgives the deceived
woman. With this in mind he conceives the possibility that Minna "might hate
him from afar" and he follows this supposition up with this final moral:

"'I would gladly forgive you for that and if that were the
case you can be assured of my forgiveness in advance. And now farewell, my duty
calls me, I must leave you!' He slowly left the harbor ... from that hour on
Gottfried was unhappy" (p. 124).

The actor and self-styled lover is transformed into the
hypocritical priest who extricates himself from the affair with an unctuous
blessing; Siegwart's sham conflicts of love have led to the happy result that
he is able in his imagination to think himself unhappy.

It finally becomes apparent that all of these arranged love stories were
nothing but Gottfried's coquettish infatuation with himself. The whole affair
amounts to no more than that our priest with his dreams of future immortality
has produced Old Testament stories and modern lending-library phantasies after
the manner of Spiess, Clauren and Cramer [13] so that he may indulge his vanity by posing as a
romantic hero.

"Rummaging among his books he came across Novalis'
Ofterdingen [14]
the book that had so often inspired him to write poetry a year before. While
still at school he and some friends had founded a society by the name of
Teutonia with the aim of increasing their understanding of German
history and literature. In this society he had assumed the name of Heinrich
von Ofterdingen.... Now the meaning of this name became clear to him.
He saw himself as that same Heinrich in the charming little town at
the foot of the Wartburg and a longing for the 'Blue Flower' took hold of him
with overwhelming force. Minna could not be the glorious fairy-tale bloom, nor
could she be his bride, however anxiously he probed his heart. Dreaming, he
read on and on, the phantastic world of magic enveloped him and he ended by
hurling himself weeping into a chair, thinking of the 'Blue Flower'."

Gottfried here unveils the whole romantic lie which he had woven
around himself; the carnival gift of disguising oneself as other people is his
authentic "inner being". Earlier on he had called himself Gottfried von
Strasbourg; now he appears as Heinrich von Ofterdingen [14] and he is searching not
for the "Blue Flower" but for a woman who will acknowledge his claims to be
Heinrich von Ofterdingen. And in the end he really did find the "Blue Flower",
a little faded and yellow, in a woman who played the much longed-for comedy in
his interest and in her own.

The sham Romanticism, the travesty and the caricature of ancient stories and
romances which Gottfried re-lives to make up for the lack of any inner
substance of his own, the whole emotional swindle of his vacuous encounters
with Mary, Minna and Elise I & II have brought him to the point where he
thinks that his experiences are on a par with those of Goethe. Just as Goethe
had suddenly rushed off to Italy, there to write his Roman Elegies
after undergoing the storms of love, so too Gottfried thinks that his
day-dreams of love qualify him for a trip to Rome. Goethe must have had a
premonition of Gottfried:

Hat doch der Walfisch seine Laus,

Kann ich auch meine haben.

[And if the whale has his lice

I can have them too] [15]

"Italy, October 1837 — March 1838"

The trip to Rome opens in Gottfried's diary with a lengthy
account of the journey from Bonn to Coblenz. This new epoch begins as the
previous one had concluded, namely with a narrative richly embellished by
allusions to the experiences of others. While on the steamer Gottfried recalls
the "splendid passage in Hoffmann" where he "made Master Johannes Wacht produce
a highly artistic work immediately after enduring the most overwhelming grief".
As a confirmation of the "splendid passage" Gottfried follows up his
"overwhelming grief" about Minna by "meditating" about a "tragedy he
had long since intended to write" (p. 140).

During Kinkel's journey from Coblenz to Rome the following events take
place:

"The friendly letters he frequently receives from his fiancee
and which he answers for the most part on the spot, dispel his gloomy thoughts"
(p. 144).

"His love for the beautiful Elise II struck root deeply in
the youth's yearning bosom" (p. 146).

In Rome we find:

"On his arrival in Rome Kinkel had found a letter from his
fiancee awaiting him which further intensified his love for her and caused the
image of Minna to fade even more into the background. His heart assured him
that Elise could make him happy and he gave himself up to this feeling with the
purest passion.... Only now did he realize what love is" (p. 151).

We see that Minna whom he only loved out of pity has re-entered the
emotional scene. In his relationship with Elise his dream is that she will make
him happy, not he her. And yet in his "Blue Flower" fantasy he had already said
that the fairy-tale blossom which had given him such a poetic itch could be
neither Elise nor Minna. His newly aroused feelings for these two girls now
serve as part of the mis-en-scène for a new conflict.

"Kinkel's poetry seemed to be slumbering in Italy" (p.
151).

Why?

"Because he lacked form" (p. 152).

We learn later that a six-month stay in Italy enabled him to
bring the "form" back to Germany well wrapped up. As Goethe had written his
Elegies in Rome so Kinkel too meditated on an elegy called "The
Awakening of Rome" (p. 153).

Kinkel's maid brings him a letter from his fiancee. He opens it joyfully
—

"and sank back on his bed with a cry. Elise announced that a
wealthy man, a Dr. D. with an extensive practice and even a riding horse had
asked for her hand in marriage. As it would probably be a long time before he,
Kinkel, an indigent theologian, would have a permanent position she asked him
to release her from the bonds that tied her to him".

A scene taken over lock, stock and barrel from [Kotzebue's]
Misanthropy and Remorse. [16]

Gottfried "annihilated", "foul putrefaction", "dry eyed", "thirst for
revenge", "dagger", "the bosom of his rival", "heart-blood of his enemy", "cold
as ice", "maddening pain", etc. (p. 156 and 157).

The element in these "Sorrows and Joys of a poor Theologian" that gives most
pain to our unhappy student is the thought that she had "spurned him for the
sake of the uncertain possession of earthly goods" (p. 157). Having been moved
by the relevant theatrical feelings he finally rises to the following
consolation:

"She was unworthy of you — and you still possess the
pinions of genius that will bear you aloft high above this dark misery! And
when one day your fame encircles the globe the false woman will find a
judge in her own heart! — Who knows, perhaps one day in the years to come
her children will seek me out to implore my aid and I would not
wish to miss that" (p. 157).

Having, inevitably, enjoyed in advance the exquisite pleasure of
"his future fame encircling the globe" he reveals himself to be a common
philistinic cleric. He speculates that later on Elise's children will come to
beg alms from the great poet — and this he would "not wish to miss". And
why? Because Elise prefers a horse to the "future fame" of which he constantly
dreams, because she prefers "earthly goods" to the farce he intends to perform
with himself in the role of Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Old Hegel was quite right
when he pointed out that a noble consciousness always transposes into a base
one. [17]

"Bonn. Summer 1838 — Summer 1843"

(Intrigue and Love)

Having furnished a caricature of Goethe in Italy, Gottfried now
resolves on his return to produce Schiller's Intrigue and Love. [18] Though his heart is rent
with Weltschmerz Gottfried feels "better than ever" physically (p. 167). His
intention is "to establish literary fame for himself through his works" (p.
169), which does not prevent him from acquiring a cheaper fame without works
later on when his "works" failed to do what was expected of them.

The "dark longing" which Gottfried always experiences when he pursues a
woman finds expression in a remarkably rapid succession of engagements and
promises of marriage. The promise of marriage is the classical method by which
the strong man and the superior mind "of the future" seeks to conquer his
beloved and bind her to him in reality. As soon as the poet catches sight of a
little blue flower that might assist him in his efforts to become Heinrich von
Ofterdingen, the gentle mists of emotion assume the firm shape of the student's
dream of perfecting the ideal affinity by the addition of the bond of "duty".
No sooner are the first greetings over than offers of marriage fly in all
directions à tort et à travers towards every Daisy and Water Lily in
sight. This bourgeois hunt puts in an even more revolting light the
unprincipled tail-wagging coquetry with which Gottfried constantly opens his
heart to reveal all "the torments of the great poet".

Thus after his return from Italy Gottfried naturally has to "promise"
marriage yet again. The object of his passion on this occasion was directly
chosen by his sister, the pietistic Johanna whose fanaticism has already been
immortalised by the exclamations in Gottfried's diary.

"Bögehold had just recently announced his engagement to Miss
Kinkel and Johanna who was more importunate than ever in her meddling in her
brother's affairs of the heart now conceived the wish, for a number of reasons
concerning the family, that Gottfried should reciprocate and marry
Miss Sophie Bögehold, her fiance's sister" (p. 172). It goes without saying
that "Kinkel could not but feel drawn to a gentle girl.... And she was
indeed a dear, innocent maiden" (p. 173). "In the most tender fashion" —
it goes without saying — "Kinkel asked for her hand which was joyfully
promised him by her parents as soon as" — it goes without saying —
"he had established himself in a job and was in a position to lead his bride to
the home of — it goes without saying — a professor or a parson."

On this occasion our passionate student set down in elegant
verses an account of that tendency towards marriage that forms such a constant
ingredient of his adventures.

"Nach anders nichts trag' ich Verlangen

Als nur nach einer weissen Hand!"

[Nought else can stir my passion

So much as a white hand]

Everything else, eyes, lips, locks is dismissed as a mere
"trifle".

"Das alles reizt nicht sein Verlangen

Allein die kleine weisse Handl" (p. 174)

[All these fail to stir his passion

Nought does so but her small, white hand!]

He describes the flirtation that he begins with Miss Sophie
Bögehold at the command of "his meddling sister Johanna" and spurred on by the
unquenchable longing for a hand, as "deep, firm and tranquil" (p. 175). Above
all "it is the religious element that predominates in this new love"
(p. 176).

In Gottfried's romances we often find the religious element alternating with
the novelistic and theatrical element. Where he cannot devise dramatic effects
to achieve new Siegwart situations he applies religious feelings to adorn these
banal episodes with the patina of higher meaning. Siegwart becomes a pious
Jung-Stilling [19] who had
likewise received such miraculous strength from God that even though three
women perished beneath his manly chest he was still able repeatedly to lead a
new love to his home.

*

We come finally to the fateful catastrophe of this eventful
life-history, to Stilling's meeting with Johanna Mockel, who had
formerly borne the married name of Mathieux. Here Gottfried discovered a female
Kinkel, his romantic alter ego. Only she was harder, smarter, less
confused and thanks to her greater age she had left her youthful illusions
behind her.

What Mockel had in common with Kinkel was the fact that her talents
too had gone unrecognised by the world. She was repulsive and vulgar;
her first marriage had been unhappy. She possessed musical talents but they
were insufficient to enable her to make a name with her compositions or
technical mastery. In Berlin her attempt to imitate the stale childhood antics
of Bettina [von Arnim] [20] had led to a fiasco. Her character had been soured
by her experiences. Even though she shared with Kinkel the affectation of
inflating the ordinary events of her life so as to invest them with a "more
exalted, sacred meaning", owing to her more advanced age she nevertheless felt
a need for love (according to Strodtmann) that was more pressing than
her need for the "poetic" drivel that accompanies it. Whereas Kinkel was
feminine in this respect, Mockel was masculine. Hence nothing could be more
natural than for such a person to enter with joy into Kinkel's comedy of the
misunderstood tender souls and to play it to a satisfying conclusion, i.e. to
acknowledge Siegwart's fitness for the role of Heinrich von Ofterdingen and to
arrange for him to discover that she was the "Blue Flower".

Kinkel, having been led to his third or fourth fiancee by his sister was now
introduced into a new labyrinth of love by Mockel.

Gottfried now found himself in the "social swim", i.e. in one of those
little circles consisting of the professors or other worthies of German
university towns. Only in the lives of Teutonic, christian students can such
societies form such a turning point. Mockel sang and was applauded. At table it
was arranged that Gottfried should sit next to her and here the following scene
took place:

"'It must be a glorious feeling', Gottfried opined, 'to fly
through the joyous world on the pinions of genius, admired by all' — 'I
should say so', Mockel exclaimed. 'I hear that you have a great gift
for poetry. Perhaps people will scatter incense for you also ... and I
shall ask you then if you can be happy if you are not...' — 'If I am
not?' Gottfried asked, as she paused" (p. 188).

The bait has been put out for our clumsy Iyrical student.

Mockel then informed him that recently she had heard

"him preaching about the yearning of Christians to return to
their faith and she had thought about how resolutely the handsome preacher must
have abandoned the world if he could arouse a timid longing even in her for the
harmless childhood slumber with which the echo of faith now lost had once
surrounded her" (p. 189).

Gottfried was "enchanted" (p. 189) by such politeness. He was
tremendously pleased to discover that "Mocker was unhappy" (loc.
cit.). He immediately resolved "to devote his passionate enthusiasm for
the faith of salvation at the hands of Jesus Christ to bringing back this
sorrowing soul too into the fold" (loc. cit.). As Mockel was
a Catholic the friendship was formed on the imaginary basis of the task of
recovering a soul "in the service of the Almighty", a comedy in which Mockel
too was willing to participate.

"In 1840 Kinkel was appointed as an assistant in the
Protestant community in Cologne where he went every Sunday to preach" (p.
193).

This biographical comment may serve as an excuse for a brief
discussion of Kinkel's position as a theologian. "In 1840" the critical
movement had already made devastating inroads into the content of the Christian
faith; with Bruno Bauer [21] science had reached the point of open conflict
with the state. It is at this juncture that Kinkel makes his debut as a
preacher. But as he lacks both the energy of the orthodox and the understanding
that would enable him to see theology objectively, he comes to terms with
Christianity on the level of Iyrical and declamatory sentimentality à la
Krummacher. That is to say, he presents a Christ who is a "friend and leader",
he seeks to do away with formal aspects of Christianity that he proclaims to be
"ugly", and for the content he substitutes a hollow phraseology. The device by
means of which content is replaced by form and ideas by phrases has produced a
host of declamatory priests in Germany whose tendencies naturally led them
finally in the direction of [liberal] democracy. But whereas in
theology at least a superficial knowledge is still essential here and there, in
the democratic movement where an orotund but vacuous rhetoric, nullite
sonore, makes intellect and an insight into realities completely
superfluous, an empty phraseology came into its own. Kinkel whose theological
studies had led to nothing beyond the making of sentimental extracts of
Christianity in the manner of Clauren's popular novels, was in speech and in
his writings the very epitome of the fake pulpit oratory that is sometimes
described as "poetic prose" and which he now comically made the basis of his
"poetic mission". This latter, moreover, did not consist in planting true
laurels but only red rowan berries with which he beautified the highway of
trivia. This same feebleness of character which attempts to overcome conflicts
not by resolving their content but by clothing them in an attractive form is
visible too in the way he lectures at the university. The struggle to abolish
the old scholastic pedantry is sidestepped by means of a "hearty" attitude
which turns the lecturer into a student and exalts the student placing him on
an equal footing with the lecturer. This school then produced a whole
generation of Strodtmanns, Schurzes and suchlike who were able to make use of
their phraseology, their knowledge and their easily acquired "lofty mission"
only in the democratic movement.

*

Kinkel's new love develops into the story of Gockel, Hinkel
und Gackeleia. [22]

The year 1840 was a turning point in the history of Germany. On the one
hand, the critical application of Hegel's philosophy to theology and politics
had brought about a scientific revolution. On the other hand, the coronation of
Frederick William IV saw the emergence of a bourgeois movement whose
constitutional aspirations still possessed a wholly radical veneer, varying
from the vague "political poetry" of the period to the new phenomenon of a
daily press with revolutionary powers.

What was Gottfried doing during this period? Together with Mockel he founded
the "Maybug" (Maikäfer) "a Journal for non-Philistines" (p. 209) and
the Maybug Club. The aim of this paper was nothing more than "to provide a
cheerful and enjoyable evening for a group of friends once a week and to give
the participants the opportunity to present their works for criticism by a
benevolent, artistically-minded audience" (pp. 209-10).

The actual purpose of the Maybug Club was to solve the riddle of the Blue
Flower. The meetings took place in Mockel's house, where, surrounded by a group
of insignificant students Mockel paraded as "Queen" (p. 210) and Kinkel as
"Minister" (p. 225). Here our two misunderstood beautiful souls found it
possible to make up for the "injustice the harsh world had done them" (p. 296);
each could acknowledge the right of the other to the respective roles of
Heinrich von Ofterdingen and the Blue Flower. Gottfried to whom the aping of
other people's roles had become second nature must have felt happy to have
created such a "theatre for connoisseurs" (p. 254). The farce itself acted as
the prelude to practical developments:

"These evenings provided the opportunity to see Mockel also
in the house of her parents" (p. 212).

Moreover, the Maybug Club copied also the Göttinger Hain [23] poets, only with the
difference that the latter represented a stage in the development of German
literature while the former remained on the level of an insignificant local
caricature. The "merry Maybugs" Sebastian Longard, Leo Hasse, C. A. Schlönbach,
etc., were, as the biographical apologia admits, pale, insipid, indolent,
unimportant youths (pp. 211 and 298).

Naturally, Gottfried soon began to make "comparisons" (p. 221) between
Mockel and his fiancee, but he had "had no time hitherto" — much against
his usual habit — "to reflect at all about weddings and marriage" (p.
219). In a word, he stood like Buridan's ass between the two bundles of hay,
unable to decide between them. With her greater maturity and very practical
bent Mockel "clearly discerned the invisible bond" (p. 225); she resolved to
give "chance or the will of God" (p. 229) a helping hand.

"At a time of day when Kinkel was usually prevented by his
scientific labours from seeing Mockel, he one day went to visit her and as he
quietly approached her room he heard the sound of a mournful song. Pausing to
listen he heard this song:

"Du nahst! Und wie Morgenröte

Bebt's über die Wangen mein, usw. usw.

Viel namenlose Schmerzen:

Wehe Du fühlst es nicht!

[You draw nigh! And like the dawn

There trembles on my cheeks, etc. etc.

Many a nameless pain.

Alas, you feel them not!]

A long drawn-out, melancholy chord concluded her song and faded
gradually in the breeze" (pp. 230 and 231).

Gottfried crept away unobserved, as he imagined, and having
arrived home again he found the situation very interesting. He wrote a large
number of despairing sonnets in which he compared Mockel to the Lorelei (p.
233). In order to escape from the Lorelei and to remain true to Miss Sophie
Bögehold he tried to obtain a post as a teacher in Wiesbaden, but was rejected.
This accident was compounded by a further intervention by Fate which proved to
be decisive. Not only was the "sun striving to leave the sign of Virgo" (p.
236), but also Gottfried and Mockel took a trip down the Rhine in a skiff;
their skiff was overturned by an approaching steam-boat and Gottfried swam
ashore bearing Mockel.

"As he drew towards the shore he felt her heart close to his
and was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that only this woman would
be able to make him happy" (p. 238).

On this occasion the experience that Gottfried has undergone is
from a real novel and not merely an imaginary one: it is to be found in
[Goethe's] Elective Affinities. This decided the matter; he broke off
his engagement to Sophie Bögehold.

*

First love, then the intrigue. In the name of the Presbytery
Pastor Engels protested to Gottfried that the marriage of a divorced Catholic
woman to a Protestant preacher was offensive. Gottfried replied by appealing to
the eternal rights of man and made the following points with a good deal of
unction.

"1. It was no crime for him to have drunk coffee with the
lady in Hirzekümpchen" (p. 249).

"2. The matter is ambiguous as he had neither announced in
public that he intended to marry the lady, nor that he did not intend to do so"
(p. 251).

"3. As far as faith is concerned, no-one can know what the
future holds in store" (p. 250).

"And with that out of the way, may I ask you to step inside
and have a cup of coffee" (p. 251).

With this slogan Gottfried and Pastor Engels, who could not
resist such an invitation, left the stage. In this way, quietly and yet
forcefully Gottfried was able to resolve the conflict with the powers that
be.

The following extract serves to illustrate the effect of the Maybug Club on
Gottfried:

"It was June 29, 1841. On this day the first anniversary of
the Maybug Club was to be celebrated on a grand scale" (p. 253). "A shout as of
one voice arose to decide who should carry off the prize. Modestly Gottfried
bent his knee before the Queen who placed the inevitable laurel wreath on his
glowing brow, while the setting sun cast its brightest rays over the
transfigured countenance of the poet" (p.285).

The solemn dedication of the imagined poetic fame of Heinrich
von Ofterdingen is followed by the feelings and the wishes of the Blue Flower.
That evening Mockel sang a Maybug anthem she had composed which ends with the
following strophe symptomatic of the whole work:

"Und was lernt man aus der Geschicht'?

Maikäfer, flieg!

Wer alt ist kriegt kein Weiblein mehr

Drum hör', bedenk' dich nicht zu sehr!

Maikäfer, flieg!

[And what's the moral of the tale?

Fly, Maybug, fly!

A man who's old will ne'er find wife,

So make haste, do not waste your life,

Fly, Maybug, fly!]

The ingenuous biographer remarks that "the invitation to
marriage contained in the song was wholly free of any ulterior motives"
(p.255). Gottfried perceived the ulterior motives but "was anxious not to miss"
the opportunity of being crowned for two further years before the whole Maybug
Club and of being an object of passion. So he married Mockel on May 22, 1843
after she had become a member of the Protestant Church despite her lack of
faith. This was done on the shabby pretext that "definite articles of faith are
less important in the Protestant church than the ethical spirit" (p.
315).

Und das lernt man aus der Geschicht',

Traut keiner blauen Blume nicht!

[So that's the moral of the tale:

The Bluest Flower will soon grow stale.]

Gottfried had established the relationship with Mockel on the
pretext of leading her out of her unfaith into the Protestant Church. Mockel
now demanded the Life of Jesus by D. F. Strauss and lapsed into
paganism,

"while with heavy heart he followed her on the path of doubt
and into the abysses of negation. Together with her he toiled through the
labyrinthine jungle of modern philosophy" (p. 308).

He is driven into negation not by the development of philosophy
which even at that time began to impinge on the masses but by the intervention
of a chance emotional relationship.

What he brings with him out of the labyrinth is revealed in his diaries:

"I should like to see whether the mighty river flowing from
Kant to Feuerbach will drive me out into — Pantheism!" (p. 308).

He writes just as if this particular river did not flow beyond
pantheism, and as if Feuerbach were the last word in German philosophy!

"The corner-stone of my life", the diary goes on to say, "is
not historical knowledge, but a coherent system, and the heart of theology is
not ecclesiastical history but dogma" (ibid.).

He is clearly ignorant of the fact that the whole achievement of
German philosophy lies in its dissolution of the coherent systems into
historical knowledge and the heart of dogma into ecclesiastical history!
— In these confessions the image of the counter-revolutionary democrat
stands revealed in every detail. For such a person movement is nothing more
than a means by which to arrive at a few irremovable eternal truths and then to
subside into a slothful tranquillity.

However, Gottfried's apologetic book-keeping of his whole development will
enable the reader to judge the intensity of the revolutionary impulse that lay
concealed in the melodramatic hamming of this theologian.

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Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 1852

II

This brings to a close the first Act of the drama of Kinkel's
life and nothing worthy of mention then occurs before the outbreak of the
February Revolution. The publishing house of Cotta accepted his poems but
without offering him a royalty and most of the copies remained unsold until the
celebrated stray bullet in Baden gave a poetic nimbus to the author and created
a market for his products.

Incidentally, our biographer omits mention of one momentous fact. The
self-confessed goal of Kinkel's desires was that he should die as an old
theatre director: his ideal was a certain old Eisenhut who together with his
troupe used to roam up and down the Rhine as a travelling Pickelhäring [clown] and who afterwards went mad.

Alongside his lectures with their rhetoric of the pulpit Gottfried also gave
a number of theological and aesthetic performances in Cologne from time to
time. When the February Revolution broke out, he concluded them with this
prophetic utterance:

"The thunder of battle reverberates over to us from Paris and
opens a new and glorious era for Germany and the whole continent of Europe. The
raging storm will be followed by Zephyr's breezes with their message of
freedom. On this day is born the great, bountiful epoch of —
constitutional monarchy!"

The constitutional monarchy expressed its thanks to Kinkel for
this compliment by appointing him to a professorial chair. Such recognition
could however not suffice for our grand homme en herbe. The
constitutional monarchy showed no eagerness to cause his "fame to encircle the
globe". Moreover, the laurels Freiligrath had collected for his recent
political poems prevented our crowned Maybug poet from sleeping. Heinrich von
Ofterdingen, therefore, resolved upon a swing to the left and became first a
constitutional democrat and then a republican democrat (honnête et
modéré). He set out to become a deputy but the May elections took him
neither to Berlin nor to Frankfurt. Despite this initial setback he pursued his
objective undismayed and it can truthfully be said that he did not spare
himself. He wisely limited himself at first to his immediate environment. He
founded the Bonner Zeitung [Bonn News], a
modest local product distinguished only by the peculiar feebleness of its
democratic rhetoric and the naivete with which it aspired to save the nation.
He elevated the Maybug Club to the rank of a democratic Students' Club and from
this there duly flowed a host of disciples that bore the Master's renown into
every corner of the district of Bonn, importuning every assembly with the fame
of Professor Kinkel. He himself politicked with the grocers in their club, he
extended a brotherly hand to the worthy manufacturers and even hawked the warm
breath of freedom among the peasantry of Kindenich and Seelscheid. Above all he
reserved his sympathy for the honourable caste of master craftsmen. He wept
together with them over the decay of handicrafts, the monstrous effects of free
competition, the modern dominance of capital and of machines. Together with
them he devised plans to restore the guilds and to prevent the violation of
guild regulations by the journeymen. So as to do everything of which he was
capable he set down the results of his pub deliberations with the petty guild
masters in the pamphlet entitled Handicraft, save yourself!

Lest there be any doubt as to Mr. Kinkel's position and to the significance
of his little tract for Frankfurt and the nation he dedicated it to the "thirty
members of the economic committee of the Frankfurt National Assembly".

Heinrich von Ofterdingen's researches into the "beauty" of the artisan class
led him immediately to the discovery that "the whole artisan class is at
present divided by a yawning chasm" (p. 5). This chasm consists in the fact
that some artisans "frequent the clubs of the grocers and officials" (what
progress!) and that others do not do this and also in the fact that some
artisans are educated and others are not. Despite this chasm the author regards
the artisans' clubs, the assemblies springing up everywhere in the beloved
fatherland and the agitation for improving the state of handicrafts
(reminiscent of the congresses à la Winkelblech [24] of 1848) as the portent of a happy future. To
ensure that his own good advice should not be missing from this beneficent
movement he devises his own programme of salvation.

He begins by asking how to eradicate the evil effects of free
competition by restricting it but without eliminating it altogether. The
solutions he proposes are these:

"A youth who lacks the requisite ability and maturity should
be debarred by law from becoming a master" (p. 20).

"No master shall be permitted to have more than one
apprentice (p. 29)

"The course of instruction in a craft shall be concluded by
an examination" (p. 30).

"The master of an apprentice must unfailingly attend the
examination" (p. 31).

"On the question of maturity it should become mandatory that
henceforth no apprentice may become a master before completion of his
twenty-fifth year" (p. 42).

"As evidence of ability every candidate for the title of
master should be required to pass a public examination" (p. 43).

"In this context it is of vital importance that the
examination should be free" (p. 44). "All provincial masters of the same guild
must likewise submit themselves to the same examination" (p. 55).

Friend Gottfried who is himself a political hawker desires to
abolish the "travelling tradesman or hawker" in other, profane wares on the
grounds of the dishonesty of such work. (p. 60.)

"A manufacturer of craft goods desires to withdraw his assets
from the business to his own advantage and, dishonestly, to the disadvantage of
his creditors. Like all ambivalent things this phenomenon too is described by a
foreign word: it is called bankruptcy. He then quickly takes his finished
products to a neighbouring town and sells them there to the highest bidder" (p.
64). These auctions — "in actual fact like a sort of garbage that our
dear neighbour, Commerce, disposes of in the garden of Handicraft" — must
be abolished. (Would it not be much simpler, Friend Gottfried, to go to the
root of the matter and abolish bankruptcy itself?).

"Of course, the annual fairs are in a special position" (p.
65). "The law will have to be flexible so as to allow the various places to
call an assembly of all the citizens to decide by majority vote (!) whether
permanent annual fairs should be retained or abolished" (p. 68).

Gottfried now comes to the "vexed" question of the relationship
between manufacture and machine industry and produces the following:

"Let everyone sell only those goods that he himself
produces with his own hands." (p. 80.) "Because machines and manufacture
have gone their own ways they have strayed from their true paths and now both
are in a sorry plight." (p. 84).

He wishes to unite them by getting artisans such as the
bookbinders, to band together and maintain a machine.

"As they only use the machine for themselves and when it is
required they will be able to produce more cheaply than the factory owner" (p.
85). "Capital will be broken by association" (p. 84). (And associations will be
broken by capital.)

He then generalises his ideas about the "purchase of a machine
to rule lines, and to cut paper and cardboard" (p. 85) for the united
certificated bookbinders of Bonn and conceives the notion of a
"Machine-Chamber".

"Confederations of the various guild masters must set up
businesses everywhere, similar to the factories of individual businessmen
though on a smaller scale. These will work to order, exclusively for the
benefit of local masters. They will not accept commissions from other
employers" (p. 86).

What distinguishes these Machine Chambers is the fact that "a
commercial management" will only "be needed initially" (ibid). "Every idea as
novel as this one", Gottfried exclaims "ecstatically", "can only be put into
practice when all the details have been thought out in the most sober, matter
of fact way". He urges "each and every branch of manufacture to perform this
analysis for itself"! (pp. 87, 88).

There follows a polemic against competition from the state in the shape of
the labour performed by the inmates of prisons, reminiscences about a colony of
criminals ("The creation of a human Siberia" (p. 102)), and finally an attack
on the "so-called handicraft companies and handicraft commissions" in the armed
forces. The aim here is to ease the burdens imposed by the army on the artisan
classes by inducing the state to commission goods from the guild masters that
it could itself produce more cheaply.

"This deals satisfactorily with the problems of competition"
(p. 109).

Gottfried's second important point touches on the material aid
due to the manufacturing classes from the state. Gottfried regards the state
solely from the point of view of an official and hence arrives at the opinion
that the easiest and surest way to help the artisan is by direct subsidy from
the Treasury to erect trade halls and set up loan-funds. How the funds reach
the Treasury in the first place is the "ugly" side of the problem and naturally
enough, cannot be investigated here.

Lastly, our theologian inevitably lapses into the role of moral preacher. He
reads the artisan class a moral lecture on self-help. He firstly condemns the
"complaints about long-term borrowing and about discounts" (p. 136), and
invites the artisan to inspect his own conscience: "Do you always fix the same,
unchanging price, my friend, for every job of work that you undertake?" (p.
132). On this occasion he also warns the artisan against making extortionate
demands on "wealthy Englishmen". "The whole root of the evil", according to the
fantasies that inhabit Gottfried's mind, "is the system of annual accounts" (p.
139). This is followed by Jeremiads about the way in which the artisans carry
on in the taverns and their wives indulge their love of finery (p. 140 ff.).

The means by which the artisan class is to better itself are "the
corporation, the sickness fund and the artisans' court" (p. 146); and lastly,
the workers' educational clubs (p. 153). Here is his closing statement about
these educational clubs.

"And finally the union of song and oratory will create a
bridge to dramatic performances and the artisan theatre which
must constantly be kept in view as the ultimate objective of these aesthetic
strivings. Only when the labouring classes learn once more how to move on the
stage will their artistic education be complete (pp. 174-175).

Gottfried has thus succeeded in changing the artisan into a
comedian and has arrived back at his own situation.

This whole flirtation with the guild aspirations of the master craftsmen in
Bonn did not fail to achieve a practical result. In return for the solemn
promises to promote the cause of the guilds Gottfried's election as Member for
Bonn in the Lower Chamber under the dictated constitution [25] was contrived. "From
this moment on Gottfried felt happy."

He set off at once for Berlin and as he believed that it was the intention
of the government to establish a permanent "corporation" of approved masters in
the craft of legislation in the Lower Chamber, he acted as if he were to stay
there for ever and even decided to send for his wife and child. But then the
Chamber was dissolved and Friend Gottfried, bitterly disappointed, had to leave
his parliamentary bliss and go back to Mockel.

Soon afterwards conflicts broke out between the Frankfurt Assembly and the
German governments and this led to the upheavals in South Germany and on the
Rhine. The Fatherland called and Gottfried obeyed. Siegburg was the site of the
arsenal for the province and next to Bonn Siegburg was the place where
Gottfried had sown the seed of freedom most frequently. He joined forces with
his friend, Anneke, a former lieutenant and summoned all his loyal vassals to a
march on Siegburg. They were to assemble at the rope ferry. More than a hundred
were supposed to come but when after waiting a long time Gottfried counted the
heads of the faithful there were barely thirty — and of these only three
were students, to the undying shame of the Maybug Club! Undaunted, Gottfried
and his band crossed the Rhine and marched towards Siegburg. The night was dark
and it was drizzling. Suddenly the sound of horses' hooves could be heard
behind our valiant heroes. They took cover at the side of the road, a patrol of
lancers galloped by: miserable knaves had talked too freely and the authorities
had got wind of it. The march was now futile and had to be abandoned. The pain
that Gottfried felt in his breast that night can only be compared with the
torments he experienced when both Knapp and Chamisso declined to print the
first flowering of his poetic talent in their magazines.

After this he could remain no longer in Bonn but surely the Palatinate would
provide great scope for his activities? He went to Kaiserslautern and as he had
to have a job he obtained a sinecure in the War Office (it is said that he was
put in charge of naval affairs). But he continued to earn his living by hawking
around his ideas about freedom and the people's paradise among the peasants of
the region and it is said that his reception in a number of reactionary
districts was anything but cordial. Despite these minor misfortunes Kinkel
could be seen on every highroad, striding along purposefully, his rucksack on
his back and from this point on he appears in all the newspapers accompanied by
his rucksack.

But the upheavals in the Palatinate were quickly terminated and we discover
Kinkel again in Karlsruhe where instead of the rucksack he carries a musket
which now becomes his permanent emblem. This musket is said to have had a very
beautiful aspect, i.e. a butt and stock made of mahogany and it was
certainly an artistic, aesthetic musket; there was also an ugly side to it and
this was the fact that Gottfried could neither load, nor see, nor shoot nor
march. So much so that a friend asked him why he was going into battle at all.
Whereupon Gottfried replied: Well, the fact is that I can't return to Bonn, I
have to live!

In this way Gottfried joined the ranks of the warriors in the corps of the
chivalrous Willich. As a number of his comrades in arms have reliably reported.
Gottfried served as a common partisan, sharing all the vicissitudes of this
company with humility. He was as merry and friendly in bad times as in good,
but he was mostly engaged in marauding. In Rastatt, [26] however, this unsullied
witness to truth and justice was to undergo the test from which he would emerge
unblemished and as a martyr to the plaudits of the whole German nation. The
exact details of this exploit have never been established with any accuracy.
All that is known is that a troop of partisans got lost in a skirmish and a few
shots were fired on their flank. A bullet grazed Gottfried's head and he fell
to the ground with the cry "I am dead". He was not in fact dead but his wound
was serious enough to prevent him from retreating with the others. He was taken
to a farm house where he turned to the worthy Black Forest peasants with the
words "Save me — I am Kinkel!" Here he was discovered by the Prussians,
who dragged him off into Babylonian captivity.

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Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 1852

Heroes of the Exile

III

With his capture a new epoch opened in Kinkel's life and at the
same time there began a new era in the history of German Philistinism. The
Maybug Club had scarcely heard the news of his capture than they wrote to all
the German papers that Kinkel, the great poet, was in danger of being summarily
shot and exhorting the German people, especially the educated among them, and
above all the women and girls to give their all to save the life of the
imprisoned poet. Kinkel himself composed a poem at about this time, as we are
told, in which he compared himself to "Christ, his friend and teacher", adding:
"My blood is shed for you." From this point on his emblem is the lyre. In this
way Germany suddenly learned that Kinkel was a poet, a great poet moreover, and
from this moment on the mass of German Philistines and aestheticising
drivellers joined in the Farce of the Blue Flower put on by our Heinrich von
Ofterdingen.

In the meantime the Prussians brought him before a military tribunal. For
the first time after a long interval he saw his opportunity to try out one of
those moving appeals to the tear ducts of his audience which — according
to Mockel — had brought him such applause earlier on as an assistant
preacher in Cologne. Cologne too was destined soon to witness his most glorious
performance in this sphere. He made a speech in his own defence before the
tribunal which thanks to the indiscretion of a friend was unfortunately made
available to the public through the medium of the Berlin Abendpost. In
this speech Kinkel "repudiates any connection between his activities and the
filth and the dirt that, as I well know, has latterly attached itself to this
revolution".

After this rabid revolutionary speech Kinkel was sentenced to twenty years
detention in a fortress. As an act of grace this was reduced to prison with
hard labour and he was removed to Naugard where he was employed in spinning
wool and so just as formerly he had appeared with the emblem first of the
rucksack, then the musket and then the lyre, he now appears in association with
the spinning wheel. We shall see him later wandering over the ocean
accompanied by the emblem of the purse.

In the meantime a curious event took place in Germany. It is well known that
the German Philistine is endowed by Nature with a beautiful soul. Now he found
his most cherished illusions cruelly shattered by the hard blows of the year
1849. Not a single hope had become reality and even the fast-beating hearts of
young men began to despair about the fate of the fatherland. Every heart
yielded to a lachrymose torpor and the need began to be felt for a democratic
Christ, for a real or imagined Sufferer who in his torments would bear the sins
of the Philistine world with the patience of a lamb and whose Passion would
epitomise in extreme form the unrestrained but chronic self-pity of the whole
of Philistinism. The Maybug Club, with Mockel at its head, set out to satisfy
this universal need. And indeed, who better fitted for the task of enacting
this great Passion Farce than our captive passion dower, Kinkel at the Spinning
Wheel, this sponge able to absorb endless floods of sentimental tears, who was
in addition preacher, professor of fine arts, deputy, political colporteur,
musketeer, newly discovered poet and old impresario all rolled into one? Kinkel
was the man of the moment and as such he was immediately accepted by the German
Philistines. Every paper abounded in anecdotes, vignettes, poems, reminiscences
of the captive poet, his sufferings in prison were magnified a thousandfold and
took on mythical stature; at least once a month his hair was reported to have
gone grey; in every bourgeois meeting-place and at every tea party he was
remembered with grief; the daughters of the educated classes sighed over his
poems and old maids who knew what unrequited passion is wept freely in various
cities at the thought of his shattered manhood. All other profane victims of
the revolutionary movement, all who had been shot, who had fallen in battle or
who had been imprisoned disappeared into naught beside this one sacrificial
lamb, beside this one hero after the hearts of the Philistines male and female.
For him alone did the rivers of tears flow, and indeed, he alone was able to
respond to them in kind. In short, we have the perfect image, complete in every
detail of the democratic Siegwart epoch which yielded in nothing to the
literary Siegwart epoch of the preceding century and Siegwart-Kinkel never felt
more at home in any role than in this one where he could seem great not because
of what he did but because of what he did not do. He could seem great not by
dint of his strength and his powers of resistance but through his weakness and
spineless behaviour in a situation where his only task was to survive with
decorum and sentiment. Mockel, however, was able and experienced enough to take
practical advantage of the public's soft heart and she immediately organised a
highly efficient industry. She caused all of Gottfried's published and
unpublished works to be printed for they all suddenly became fashionable and
were much in demand; she also found a market for her own life-experiences from
the insect world, e.g., her Story of a Firefly; she employed the
Maybug Strodtmann to assemble Gottfried's most secret diary-feelings and
prostitute them to the public for a considerable sum of money; she organised
collections of every kind and in general she displayed undeniable talent and
great perseverance in converting the feelings of the educated public into hard
cash. In addition she had the great satisfaction "of seeing the greatest men of
Germany, such as Adolf Stahr, meeting daily in her own little room". The climax
of this whole Siegwart mania was to be reached at the Assizes in Cologne where
Gottfried made a guest appearance early in 1850. This was the trial resulting
from the attempted uprising in Siegburg and Kinkel was brought to Cologne for
the occasion. As Gottfried's diaries play such a prominent part in this sketch
it will be appropriate if we insert here an excerpt from the diary of an
eyewitness.

"Kinkel's wife visited him in gaol. She welcomed him from
behind the grill with verses; he replied, I understand, in hexameters;
whereupon they both sank to their knees before each other and the prison
inspector, an old sergeant-major, who was standing by wondered whether he was
dealing with madmen or clowns. When asked later by the chief prosecutor about
the content of their conversation he declared that the couple had indeed spoken
German but that he could not make head nor tail of it. Whereupon Mrs. Kinkel is
supposed to have retorted that a man who was so wholly innocent of art and
literature should not be made an inspector."

Faced with the jury Kinkel wriggled his way out by acting the
pure tearjerker, the poetaster of the Siegwart period of the vintage of
Werther's Sufferings. [27]

"Members of the Court, Gentlemen of the Jury — the
blue eyes of my children — the green waters of the Rhine — it is no
dishonour to shake the hand of the proletarian — the pallid lips of the
prisoner — the peaceful air of one's home" — and similar crap: that
was what the whole famous speech amounted to and the public, the jury, the
prosecution and even the police shed their bitterest tears and the trial closed
with a unanimous acquittal and a no less unanimous weeping and wailing. Kinkel
is doubtless a dear, good man but he is also a repulsive mixture of religious,
political and literary reminiscences."

It's enough to make you sick.

Fortunately this period of misery was soon terminated by the romantic
liberation of Kinkel from Spandua gaol. His escape was a re-enactment of the
story of Richard Lionheart and Blondel with the difference that this time it
was Blondel who was in prison while Lionheart played on the barrel-organ
outside and that Blondel was an ordinary music-hall minstrel and the lion was
basically more like a rabbit. Lionheart was in fact the student Schurz from the
Maybug Club, a little intriguer with great ambitions and limited achievements
who was however intelligent enough to have seen through the "German Lamartine"!
Not long after the escape student Schurz declared in Paris that he knew very
well that Kinkel was no lumen mundi, whereas he, Schurz, and none other was
destined to be the future president of the German Republic. This mannikin, one
of those students "in brown jackets and pale-blue overcoats" whom Gottfried had
once followed with his gloomily flashing eyes succeeded in freeing Kinkel at
the cost of sacrificing some poor devil of a warder who is now doing time
elevated by the feeling of being a martyr for freedom — the freedom of
Gottfried Kinkel.

Contents | Notes | Marx/Engels
Archive

Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 1852

Heroes of the Exile

IV

We next meet Kinkel again in London, and this time, thanks to
his prison fame and the sentimentality of the German Philistines, he has become
the greatest man in Germany. Mindful of his sublime mission Friend Gottfried
was able to exploit all the advantages of the moment. His romantic
escape gave new impetus to the Kinkel cult in Germany and he adroitly directed
this onto a path that was not without beneficial material consequences. At the
same time London provided the much venerated man with a new, complex arena in
which to receive even greater acclaim. He did not hesitate: he would have to be
the new lion of the season. With this in mind he refrained for the time being
from all political activity and withdrew into the seclusion of his home in
order to grow a beard, without which no prophet can succeed. After that he
visited Dickens, the English liberal newspapers, the German businessmen in the
City and especially the aesthetic Jews in that place. He was all things to all
men: to one a poet, to another a patriot in general, professor of fine arts to
a third, Christ to the fourth, the patiently suffering Odysseus to the fifth.
To everyone, however, he appeared as the gentle, artistic, benevolent and
humanitarian Gottfried. He did not rest until Dickens had eulogised him in the
Household Words, until the Illustrated News had published his
portrait. He induced the few Germans in London who had been involved in the
Kinkel mania even at a distance to allow themselves to be invited to lectures
on modern drama. Once he had organised them in this way tickets to these
lectures flooded into the homes of the local German population. No running
around, no advertisement, no charlatanism, no importunity was beneath him; in
return, however, he did not go unrewarded. Gottfried sunned himself
complacently in the mirror of his own fame and in the gigantic mirror of the
Crystal Palace of the world. And we may say that he now felt tremendously
content.

There was no lack of praise for his lectures (see Kosmos).

Kosmos: "Kinkel's Lectures"

"While looking once at Dobler's paintings of misty
landscapes, I was surprised by the whimsical question of whether it was
possible to produce such chaotic creations in words, whether it was possible to
utter misty images. It is no doubt unpleasant for the critic to have to confess
that in this case his critical autonomy will vibrate against the galvanized
nerves of an external reminiscence, as the fading sound of a dying note echoes
in the strings. Nevertheless I would prefer to renounce any attempt at a
bewigged and boring analysis of pedantic insensitivity than to deny that tone
which the charming muse of the German refugee caused to resonate in my
sensibility. This ground note of Kinkel's paintings, this sounding
board of his chords is the sonorous, creative, formative and gradually shaping
'word' — 'modern thought'. To 'judge' this thought is to lead truth out
of the chaos of mendacious traditions, to constitute it as the indestructible
property of the world and as such to place it under the protection of
spiritually active, logical minorities who will educate the world leading it
from a credulous ignorance to a state of more sceptical science. It is the task
of the science of doubt to profane the mysticism of pious deceit, to undermine
the absolutism of an atrophied tradition. Science must employ scepticism, that
ceaselessly labouring guillotine of philosophy, to decapitate accepted
authority and to lead the nations out of the misty regions of theocracy by
means of revolution into the luscious meadows of democracy" (of nonsense). "The
sustained, unflagging search in the annals of mankind and the understanding of
man himself is the great task of all revolutionaries and this had been
understood by that proscribed poet rebel who on three recent Monday evenings
uttered his subversive views before a bourgeois audience in the course of his
lectures on the history of the modern theatre."

"A Worker"

It is generally claimed that this worker is a very close
relation of Kinkel's — namely Mockel — as indeed seems likely from
the use of such expressions as "sounding-board", "fading sound", "chords" and
"galvanized nerves".

However, even this period of hard-earned pleasure was not to last forever.
The Last Judgement on the existing world-order, the democratic day of
judgement, namely the much celebrated May 1852 [28] was drawing ever closer. In order to confront this
day all booted and spurred Kinkel had to don his political lionskin once more:
he had to make contact with the "Emigration".

So we come to the London "Emigration", this hotchpotch of former members of
the Frankfurt Parliament, the Berlin National Assembly, and Chamber of
Deputies, of gentlemen from the Baden Campagne, Gargantuas from the Comedy of
the Imperial Constitution, [29] writers without a public, loudmouths from the
democratic clubs and congresses, twelfth-rate journalists and so forth.

The heroes of the 1848 revolution in Germany had been on the point of coming
to a sticky end when the victory of ''tyranny'' rescued them, swept them out of
the country and made saints and martyrs of them. They were saved by the
counter-revolution. The course of continental politics brought most of them to
London which thus became their European centre. It is evident that something
had to happen, something had to be arranged to remind the public daily of the
existence of these world-liberators. At all costs it must not become obvious
that the course of universal history might be able to proceed without the
intervention of these mighty men. The more this refuse of mankind found itself
hindered by its own impotence as much as by the prevailing situation from
undertaking any real action, the more zealously did it indulge in spurious
activity whose imagined deeds, imagined parties, imagined struggles and
imagined interests have been so noisily trumpeted abroad by those involved. The
less able they were to bring about a new revolution the more they discounted
the importance of such an eventuality in their minds, while they concentrated
on sharing out the plum jobs and enjoying the prospect of future power. The
form taken by this self-important activity was that of a mutual insurance club
of the heroes-to-be and the reciprocal guarantee of government posts.

V

The first attempt to create such an "organisation" took place as
early as the Spring of 1850. A magniloquent "draft circular to German
democrats" was hawked around London in manuscript form together with a
“Covering Letter to the Leaders”. It contained an exhortation to
found a united democratic church. Its immediate aim was to form a Central
Office to deal with the affairs of German émigrés, to set up a central
administration for refugee problems, to start a printing press in London, and
to unite all patriots against the common enemy. The Emigration would then
become the centre of the internal revolutionary movement, the organisation of
the Emigration would be the beginning of a comprehensive democratic
organisation, the outstanding personalities among the members of the Central
Office would be paid salaries raised by taxes levied on the German people. This
tax proposal seemed all the more appropriate as “the German Emigration
had gone abroad not merely without a respectable hero but what is even worse,
without common assets”. It is no secret that the Hungarian,
Polish and French committees already in existence provided the model for this
“organisation” and the whole document is redolent of envy of the
privileged position of these prominent allies.

The circular was the joint production of Messrs. Rudolph Schramm
and Gustav Struve, behind whom lay concealed the merry figure of Mr.
Arnold Ruge, a corresponding member living in Ostend at the time.

Mr. Rudolph Schramm — a rowdy, loudmouthed and extremely
confused little mannikin whose life-motto came from Rameau's Nephew:
“I would rather be an impudent windbag than be nothing at all.”

When at the height of his power, Mr. Camphausen [30] would gladly have given the young forward
Crefelder an important post, had it been permissible to elevate a junior
official. Thanks to bureaucratic etiquette Mr. Schrarnm found only the career
of a democrat open to him. And in this profession he really did advance at one
point to the post of President of the Democratic Club in Berlin and with the
support of some left-wing Members of Parliament he became the Deputy for
Striegau in the Berlin National Assembly. Here the normally so loquacious
Schramm distinguished himself by his obstinate silence, which was accompanied,
however, by an uninterrupted series of grunts. After the Assembly had been
dissolved [31] our
democratic man of the people wrote a pamphlet in support of a constitutional
monarchy but this did not suffice to get him re-elected. Later, at the time of
the Brentano government he appeared momentarily in Baden and there in the
“Club for Resolute Progress” he became acquainted with Struve. On
his arrival in London he declared his intention of withdrawing from all
political activity for which reason he then published the circular referred to
above. Essentially a bureaucrat Mr. Schramm imagined that his family relations
qualified him to represent the radical bourgeoisie in exile and he did indeed
present a fair caricature of the radical bourgeois.

Gustav Struve is one of the more important figures of the
emigration. At the very first glimpse of his leathery appearance, his
protuberant eyes with their sly, stupid expression, the matt gleam on his bald
pate and his half Slav, half Kalmuck [a western mongol
people] features one cannot doubt that one is in the presence of an
unusual man. And this first impression is confirmed by his low, guttural voice,
his oily manner of speaking and the air of solemn gravity he imparts to his
gestures. To be just it must be said that faced with the greatly increased
difficulties of distinguishing oneself these days, our Gustav at least made the
effort to attract attention by using his diverse talents — he is part
prophet, part speculator, part bunion healer — centring his activities on
all kinds of peripheral matters and making propaganda for the strangest
assortment of causes. For example, he was born a Russian but suddenly took it
into his head to enthuse about the cause of German freedom after he had been
employed in a minor capacity in the Russian embassy to the Federal Diet and had
written a little pamphlet in defence of the Diet. Regarding his own skull as
normal he suddenly developed an interest in phrenology and from then on he
refused to trust anyone whose skull he had not yet felt and examined. He also
gave up eating meat and preached the gospel of strict vegetarianism; he was,
moreover, a weather-prophet, he inveighed against tobacco and was prominent in
the interest of German Catholicism and water-cures. In harmony with his
thoroughgoing hatred of scientific knowledge it was natural that he should be
in favour of free universities in which the four faculties would be replaced by
the study of phrenology, physiognomy, chiromancy and necromancy. It was also
quite in character for him to insist that he must become a great writer simply
because his mode of writing was the antithesis of everything that could be held
to be stylistically acceptable.

In the early Forties Gustav had already invented the Deutscher
Zuschauer, a little paper that he published in Mannheim, that he patented
and that pursued him everywhere as an idée fixe. He also made the
discovery at around this time that Rotteck's History of the World and
the Rotteck-Welcker Lexicon of Politics, the two works that
had been his Old and New Testaments, were out of date and in need of a new
democratic edition. This revision Gustav undertook without delay and
published an extract from it in advance under the title The Basic Elements
of Political Science. He argued that the revision had become "an
undeniable necessity since 1848 as the late-lamented Rotteck had not
experienced the events of recent years".

In the meantime there broke out in Baden in quick succession the three
"popular uprisings" that Gustav has placed in the very centre of the whole
modern course of world history. Driven into exile by the very first of these
revolts (Hacker's) and occupied with the task of publishing the Deutscher
Zuschauer once again, this time from Basel, he was then dealt a hard blow
by fate when the Mannheim publisher continued to print the
Deutscher Zuschauer under a different editor. The battle between the
true and the false Deutscher Zuschauer was so bitterly fought that
neither paper survived. To compensate for this Gustav devised a constitution
for the German Federal Republic in which Germany was to be divided into 24
republics, each with a president and two chambers; he appended a neat map on
which the whole proposal could be clearly seen. In September 1848 the second
insurrection began in which our Gustav acted as both Caesar and Socrates. He
used the time granted him on German soil to issue serious warnings to the Black
Forest Peasantry about the deleterious effects of smoking tobacco. In Lörrach
he published his Moniteur with the title of Government Organ — German
Free State — Freedom, Prosperity, Education. This publication
contained inter alia the following decree:

"Article 1. The extra tax of 10 per cent on goods imported
from Switzerland is hereby abolished;

Article 2. Christian Müller, the Customs Officer is to
be given the task of implementing this measure."

He was accompanied in all his trials by his faithful Amalia who
subsequently published a romantic account of them. She was also active in
administering the oath to captured gendarmes, for it was her custom to fasten a
red band around the arm of every one who swore allegiance to the German Free
State and to give him a big kiss. Unfortunately Gustav and Amalia were taken
prisoner and languished in gaol where the imperturbable Gustav at once resumed
his republican translation of Rotteck's History of the World until he
was liberated by the outbreak of the third insurrection. Gustav now became a
member of a real provisional government and the mania for provisional
governments was now added to his other idées fixes. As President of
the War Council he hastened to introduce as much muddle as possible into his
department and to recommend the "traitor" Mayerhofer for the post of Minister
for War (vice Goegg, Retrospect, Paris 1850). Later he vainly aspired
to the post of Foreign Minister and to have 60,000 Florins placed at his
disposal. Mr. Brentano soon relieved Gustav of the burdens of government and
Gustav now entered the "Club of Resolute Progress" from which he became leader
of the opposition. He delighted above all in opposing the very measures of
Brentano which he had hitherto supported. Even though the Club too was
disbanded and Gustav had to flee to the Palatinate this disaster had its
positive side for it enabled him to issue one further number of the inevitable
Deutscher Zuschauer in Neustadt an der Haardt — this compensated
Gustav for much undeserved suffering. A further satisfaction was that he was
successful in a by-election in some remote corner of the uplands and was
nominated member of the Baden Constituent Assembly which meant that he could
now return in an official capacity. In this Assembly Gustav only distinguished
himself by the following three proposals that he put forward in Freiburg: (1)
On June 28th: everyone who enters into dealings with the enemy should be
declared a traitor. (2) On June 30th: a new provisional government should be
formed in which Struve would have a seat and a vote. (3) On the same day that
the previous motion was defeated he proposed that as the defeat at Rastatt had
rendered all resistance futile the uplands should be spared the terrors of war
and that therefore all officials and soldiers should receive ten days' wages
and members of the Assembly should receive ten days' expenses together with
travelling costs after which they should all repair to Switzerland to the
accompaniment of trumpets and drums. When this proposal too was rejected Gustav
set out for Switzerland on his own and having been driven from thence by James
Fazy's stick he retreated to London where he at once came to the fore with yet
another discovery, namely the Six scourges of mankind. These six
scourges were: the princes, the nobles, the priests, the bureaucracy, the
standing army, mammon and bedbugs. The spirit in which Gustav interpreted the
lamented Rotteck can be gauged from the further discovery that mammon was the
invention of Louis Philippe. Gustav preached the gospel of the six scourges in
the Deutsche Londoner Zeitung [German London News] which belonged to
the ex-Duke of Brunswick. He was amply rewarded for this activity and in return
he gratefully bowed to the ducal censorship. So much for Gustav's relations
with the first scourge, the princes. As for his relationship with the nobles,
the second scourge, our moral and religious republican had visiting cards
printed on which he figured as "Baron von Struve". If his relations with the
remaining scourges were less amicable this cannot be his fault. Gustav then
made use of his leisure time in London to devise a republican calendar in which
the saints were replaced by right-minded men and the names "Gustav" and
"Amelia" were particularly prominent. The months were designated by German
equivalents of those in the calendar of the French Republic and there were a
number of other commonplaces for the common good. For the rest, the remaining
idées fixes made their appearance again in London: Gustav made haste
to revive the Deutscher Zuschauer and the Club of Resolute Progress
and to form a provisional government. On all these matters he found himself of
one mind with Schramm and in this way the circular came into being.

The third member of the alliance, the great Arnold Ruge with his
air of a sergeant-major living in hopes of civilian employment outshines in
glory the whole of the emigration. It cannot be said that this noble man
commends himself by his notably handsome exterior; Paris acquaintances were
wont to sum up his Pomeranian-Slav features with the word "ferret-face"
(figure de fouine). Arnold Ruge, the son of peasants of the isle of
Rugen, had endured seven years in Prussian prisons for democratic agitation. He
embraced Hegelian philosophy as soon as he had realised that once he had leafed
through Hegel's Encyclopaedia he could dispense with the study of all
other science. He also developed the principle (described in a Novelle and
which he attempted to practice on his friends — poor Georg Herwegh can
vouch for the truth of this), of profiting from marriage and he early acquired
a "substantial property" in this manner.

Despite his Hegelian phrases and his substantial property he did not advance
beyond the post of porter to German philosophy. In the
Hallische-Jahrbücher [Halle Annals] and the
Deutsche-Jahrbücher [German Annals] it was his task to announce and to
trumpet the names of the great philosophers of the future and he showed that he
was not without talent in exploiting them for his own purposes. Unfortunately,
the period of philosophical anarchy soon supervened, that period when science
no longer had a universally acknowledged king, when Strauss, Bruno Bauer and
Feuerbadh fought among themselves and when the most diverse alien elements
began to disrupt the simplicity of classical doctrine. Ruge looked on
helplessly, he no longer knew which path to take; his Hegelian categories had
always operated in a vacuum, now they ran completely amok and he suddenly felt
the need for a mighty movement in which exact thought and writing were not
indispensable.

Ruge played the same role in the Hallische Jahrbücher as the late
bookseller Nicolai had done in the old Berliner Monatsschrft [Berlin
Monthly Magazine]. Like the latter his ambition was to print the works of
others and in so doing, to derive material advantage and also to quarry
literary sustenance for the effusions of his own brain. The only difference was
that in this literary digestive process with its inevitable end product Ruge
went much further than did his model in rewriting his collaborators' articles.
Moreover, Ruge was not the porter of German Enlightenment, he was the Nicolai
of modern German philosophy and thus was able to conceal the natural
banality of his genius behind a thick hedge of speculative jargon. Like Nicolai
he fought valiantly against Romanticism because Hegel had demolished
it philosophically in the aesthetics and Heine had done the same thing
from the point of view of literature in The Romantic School. Unlike
Hegel he agreed with Nicolai in arrogating to himself the right as an
anti-Romantic to set up a vulgar Philistinism and above all his own Philistinic
self as an ideal of perfection. With this in mind and so as to defeat the enemy
on his own ground Ruge went in for making verses. No Dutchman could have
achieved the dull flatness of these poems which Ruge hurled so challengingly
into the face of Romanticism.

And in general our Pomeranian thinker did not really feel at ease in
Hegelian philosophy. Able as he was in detecting contradictions he was all the
more feeble in resolving them and he had a very understandable horror of
dialectics. The upshot was that the crudest possible contradictions dwelt
peaceably together in his dogmatic brain and that his powers of understanding,
never very agile, were nowhere more at home than in such mixed company. It is
not unknown for him to read simultaneously two articles by two different
writers and to conflate them into a single new product without noticing that
they had been written from two opposing viewpoints. Always riding firmly
between his own contradictions he sought to extricate himself from condemnation
by the theorists by declaring his faulty theory to be "practical", while at the
same time he would disarm the practical by interpreting his practical
clumsiness and inconsequentiality as theoretical expertise. He would end by
sanctifying his own entanglement in insoluble contradictions, his chaotically
uncritical faith in popular slogans by regarding them as proof that he was a
man of "principle".

Before we go on to concern ourselves with the further career of our Maurice
of Saxony, as he liked to style himself in his intimate circle or friends, we
would point to two qualities which made their appearance already in the
Jahrbücher. [Deutsche Jahrbücher, edited by
Ruge] The first is his mania for manifestos. No sooner had
someone hatched a novel opinion that Ruge believed to have a future than he
would issue a manifesto. As no-one reproaches him with ever having given birth
to an original thought of his own, such manifestos were always suitable
opportunity to claim this novel idea as his own property in a more or less
declamatory fashion. This would be followed by the attempt to form a party, a
"mass" which would stand behind him and to whom he could act as sergeant-major.
We shall see later to what unbelievable heights of perfection Ruge had
developed the art of fabricating manifestos, proclamations and pronunciamentos.
The second quality is the particular diligence in which Arnold excels.
As he does not care to study overmuch, or as he puts it “to transfer
ideas from one library into another”, he prefers to gain his knowledge
“fresh from life”. He means by this to note down conscientiously
every evening all the witty, novel or bright ideas that he has read, heard or
just picked up during the day. As opportunity arises these materials are then
made to contribute to Ruge's daily stint which he labours at just as
conscientiously as at his other bodily needs. It is this that his admirers
refer to when they say that he cannot hold his ink. The subject of his daily
literary production is a matter of complete indifference; what is vital is that
Ruge should be able to immerse every possible topic in that wonderful stylistic
sauce that goes with everything just like the English who enjoy their Soyer's
relish or Worcester Sauce equally with fish, fowl, cutlets or anything else.
This daily stylistic diarrhoea he likes to designate the “all-pervading
beautiful form” and he regards it as adequate grounds for passing himself
off as an artist.

Contented as Ruge was to be the Swiss guard of German philosophy he still
had a secret sorrow gnawing at his innermost vitals. He had not written a
single large book and had daily to envy the happy Bruno Bauer who had published
18 fat volumes while still a young man. To reduce the discrepancy Ruge had one
and the same essay printed three times in one and the same volume under
different titles and then brought out the same volume in a number of different
formats. In this way Arnold Ruge's Complete Works came into being and
even today he derives much pleasure from counting them every morning volume by
volume as they stand there neatly bound in his library, whereupon he exclaims
joyfully: “And anyway, Bruno Bauer is a man without principles!”

Even though Arnold did not manage to comprehend the Hegelian system of
philosophy, he did succeed in representing one Hegelian category in his own
person. He was the very incarnation of the “honest consciousness”
and was strengthened in this when he made the pleasant discovery in the
Phenomenology — a book that was otherwise closed to him and
bound with seven seals — that the honest consciousness “always has
pleasure in itself”. Though he wears his integrity on his sleeve the
honest consciousness uses it to conceal the petty malice and crotchetiness of
the Philistine; he has the right to allow himself every kind of base action
because he knows that his baseness springs from honest motives. His very
stupidity becomes a virtue because it is an irrefutable proof that he stands up
for his principles. Despite every arrière pensée he is firmly
convinced of his own integrity and however base or filthy an intended act may
be it does not prevent him from appearing sincere and trusting. Beneath the
halo of good intentions all the petty meannesses of the citizen become
transformed into as many virtues; sordid self-interest appears as an innocent
babe when dressed up to look like a piece of self-sacrifice; cowardice appears
disguised as a higher form of courage, baseness becomes magnanimity, and the
coarse manners of the peasant become ennobled, and indeed transfigured into the
signs of decency and good humour. This is the gutter into which the
contradictions of philosophy, democracy and the cliché industry all pour; such
a man is moreover richly endowed with all the vices, the mean and petty
qualities, with the slyness and the stupidity, the greed and the clumsiness,
the servility and the arrogance, the untrustworthiness and the bonhomie of the
emancipated serf, the peasant; Philistine and ideologist, atheist and slogan
worshipper, absolute ignoramus and absolute philosopher all in one — that
is Arnold Ruge as Hegel foretold him in 1806.

After the Deutsche Jahrbücher were suppressed Ruge transported his
family to Paris in a carriage specially designed for the purpose. Here, his
unlucky star brought him into contact with Heine who honoured him as
the man who "had translated Hegel into Pomeranian". Heine asked him whether
Prutz was not a pseudonym of his which Ruge could deny in good conscience.
However, it was not possible to make Heine believe that anyone but Arnold was
the author of Prutz's poems. Heine also discovered very soon that even though
Ruge had no talent he knew very well how to give the appearance of being a man
of character. Thus it came about that Friend Arnold gave Heine the idea for his
Atta Troll. If Ruge was not able to immortalise his sojourn in Paris
by writing a great work he at least deserves our thanks for the one Heine
produced for him. In gratitude the poet wrote for him this well-known
epitaph:

Atta Troll, Tendenzbär; sittlich

Religiös; als Gatte brünstig;

Durch Verführtsein von dem Zeitgeist

Waldursprünglich Sansculotte;

Sehr schlecht tanzend, doch Gesinnung

Tragend in der zott'gen Hochbrust;

Manchmal auch gestunken habend;

Kein Talent, doch ein Charakter!

[Atta Troll, performing bear,

Pure and pious; a passionate husband,

By the Zeitgeist led astray

A backwoods sansculotte,

Dances badly but ideals

Dwell within his shaggy breast

Often stinking very strongly —

Talent none, but Character]

In Paris our Arnold experienced the misfortune of becoming
involved with the Communists. He published articles by Marx and Engels in the
Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher that contained views running directly
counter to those he had himself announced in the Preface, an accident to which
the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung drew his attention but which he bore
with philosophical resignation.

To overcome an innate social awkwardness Ruge has collected a small number
of curious anecdotes that could be used on any occasion. He calls these
anecdotes jokes. His preoccupation with these jokes, sustained over many years,
finally led to the transformation of all events, situations and circumstances
into a series of pleasant or unpleasant, good or bad, important or trivial,
interesting or boring jokes. The Paris upheavals, the many new impressions,
socialism, politics, the Palais-Royal, the cheapness of the oysters — all
these things wrought so powerfully on the mind of this unhappy wretch that his
head went round and round in a permanent and incurable whirl of jokes and Paris
itself became an unlimited storehouse of jokes. One of the brightest of these
jokes was the idea of using wood shavings to make coats for the proletariat and
in general he had a foible for industrial jokes for which he could never find
enough share-holders.

When the better known Germans were expelled from France Ruge contrived to
avoid this fate by presenting himself to the minister, Duchâtel, as a
savant sérieux. He evidently had in mind the scholar in Paul de Kock's
Amant de la lune, who established himself as a savant by
means of an original device for propelling corks through the air. Shortly
afterwards Arnold went to Switzerland where he joined forces with a former
Dutch NCO, Cologne writer and Prussian tax subinspector, called
Heinzen. Both were soon bound together by the bonds of the most
intimate friendship. Heinzen learnt philosophy from Ruge, Ruge learnt politics
from Heinzen. From this time on we detect in Ruge a growing necessity to appear
as a philosopher par excellence only among the coarser elements of the German
movement, a fate that led him down and down until at last he was accepted as a
philosopher only by non-conformist parsons (Dulon), German catholic parsons
(Ronge) and Fanny Lewald. At the same time anarchy was growing apace in German
philosophy. Stirner's The Self and its Own, Stein's Socialism,
Communism, etc., all recent intruders, drove Ruge's sense of humour to
breaking-point: a great leap must be ventured. So Ruge escaped into
humanism, the slogan with which all Confusionists in Germany from
Reuchlin to Herder have covered up their embarrassment. This slogan seemed all
the more appropriate as Feuerbach had only recently "rediscovered man" and
Arnold fastened on to it with such desperation that he has not let go of it to
this day. But while still in Switzerland Arnold made yet another, incomparably
greater discovery. This was that "the ego by appearing frequently
before the public proves itself a character". From this point on a new
field of activity opened for Arnold. He now erected the most shameless meddling
and interfering into a principle. Ruge had to poke his nose into everything. No
hen could lay an egg without Ruge "commenting on the reason underlying the
event". Contact had to be maintained at all cost with every obscure local paper
where there was a chance of making frequent appearances. He wrote no newspaper
articles without signing his name and, where possible, mentioning himself. The
principle of the frequent appearance had to be extended to every article; an
article had first to appear in letter form in the European papers (and after
Heinzen's emigration, in the American papers also), it was then reprinted as a
pamphlet and appeared again finally in the collected works.

Thus equipped Ruge could now return to Leipzig to obtain definitive
recognition of his character. But once arrived all was not a bed of
roses. His old friend Wigand, the bookseller, had very successfully replaced
him in the role of Nicolai and as no other post was vacant Ruge fell into
gloomy reflections on the transitoriness of all jokes. This was his situation
when the German Revolution broke out.

For him too it came in the hour of need. The mighty movement in which even
the clumsiest could easily swim with the current had finally got underway and
Ruge went to Berlin where he intended to fish in troubled waters. As a
revolution had just broken out he felt that it would be appropriate
for him to come forward with proposals for reform. So he founded a paper with
that name. The pre-revolutionary Réforme of Paris had been the most
untalented, illiterate and boring paper in France. The Berlin Reform
demonstrated that it was possible to surpass its French model and that one need
not blush at offering German public such an incredible journal even in the
&ldquo;metropolis of intelligence&rdquo;. On the assumption that Ruge's
defective grasp of style contained the best guarantee for the profound content
lying behind and beneath it Arnold was elected to the Frankfurt Parliament as
Member for Breslau. Here he saw his chance as editor of the democratic
Left-wing to come forward with an absurd manifesto. Apart from that he
distinguished himself only by his passion for issuing manifestos for
European People's Congresses, and hastened to add his voice to
the general wish that Prussia should be absorbed into Germany. Later, on his
return to Berlin he demanded that Germany should be swallowed up by Prussia and
Frankfurt by Berlin and when he finally decided to become a peer of Saxony he
proposed that Prussia and Germany should both be swallowed up by Dresden.

His parliamentary activity brought him no laurels other than the fact that
his own party despaired at so much folly. At the same time his
Reform was going downhill, a situation that could only be remedied, as
he thought, by his personal presence in Berlin. As an “honest
consciousness” it goes without saying that he also discovered an urgent
political reason for taking such a step and in fact he demanded that the whole
of the Left should accompany him there. Naturally, they refused and Ruge went
to Berlin alone. Once there, he discovered that modern conflicts can best be
resolved by the "Dessau method" as he termed the small state, a model of
constitutional democracy. Then during the siege [of
Vienna] he again drew up a manifesto in which General Wrangel
was exhorted to march against Windischgraetz and free Vienna. He even obtained
the approval of the democratic Congress for this curious document by pointing
out that the type had been set up and that it was already being printed.
Finally, when Berlin itself came under siege, Ruge went to Manteuffel and made
proposals concerning the Reform, which were, however, rejected.
Manteuffel told him that he wished all opposition papers were like the
Reform, the Neue Preussische Zeitung [32] was much more dangerous
to him — an utterance which the naive Ruge, with a tone of triumphant
pride, hastened to report through the length and breadth of Germany. Arnold
became an enthusiastic advocate of passive resistance which he himself
put into practice by leaving his paper, editors and everything in the lurch and
running away. Active flight is evidently the most resolute form of passive
resistance. The counter-revolution had arrived and Ruge fled before it all the
way from Berlin to London without stopping.

At the time of the May uprising in Dresden [33] Arnold placed himself at the head of the movement
in Leipzig together with his friend Otto Wigand and the city council. He and
his allies issued a vigorous manifesto to the citizens of Dresden urging them
to fight bravely; Ruge, Wigand and the city fathers, it went on, were sitting
watching in Leipzig and whoever did not desert himself would not be deserted by
Heaven. Scarcely had the manifesto been published than our brave Arnold took to
his heels and fled to Karlsruhe.

In Karlsruhe he felt unsafe even though the Baden troops were standing on
the Neckar and hostilities were a long way from breaking out. He asked Brentano
to send him to Paris as ambassador. Brentano permitted himself the joke of
giving him the post for 12 hours and then revoking it just when Ruge was about
to depart. Undaunted, Ruge still went to Paris together with Schutz and Blind,
the official representatives of the Brentano government, and once there made
such a spectacle of himself that his former editor announced in the official
Karlsruhe Zeitung that Mr. Ruge was not in Paris in any official
capacity but merely “on his own initiative”. Having once been taken
along by Schutz and Blind to see Ledru-Rollin Ruge suddenly interrupted the
diplomatic negotiations with a terrible diatribe against the Germans in the
presence of the Frenchmen so that his colleagues finally had to withdraw
discomfited and compromised. June 13th [34] came and dealt our Arnold such a severe blow that
he took to his heels and did not pause to take breath again until he found
himself in London, on free British soil. Referring to this fight later he
compared himself to Demosthenes.

In London Ruge first attempted to pass himself off as the Baden provisional
ambassador. He then tried to gain acceptance in the English press as a great
German writer and thinker but was turned away on the grounds that the English
were too materialistic ever to understand German philosophy. He was also asked
about his works — a request which Ruge could answer only with a sigh
while the image of Bruno Bauer once again rose up before his eyes. For even his
Collected Works, what were they but reprints of pamphlets? And they were not
even pamphlets but merely newspaper articles in pamphlet form, and basically
they were not even newspaper articles but only the muddled fruits of his
reading. Action was necessary and so Ruge wrote two articles for the
Leader in which under the pretext of an analysis of German democracy
he declared that in Germany "humanism" was the order of the day as
represented by Ludwig Feuerbach and Arnold Ruge, the author of the following
works: (1) The Religion of our Age, (2)Democracy and
Socialism, (3)Philosophy and the Revolution. These three
epoch-making works which have not appeared in the bookshops to this day are, it
goes without saying, nothing more than new titles arbitrarily applied to old
essays of Ruge's. Simultaneously he resumed his daily stints when for his own
edification, for the benefit of the German public and to the horror of Mr.
Brüggemann [35] he began to retranslate articles
into German that had somehow got out of the Kölnische Zeitung and into
the Morning Advertiser. Not exactly burdened with laurels he withdrew
to Ostend where he found the leisure necessary to his preparations for the role
of universal sage, the Confucius of the German Emigration.

Just as Gustav was the vegetable and Gottfried the sensibility of the German
petty-bourgeois Philistine, Arnold is representative of its
understanding or rather its non-understanding. Unlike Arnold
Winkelried [36] he does not open up a path to
freedom [der Freiheit eine Gasse]; he is in his own person the gutter of
freedom [der Freiheit eine Gosse]; Ruge stands in the German revolution like
the notices seen at the corner of certain streets: It is permitted to pass
water here.

We return at last to our circular with its covering letter. It fell flat and
the first attempt to create a united democratic church came to nought. Schramm
and Gustav later declared that failure was due solely to the circumstance chat
Ruge could neither speak French nor write German. But then the heroes again set
to work.

Che ciascun oltra moda era possente,

Come udirete nel canto seguente.

[For puissant were they all beyond compare,

As in our next canto you shall hear.] [37]

Contents | Notes | Marx/Engels
Archive

Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 1852

Heroes of the Exile

VI

Together with Gustav, Rodomonte [the
nickname refers back to the quotation closing the former chapter]
Heinzen had arrived in London from Switzerland. Karl Heinzen had for many years
made a living from his threat to destroy "tyranny" in Germany. After the
outbreak of the February Revolution he went so far as to attempt, with
unheard-of courage, to inspect German soil from the vantage point of Schuster
Island [near Basle]. He then betook himself to
Switzerland where from the safety of Geneva he again thundered against the
“tyrants and oppressors of the people” and took the opportunity to
declare that “Kossuth is a great man, but Kossuth has forgotten about
explosive silver”. His horror of bloodshed was such that it turned him
into the alchemist of the revolution. He dreamt of an explosive substance that
would blast the whole European reaction into the air in a trice without its
users even getting their fingers burnt. He had a particular aversion to walking
amid a shower of bullets and in general to conventional warfare in which
principles are no defence against bullets. Under the government of Brentano he
risked a revolutionary visit to Karlsruhe. As he did not receive the reward he
thought due to him for his heroic deeds he resolved to edit the
Moniteur [38] of
that "traitor" Brentano. But as the Prussians advanced he declared that Heinzen
would not "let himself be shot" for that traitor Brentano. Under the pretext of
forming an elite corps where political principles and military organisation
would mutually complement each other, i.e. where military cowardice would pass
for political courage, his constant search for the ideal free corps made him
retrace his steps until he had regained the familiar territory of Switzerland.
Sophie's Journey from Memel to Saxony [39] was a good deal more bloody than Heinzen's
revolutionary expedition. On his arrival in Switzerland he declared that there
were no longer any real men in Germany, that the authentic explosive silver had
not yet been discovered, that the war was not being conducted on revolutionary
principles but in the normal fashion with powder and lead, and that he intended
to revolutionise in Switzerland as Germany was a lost cause. In the secluded
idyll of Switzerland and with the tortured dialect they speak there it was easy
for Rodomonte to pass for a German writer and even for a dangerous man. He
achieved his aim. He was expelled and dispatched to London at Federal expense.
Rodomonte Heinzen had not directly participated in the European revolutions;
but, undeniably, he had moved about extensively on their behalf. When the
February Revolution broke out he took up a collection of “revolutionary
money” in New York, hastened to the aid of his country and advanced as
far as the Swiss border. When the March Club's [40] revolution collapsed he retired from Switzerland
to beyond the Channel at the expense of the Swiss Federal Council. He had the
satisfaction of making the revolution pay for his advance and the
counter-revolution for his retreat.

At every turn in the Italian epics of chivalry we encounter mighty,
broad-shouldered giants armed with colossal staves who despite the fact that
they lash about them wildly and make a frightening din in battle, never manage
to kill their foes but only to destroy the trees in the vicinity. Mr. Heinzen
is such an Ariostian giant in political literature. Endowed by nature with a
churlish figure and huge masses of flesh he interpreted these gifts to mean
that he was destined to be a great man. His weighty physical appearance
determines his whole literary posture which is physical through and through.
His opponents are always small, mere dwarfs, who can barely reach his ankles
and whom he can survey with his kneecap. When, however, he should indeed make a
physical appearance, our uomo membruto takes refuge in literature or in the
courts. Thus scarcely had he reached the safety of English soil than he wrote a
tract on moral courage. Or again, our giant allowed a certain Mr. Richter to
thrash him so frequently and so thoroughly in New York that the magistrate, who
at first only imposed insignificant fines relented and in recognition of
Heinzen's doggedness he sentenced the dwarf Richter to pay 200 dollars damages.
The natural complement to this great physique so healthy in every fibre is the
healthy commonsense which Heinzen ascribes to himself in the highest
possible degree. It is inevitable that a man with such commonsense will turn
out to be a natural genius who has learnt nothing, a barbarian innocent of
literature and science. By virtue of his commonsense (which he also calls his
"perspicacity" and which allows him to tell Kossuth that he has "advanced to
the extreme frontiers of thought"), he learns only from hearsay or the
newspapers. He is therefore always behind the times and always wears the coat
that literature has cast off some years previously, while rejecting as immoral
and reprehensible the new modern dress he cannot find his way into. But when he
has once assimilated a thing his faith in it is unshakable; it transforms
itself into something that has grown naturally, that is self-evident, that
everyone must immediately agree to and that only malicious, stupid or
sophisticated persons will pretend not to believe. Such a robust body and
healthy commonsense must of course have also some honest, down-to-earth
principles and he even shows to advantage when he takes the craze for
principles to extremes. In this field Heinzen is second to none. He draws
attention to his principles at every opportunity, every argument is met by an
appeal to principle, everyone who fails to understand him or whom he does not
understand is demolished by the argument that he has no real principles, his
insincerity and pure ill-will are such that he would deny that day was day and
night night. To deal with these base disciples of Ahriman [Zoroastrian demon who returns to earth every 1000 years to
wreak havoc] he summons up his muse, indignation; he curses, rages,
boasts, preaches, and foaming at the mouth he roars out the most tragicomical
imprecations. He demonstrates what can be achieved in the field of literary
invective by a man to whom Börne’s [41] wit and literary talent are equally alien. As the
muse is, so is the style. An eternal bludgeon, but a commonplace bludgeon with
knots that are not even original or sharp. Only when he encounters science does
he feel momentarily at a loss. He is then like that Billingsgate fishwife with
whom O'Connell became involved in a shouting match and whom he silenced by
replying to a long string of insults: "You are all that and worse: you are an
isosceles triangle, you are a parallelepiped".

From the earlier history of Mr. Heinzen mention should be made of the fact
that he was in the Dutch colonies where he advanced not indeed to the rank of
general but to that of NCO, a slight for which he later on always treated the
Dutch as a nation without principles. Later we find him back in Cologne as a
sub-inspector of taxes and in this capacity he wrote a comedy in which his
healthy commonsense vainly strove to satirise the philosophy of Hegel. He was
more at home in the gossip columns of the Kölnische Zeitung, in the
feuilleton where he let fall some weighty words about the quarrels in the
Cologne Carnival Club, the institute from which all the great men of Cologne
have graduated. His own sufferings and those of his father, a forester, in his
conflicts with superiors assumed the proportions of events of universal
significance, as easily happens when the man of healthy commonsense
contemplates his little personal problems. He gives an account of them in his
Prussian Bureaucracy, a book much inferior to Venedey's [42] and containing nothing
more than the complaints of a petty official against the higher authorities.
The book involved him in a trial and although the worst he had to fear was six
months in gaol he thought his head was in danger and fled to Brussels. From
here he demanded that the Prussian government should not only grant him a safe
conduct but also that they should suspend the whole French legal system and
give him a jury trial for an ordinary offence. The Prussian government issued a
warrant for his arrest; he replied with a “warrant“ against the
Prussian government which contained inter alia a sermon on moral
resistance and constitutional monarchy and condemned revolution as immoral and
jesuitical. From Brussels he went to Switzerland. Here, as we saw above, he met
Friend Arnold and from him he learnt not only his philosophy but also a very
useful method of self-enrichment. Just as Arnold sought to assimilate the ideas
of his opponents in the course of polemicising against them, so Heinzen learned
to acquire ideas new to him by reviling them. Hardly had he become an atheist
than with all the zeal of the proselyte he immediately plunged into a furious
polemic against poor old Follen [August Follen, German
poet who wrote a collection of sonnets aimed against Heinzen and Ruge]
because the latter saw no reason to become an atheist in his old age.
Having had his nose rubbed in the Swiss Federal Republic our healthy
commonsense developed to the point where it desired to introduce the Federal
Republic into Germany too. The same commonsense came to the conclusion that
this could not be done without a revolution and so Heinzen became a
revolutionary. He then began a trade in pamphlets which in the coarsest tones
of the Swiss peasant preached immediate revolution and death to the rulers from
whom all the evils of the world stem. He sought out committees in Germany who
would drum up the cost of printing and distributing these pamphlets and this
led naturally to the growth of a begging industry on a large scale in the
course of which the party workers were first exploited and then reviled. Old
Itzstein could tell a story or two about that. These pamphlets gave Heinzen a
great reputation among itinerant German wine salesmen who praised him
everywhere as a bonny little fighter.

From Switzerland he went to America. Here, although his Swiss rustic style
enabled him to pass as a genuine poet he nevertheless managed to ride the New
York Schnellpost to death in no time at all

Having returned to Europe in the wake of the February revolution he sent
despatches to the Mannheimer Zeitung announcing the arrival of the
great Heinzen and he also published a pamphlet to revenge himself on Lamartine
who together with his whole government had refused to acknowledge him as an
official representative of the American Germans. He still did not wish to go to
Prussia as he still feared for his head despite the March Revolution and the
general amnesty. He would wait until the nation summoned him. As this did not
happen he resolved to stand in absentia for the Hamburg constituency to the
Frankfurt Parliament: his hope was that he would compensate for being a bad
speaker by the loudness of his voice — but he lost the election.

Arriving in London after the collapse of the Baden uprising he fell into a
rage with the young people who knew nothing of this great man of
before the revolution and of after the revolution, and who
caused him to sink into oblivion. He had always been nothing more than
l'homme de la veille or l'homme du lendemain, he was never
l'homme du jour or even de la journée. As the authentic
exploding silver had still not been discovered new weapons had to be found to
combat the reaction. He called for two million heads so that he could be a
dictator and wade up to the ankles in blood — shed by others. His real
aim was, of course, to create a scandal; the reaction had brought him to London
at its own expense, by means of an expulsion order from England it would now,
so Heinzen hoped, expedite him gratis to New York. The coup failed and its only
consequence was that the radical French papers called him a fool who shouted
for two million heads only because he had never risked his own. To complete the
picture it should be pointed out that his bloodthirsty article had been
published in the Deutsche Londoner Zeitung owned by the ex-Duke of
Brunswick — in return for a cash payment, of course.

Gustav and Heinzen had admired each other for a considerable time. Heinzen
praised Gustav as a sage and Gustav praised Heinzen as a fighter. Heinzen had
scarcely been able to wait for the end of the European revolution so that he
could put an end to the “ruinous disunity in the democratic German
emigration” and to re-open his pre-revolutionary business. He
called for discussion of a draft programme of the German Revolutionary Party.
This programme was distinguished by the invention of a special ministry
“to cater for the all-important need for public playgrounds,
battlegrounds” (minus hail of bullets) “and gardens”, and was
notable also for the article abolishing “the privileges of the male sex
especially in marriage” (and also in thrusting maneuvers [Stosstaktik] in
war, see Clausewitz). This programme was actually no more than a diplomatic
note from Heinzen to Gustav as no-one else was clamouring for it. And instead
of the hoped for unification it brought about the immediate separation of the
two warriors. Heinzen had demanded that during the “revolutionary
transition period” there should be a single dictator who would moreover
be a Prussian and, to preclude all misunderstandings, he added: “No
soldier can qualify as dictator.“ Gustav, on the other hand, argued for a
triumvirate comprising two Badeners and himself. Moreover, Gustav found that
Heinzen had included in his prematurely published programme an
“idea” stolen from him. This put an end to the second attempt at
unification and Heinzen, denied recognition by the whole world, receded into
obscurity until, in Autumn 1850, he found English soil too hot for him and
sailed off to New York.

VII

Gustav and the Colony of Renunciation

After the indefatigable Gustav had made an unsuccessful attempt
to establish a Central Refugee Committee together with Friedrich
Bobzin, Habegg, Oswald, Rosenblum, Cohaheim, Grunich and other "outstanding"
men, he made his way towards Yorkshire. For here, so he believed, a magic
garden would flower and in it, unlike the garden of Alcine, [43] virtue would rule
instead of vice. An old Englishman with a sense of humour who had been bored by
Gustav's theories took him at his word and gave him a few acres of moor in
Yorkshire on the express condition that he would there found a “colony of
renunciation”, a colony in which the consumption of meat, tobacco and
spirits would be strictly prohibited, only a vegetarian diet would be permitted
and where every colonist would be obliged to read a chapter from Struve's book
on Constitutional Law at his morning prayers. Moreover, the colony was to be
self-supporting. Accompanied by his Amalia, by Schnauffer, his Swabian canary
and by a few other good men and true, Gustav placed his trust in God and went
to found the “Colony of Renunciation”. Of the colony it must be
reported that it contained little prosperity, much culture and unlimited
freedom to be bored and to grow thin. One fine morning Gustav uncovered a
dreadful plot. His companions who did not share Gustav's ruminant constitution
had resolved behind his back to slaughter the old cow, the only one and one
whose milk provided the chief source of income of the “Colony of
Renunciation”. Gustav wrung his hands and shed bitter tears at this
betrayal of a fellow creature. He indignantly dissolved the colony and decided
to become a "wet" Quaker [44] if he were unable to revive the Deutscher
Zuschauer or to establish a “provisional government” in
London.

VIII

Arnold, who was anything but content in his retreat in Ostend
and who longed for a “frequent appearance” before the public, heard
of Gustav's misfortune. He resolved to return to England at once and by
climbing on Gustav's shoulders, to hoist himself into the pentarchy of European
democracy. For in the meantime the European Central Committee [45] had been formed
consisting of Mazzini, Ledru-Rollin and Darasz. Mazzini of course was the soul
of the enterprise. Ruge thought he could smell a vacant position. In his
Proscrit Mazzini had indeed introduced General Ernst Haug, his own
invention, as the German associate but for decency’s sake it was not
possible to nominate such a completely unknown person onto the Central
Committee. Ruge was not unaware of the fact that Gustav had had dealings with
Mazzini in Switzerland. He himself was acquainted with Ledru-Rollin but
unfortunately Ledru-Rollin was not acquainted with him. So Arnold took up
residence in Brighton and flattered and cajoled the unsuspecting Gustav,
promised to help him found a Deutscher Zuschauer in London and even to
undertake as a joint venture the democratic publication of the Rotteck-Welcker
Lexicon of Politics with Ruge paying the costs. At the same time he
introduced Gustav as a great man and collaborator into the local German paper
which in accordance with his principles he always had on tap (this time the
blow fell on the Bremer Tages-Chronik of the nonconformist parson
Dulon). One good deed deserves another: Gustav presented Arnold to Mazzini. As
Arnold's French was wholly incomprehensible there was nothing to prevent him
from introducing himself to Mazzini as the greatest man in Germany and above
all as her greatest “thinker”. The canny Italian idealist at once
realised that Arnold was the man he was looking for, the homme sans
conséquence who would provide the German countersignature of his
anti-papal Bulls. Thus Arnold Ruge became the fifth wheel on the state coach of
European democracy. When an Alsatian asked Ledru what on earth possessed him to
make an ally of such a bête, Ledru replied brusquely: “He is
Mazzini's man.” When Mazzini was asked why he became involved with Ledru,
a man bereft of all ideas, he answered slyly: “I took him for that very
reason.” Mazzini himself had every reason to avoid people with ideas. But
Arnold Ruge saw his wildest dreams come true and for the moment he even forgot
Bruno Bauer.

When the time came for him to sign Mazzini's first manifesto he sadly
recalled the days when he had presented himself to Professor Leo in Halle and
old Follen in Switzerland as a Trinitarian on one occasion and as a humanist
atheist on another. This time he had to declare himself for God and against the
princes. However, Arnold's philosophic conscience had been enfeebled by his
association with Dulon and other parsons among whom he passed for a
philosopher. Even in his best days Arnold could not entirely suppress a certain
foible for religion in general and moreover his “honest
consciousness” kept on whispering to him: Sign, Arnold! Paris vaut bien
une messe. One does not become fifth wheel on the coach of the provisional
govemment of Europe in partibus for nothing. Reflect, Arnold! all you have to
do is sign a manifesto every two weeks, and as a member of the German
Parliament, in the company of the greatest men in all Europe. And bathed in
perspiration Arnold signs. A curious joke, he murmurs. Ce n'est que le premier
pas qui coûte. He had copied this last sentence into his notebook the previous
night. However, Arnold had not come to the end of his trials. The European
Central Committee had issued a series of manifestos to Europe, to the French,
the Italians, the Poles and the Wallachians and now, following the great battle
at Bronzell, [46] it was
Germany’s turn. In his draft Mazzini attacked the Germans for
their lack of cosmopolitan spirit, and in particular, for their arrogant
treatment of Italian salami vendors, organ-grinders, confectioners, dormouse
tamers and mouse-trap sellers. Taken aback Arnold confessed that it was true.
He went further. He declared his readiness to cede the Austrian Tirol and
Istria to Mazzini. But this was not enough. He had not only to appeal to the
conscience of the German people, but also to attack them where they were most
vulnerable. Arnold received instructions that this time he was to have an
opinion, as he represented the German element. He felt like the student Jobs.
[47] He scratched himself
thoughtfully behind his ear and after long reflection he stuttered:
“Since the age of Tacitus the voices of German bards and baritones can be
heard. In winter they kindle fires on all the mountains so as to warm their
feet.” The bards, the baritones and fires on all the mountains! That will
put a bomb under German freedom! thought Mazzini with a grin. The bards,
baritones, fires on all the mountains and German freedom to boot went into the
manifesto as a sop for the German nation. To his astonishment Arnold had passed
the examination and understood for the first time with what little wisdom the
world is governed. From that moment on he despised Bruno Bauer more than ever
for all his eighteen hefty tomes written while he was still young.

While Arnold in the wake of the European Central Committee was signing
warlike manifestoes with God, for Mazzini and against the princes, the
peace movement was raging not only in England, under the aegis of
Cobden, but even beyond the North Sea. So that in Frankfurt/Main the Yankee
swindler, Elihu Burritt together with Cobden, Jaup, Girardin and the Red Indian
Ka-gi-ga-gi-wa-wa-be-ta organised a Peace Congress. Our Arnold was just itching
to be able to make one of his “frequent appearances” and to give
birth to a manifesto. So he proclaimed himself the corresponding member of the
Frankfurt Assembly and sent over an extremely confused Peace Manifesto
translated out of Cobden's speeches into his own speculative Pomeranian.
Various Germans drew Arnold's attention to the contradiction between his
warlike attitude in the Central Committee and his peaceful Quakerism. He would
reply: “Well, there you have the contradictions. That's the dialectic for
you. In my youth I studied Hegel.” His “honest consciousness”
was eased by the thought that Mazzini knew no German and that it was not hard
to pull the wool over his eyes.

Moreover, his relationship with Mazzini promised to become even more secure
thanks to the protection of Harro Harring who had just landed in Hull.
For with Harring a new and highly symptomatic character steps onto the
stage.

IX

The great drama of the democratic emigration of 1848-52 had been
preceded by a prelude eighteen years previously: the democratic emigration of
1830-31. Even though with the passage of time most of the players had
disappeared from the stage there still remained a few noble ruins who,
stoically indifferent to the course of history and their own lack of success,
continued their activities as agitators, devised comprehensive plans, formed
provisional governments and hurled proclamations into the world in every
direction. It is obvious that these experienced swindlers were infinitely
superior to the younger generation in business know-how. It was this very
know-how acquired through eighteen years practice in conspiring, scheming,
intriguing, proclaiming, duping, showing off and pushing oneself to the fore
that gave Mr. Mazzini the cheek and the assurance to install himself as the
Central Committee of European democracy supported only by three straw men of
much smaller experience in such matters.

No one was more favoured by circumstances to become the very type of the
émigré agitator than our friend Harro Harring. And indeed he
did become the prototype whom all our heroes of the Exile, all the Arnolds,
Gustavs and Gottfrieds strove more or less consciously and with varying success
to emulate. They may even equal him if circumstances are not unfavourable, but
they will hardly surpass him.

Harro who like Caesar has himself described his own great deeds (London
1852) was born on the “Cimbrian peninsula” and belongs to that
visionary North Frisian race which has already been shown by Dr. Clement to
have produced all the great nations of the world.

“Already in early youth” he attempted to “set the seal of
action upon his enthusiasm for the cause of the peoples“ by going to
Greece in 1821. We see how Friend Harro had an early premonition of
his mission to be everywhere where confusion reigned. Later on “a strange
fate led him to the source of absolutism, to the vicinity of the Czar and he
had seen through the Jesuitism of constitutional monarchy in
Poland“.

So Harro fought for freedom in Poland also. But “the crisis in the
history of Europe following the fall of Warsaw greatly perplexed him”,
and his perplexity led him to the idea of “the democracy of
nations”, which he at once “documented in the work: The
Nations, Strasbourg, March 1832”. It is worth remarking that this
work was almost quoted at the Hambacher Fest. [48] At the same time he published his
“republican poems: Blutstropfen [Drops of Blood]; The
History of King Saul or the Monarchy; Male voices on Germany's
Freedom” and edited the journal Deutschland in Strasbourg.
All these and even his future writings had the unexpected good fortune to be
banned by the Federal Diet on November 4, 1831. This was the only thing he
still lacked, only now did he achieve real importance and also the martyr's
crown. So that he could exclaim “My writings were everywhere well
received and echoed loudly in the hearts of the people. They were mostly
distributed gratis. In the case of some of them I did not even receive enough
to cover the Costs of printing.”

But new honours still awaited him. In 1831 Mr. Welcker had vainly attempted
in a long letter “to convert him to the vertical horizon of
constitutional monarchy”. And now, in January 1832, there came a visit
from Mr. Malten, a well-known Prussian agent abroad, who proposed that he
should enter Prussian service. What double recognition this was — and
from the enemy too! Enough, Malten's offer “triggered off the idea that
in the face of this dynastic treachery he should give birth to the concept of
Scandinavian nationality”, and “from that time on at least the
word Scandinavia was reborn after having been forgotten for
centuries”.

In this manner our North Frisian from South Jutland who did not know himself
whether he was a German or a Dane acquired at least an imaginary nationality
whose first consequence was that the men of Hambach would have nothing to do
with him.

With all these events behind him Harro's fortune was made. Veteran of
freedom in Greece and Poland, the inventor of “democracy of
nations”, re-discoverer of the word “Scandinavia”, poet
acknowledged by the ban of the Federal Diet, thinker and journalist, martyr, a
great man esteemed even by his enemies, a man whose allegiance
constitutionalists, absolutists and republicans vied with each other to possess
and, with all that, empty-headed and confused enough to believe in his own
greatness — what then was needed to make his happiness complete? But
Harro was a conscientious man and as his fame grew so did the demands which he
made upon himself What was missing was a great work that would present in an
entertaining and popular form the great doctrines of freedom, the idea of
democracy, and of nationality and all the sublime struggles for freedom on the
part of the youthful Europe arising before his very eyes. None but a poet and
thinker of the very first rank could produce such a work and none but Harro
could be this man. Thus arose the first three plays of the “dramatic
cycle” The People, of which there were twelve parts in all, one
of them in Danish, a labour to which the author devoted ten years of his life.
Unfortunately eleven of these twelve parts have “hitherto remained in
manuscript”.

However, this dallying with the muse was not to last forever.

“In the winter of 1832-1833 a movement was prepared in
Germany — which was brought to a tragic end in the skirmish in Frankfurt.
I was entrusted with the task of taking the fortress (?) in Kehl on the night
of 6 April. Men and weapons were at the ready.“

Unfortunately it all came to nothing and Harro had to retire to the depths
of France where he wrote his Words of a Man. From there he was
summoned to Switzerland by the Poles arming themselves for their march on
Savoy. Here he became “attached to their General Staff”, wrote a
further two parts of his dramatic cycle The People, and made the
acquaintance of Mazzini in Geneva. The whole band of fire-eaters consisting of
Polish, French, German, Italian and Swiss adventurers under the command of the
noble Ramorino then made their famous attack on Savoy. [49] In this campaign our
Harro "discovered the value of his life and strength". But as the other freedom
fighters felt “the value of their lives” no less than Harro and no
doubt had just as few illusions about their “strength&lrquo; the
exploit ended badly and they returned to Switzerland beaten, dishevelled and in
disarray.

This campaign was all that was needed to give our band of emigrant knights a
complete insight into the terror they inspired in the tyrants. As long as the
aftermath of the July Revolution could still be felt in isolated insurrections
in France, Germany or Italy, as long as they felt someone or other standing
behind them our émigré heroes felt themselves to be but atoms in the
seething masses — more or less privileged, prominent atoms, to be sure,
but in the last analysis they were still atoms. But as these insurrections
gradually grew feebler, as the great mass of “lackeys”, of the
“half-hearted” and the “men of little faith” retired
from the putschist swindles and as our knights felt increasingly lonely, so did
their self-esteem grow in proportion. If the whole of Europe became craven,
stupid and selfish, how could our trusty heroes fail to grow in their own
estimation, for were they not the priests who kept the sacred fires of hatred
for all tyrants burning in their breasts and who maintained the traditions of
virtue and love of freedom for a more vigorous generation yet to come! If they
too deserted the flag the tyrants would be safe for ever. So like the democrats
of 1848 they saw in every defeat a guarantee of future victory and they
gradually transformed themselves more and more into itinerant Don Quixotes with
dubious sources of income. Once arrived at this point they could plan their
greatest act of heroism, the foundation of “Young Europe” whose
Charter of Brotherhood was drawn up by Mazzini and signed in Berne on 15 April
1834. Harro appears in it as

“initiator of the Central Committee, adoptive member
of Young Germany and Young Italy and also as representative of the Scandinavian
branch” which he “still represents today”.

The date of the Charter of Brotherhood marks for Harro the great
epoch from which calculations are made forwards and backwards, thus replacing
the birth of Christ. It is the highpoint of his life. He was co-dictator of
Europe in partibus and although the world knew nothing of him he was one of the
most dangerous men alive. No one stood behind him but his many unpublished
works, a few German artisans in Switzerland and a dozen political speculators
who had seen better days — but for that very reason he could claim that
all the people of the world were on his side. For it is the fate of all great
men not to be recognised by their own age whereas the future belongs to them.
And Harro had taken care of the future — he had it in black and white in
his bag in the form of the Charter of Brotherhood.

But now began Harro's decline. His first sorrow was that “Young
Germany split off from Young Europe in 1836”. But Germany was duly
punished for that. Because of the split “nothing had been
prepared for a national movement in Germany early in 1848” and this
is why everything ended so miserably.

But a much greater sorrow for Harro was the growth of communism. We learn
from him that the founder of communism was none other than

“the cynic Johannes Müller from Berlin, the author of
a very interesting pamphlet on Prussian policy, Altenburg 1831”. Müller
went to England where “the only available opening for him was in
Smithfield Market where he had to tend swine at the crack of dawn”.

Communism soon began to spread among the German artisans in
France and Switzerland and it became a very dangerous enemy for Harro as it cut
off the only market for his writings. This was due to the “indirect
censorship of communism” from which poor Harro has suffered to this very
day and indeed it is now worse than ever as he sadly confesses and “as
the fate of my drama The Dynasty proves”. This indirect
communist censorship even succeeded in expelling Harro from Europe and so he
went to Rio de Janeiro (in 1840) where he lived for a time as a painter.
“Using his time conscientiously here as everywhere” he brought out
a new work: "Poems of a Scandinavian (2000 copies) which has been
distributed so widely among sea-faring people as to have become an oceanic
best-seller".

However, his “scrupulous sense of obligation towards Young
Europe” unfortunately led him to return to the Old World.

He “hastened to Mazzini in London and soon perceived the danger that
threatened the cause of the peoples from communism”.

New deeds awaited him. The Bandiera brothers [50] were preparing for their expedition to Italy. To
support them and to divert the forces of despotism Harro “returned to
South America where in union with Garibaldi he dedicated himself to furthering
the idea of a United States of South America”.

But the despots had got wind of his mission and Harro took to his heels. He
sailed to New York.

“During the voyage I was very active intellectually
and wrote among other things a drama: The Power of Ideas, which
belonged to the dramatic cycle The People — this too has
remained in MS. up to now!”

From South America he brought with him to New York a programme
from a group alleged to be affiliated with Humanidad.

The news of the February Revolution inspired him to produce a pamphlet in
French, La France réveillée and while embarking for Europe “I
documented my love for my country once again in some poems,
Scandinavia”.

He went to Schleswig-Holstein. Here, after an absence of twentyseven years,
he “discovered an unheard of conceptual confusion in the sphere of
international law, democracy, republicanism socialism and communism, a chaos
which lay like rotting hay and straw in the Augean stables of party factions
and national hatred”.

No wonder, for his “political writings” like his “whole
striving and activities since 1831 had remained alien and unknown in those
frontier provinces of my home country”.

The Augustenburg Party [51] had suppressed him for eighteen years by means of
a conspiracy of silence. To deal with this he girt on a sabre, a rifle, four
pistols and six daggers and called for the formation of a free corps, but in
vain. After various adventures he finally arrived in Hull. Here he hastened to
issue two circulars to the peoples of Schleswig-Holstein, Scandinavia and
Germany and even sent a note, as has been reported, to two communists in London
with this message: "Five thousand workers in Norway send you fraternal
greetings through me.

Despite this curious appeal he soon became a sleeping partner of the
European Central Committee again, thanks to the Charter of Brotherhood, and he
also became “nightwatchman and employee of a young firm of brokers in
Gravesend on the Thames where my task was to drum up trade among ships’
captains in nine different languages until I was accused of fraud, a thing
which the philosopher Johannes Müller was at least spared in his capacity as
swineherd”.

Harro summarised his action-packed life as follows:

“It can easily be calculated that apart from my poems
I have given away more than 18,000 copies of my writings in German (varying
from 10 shillings to 3 Marks in price, and hence amounting to around 25,000
Marks in toto) to the democratic movement. I have never even been reimbursed
for the printing costs, let alone received any profit for myself.”

With this we bring the adventures of our demagogic Hidalgo from
the South Jutland Mancha to a close. In Greece and Brazil, on the Vistula and
La Plata, in Schleswig-Holstein and in New York, in London and in Switzerland:
the representative of Young Europe and of the South American
Humanidad, painter, nightwatchman and employee, peddler of his own
writings; among Poles one day and gauchos the next, and ship’s captains the day
after that; unacknowledged, abandoned, ignored but everywhere an itinerant
knight of freedom with a thoroughgoing dislike of ordinary bourgeois hard work
— our hero at all times in all countries and in all circumstances remains
himself; with the same confusion, the same meddlesome pretensions, the same
faith in himself He will always defy the world and never cease to say, write
and print that since 1831 he has been the mainspring of world history.

Contents | Notes | Marx/Engels
Archive

Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 1852

Heroes of the Exile

X

Despite his unexpected successes hitherto Arnold had not yet
arrived at the goal of his labours. As Germany's representative by the grace of
Mazzini, he was under the obligation on the one hand to obtain confirmation of
his appointment at least by the German emigration and, on the other hand, to
present the Central Committee with people who respected his leadership. He did
indeed claim that in Germany there was “a clearly defined part of the
people behind him” but this hind portion could scarcely inspire much
confidence in Mazzini and Ledru as long as they could see nothing but the Ruge
front portion. Suffice it to say that Arnold had to look around among the
émigrés for a “clearly defined” tail.

At about this time Gottfried Kinkel came to London and together with him or
soon afterwards a number of other exiles partly from France, partly from
Switzerland and Belgium: Schurz, Strodtmann, Oppenheim, Schimmelpfennig,
Techow, etc. These new arrivals some of whom had already tried their hand at
forming provisional governments in Switzerland, infused new life into the
London emigration and for Arnold the moment seemed more favourable than ever.
At the same time Heinzen again took over the Schnellpost in New York
and so Arnold could now make his “frequent appearances” on the
other side of the ocean and not just in the local Bremen paper. Should Arnold
ever find his Strodtmann the latter would surely declare the monthly numbers of
the Schnellpost from the beginning of 1851 on to be a priceless source
of information. One has to see this infinitely feeble mixture of gossip,
silliness and nastiness, this ant-like self-importance with which Arnold
deposits his dung, for otherwise one would not believe it. While Heinzen
portrays Arnold as a European Great Power, Arnold treats Heinzen as an American
newspaper oracle. He tells him the secrets of European diplomacy and in
particular the latest events in the history of world emigration. Arnold
sometimes figures as the anonymous correspondent in London and Paris in order
to keep the American public informed of some of the great Arnold's fashionable
movements.

“Once again Arnold Ruge has the communists by the
throat” — “Arnold Ruge yesterday (dated from Paris
so that the dating gives the old joker away) made an excursion from Brighton to
London.” And again: “Arnold Ruge to Karl Heinzen: Dear Friend and
Editor .... Mazzini sends his greetings ... Ledru-Rollin gives his
permission to translate his pamphlet on the June 13th” and so on.

A letter from America has this comment to make:

“As I see from Ruge's letters in the
Schnellpost Heinzen must be writing Ruge (privately) all sorts of
funny stories about the importance of his paper in America, while Ruge seems to
act as if he were a major European govemment. Whenever Ruge imparts a momentous
piece of information to Heinzen he never omits to add: You can ask other
newspapers to reprint this. As if they would hesitate to print news regardless
of Ruge’s authorisation. Incidentally, I have never seen these momentous
reports actually appear anywhere else despite Ruge's advice and
permission.”

Father Ruge employed both this paper and the Bremer
TagesChronik to win over new arrivals by flattery: Kinkel is here now, the
patriot and poet of genius; Strodtmann, a great writer; Schurz, a young man as
amiable as he is bold, and a whole array of distinguished revolutionary
warriors.

Meanwhile in contrast to the Mazzini Committee a plebeian European
Committee was formed with the support of the “inferior refugees”
and the émigré dregs of the various European nations. At the time of
the battle of Bronzell this committee had issued a manifesto that included the
following outstanding German signatories: Gebert, Majer, Dietz, Schärttner,
Schapper, Willich. This document was couched in peculiar French and contained
the information that at that moment (10 November 1850) the Holy Alliance of
Tyrants had assembled 1,330,000 soldiers backed by another 700,000 armed
lackeys in reserve; that “the German papers and the Committee’s own
contacts” had revealed the secret intentions of the Warsaw Conferences [52] and that these were to
massacre all the republicans of Europe. This was followed by the inevitable
call to arms. This “manifeste-Faneron-Caperon-Gouté” as it was
described by the Patrie (to whom they sent it) was
overwhelmed with ridicule by the reactionary press. The Patrie called
it “the manifesto of the dii minorum gentium, written without
chic, without style and equipped with only the most banal clichés,
‘serpents’, ‘sicaires’ and
‘égorgements’”.

The Indépendence Belge states that it was written by the most
obscure soldiers of democracy, poor devils who had sent it to their
correspondent in London even though their paper was conservative. Greatly as
they longed to get into print, they would nevertheless not publish the names of
the signatories as a punishment. Despite their attempts to beg from the
reaction these noble people did not manage to obtain recognition as dangerous
conspirators.

The establishment of this rival firm spurred Arnold on to even greater
efforts. Together with Strave, Kinkel, R. Schramm and Bucher, etc. he tried to
found a Volksfreund, or, if Gustav were to insist, a Deutscher
Zuschauer. But the plan fell through. Partly because our
“good-humoured” Gottfried demanded payment in cash whereas Arnold
shared Hansemann's view that in money matters there is no room for good humour.
Arnold's particular aim was to impose a levy on the Reading Circle, a club of
German watchmakers, well-paid workers and petty bourgeois, but in this too he
was frustrated.

But soon there arose another opportunity for Arnold to make one of his
“frequent appearances”. Ledru and his supporters among the French
émigrés could not let 24 February (1851) [53] pass without celebrating a “Fraternal
Feast” of the nations of Europe. In fact only the French and the Germans
attended. Mazzini did not come and excused himself by letter: Gottfried who was
present went home fuming because his mute presence failed to produce the
magical effect he expected; Arnold lived to see the day when his friend Ledru
pretended not to know him and became so confused when he arose to speak that he
kept quiet about the French speech he had prepared and which had been approved
in high places; he just stammered a few words in German and retreated
precipitately, exclaiming: Àla restauration de la révolution! to the
accompaniment of a general shaking of heads.

On the same day a rival banquet took place under the auspices of the
competing committee referred to above. Annoyed that the Mazzini-Ledru committee
had not invited him to join them from the beginning Louis Blanc took himself
off to the refugee mob, declaring that “the aristocracy of talent must
also be abolished”. The whole lower emigration was thus assembled. The
chivalrous Willich presided. The hall was festooned with flags and the walls
were emblazoned with the names of the greatest men of the people: Waldeck
between Garibaldi and Kossuth, Jacoby between Blanqui and Cabet, Robert Blum
between Barbès and Robespierre. That coquettish ape Louis Blanc read out in a
whining voice an address from his old yes men [German: Ja
Brüder], the future peers of the social republic, the delegates of the
Luxemburg of 1848. Willich read out an address from Switzerland the signatures
to which had partly been collected under false presences. Later he was
indiscreet enough to publish the address, which resulted in the mass expulsion
of the signatories. From Germany no message had arrived. Then speeches. Despite
the eternal brotherhood boredom could be seen on every face.

The banquet gave rise to a highly edifying scandal which like the heroic
deeds of the European central mob-committee, unfolded within the pages of the
counter-revolutionary press. It had struck observers as very strange that
during the banquet a certain Barthélemy should have given an extremely
grandiose eulogy of Blanqui in the presence of Louis Blanc. The puzzle
was now elucidated. The Patrie printed a toast that Blanqui had sent
from Belle-Île in response to a request from the orator at the banquet. In the
toast he aimed some rough blows at the whole provisional government of 1848 and
at Louis Blanc in particular. The Patrie expressed astonishment that
this toast had been suppressed in the course of the banquet. Louis Blanc at
once wrote to The Times declaring that Blanqui was an abominable
intriguer and had never sent such a toast to the Banquet committee. The
committee consisting of Messrs, Blanc, Willich, Landolphe, Schapper, Barthélemy
and Vidil, announced simultaneously in the Patrie that they had never
received the toast. The Patrie, however, did not allow the declaration
to be printed until they had made inquiries of M. Antoine, Blanqui's
brother-in-law, who had given them the text of the toast. Beneath the
declaration of the Banquet committee they printed M. Antoine's reply: he had
sent the toast to Barthélemy, one of the signatories of the declaration and had
received an acknowledgement from him. Whereupon Mr. Barthélemy was forced to
admit that it was true that he had lied. He had indeed received the toast but
had thought it unsuitable and so had not informed the committee of it. But
before this, behind Barthélemy's back his co-signatory, the French ax-captain
Vidil had also written to the Patrie saying that his honour as a
soldier and his sense of truth compelled him to confess that not only he but
also Louis Blanc, Willich and all the other signatories of the first
declaration had lied. The committee had consisted of 13 members and not 6. They
had all seen Blanqui's toast, they had discussed it and after a long debate
agreed to suppress it by a majority of 7 votes to 6. He had been one who had
voted in favour of reading it in public.

It is easy to imagine the joy of the Patrie when it received
Barthélemy's declaration after Vidil's letter. They printed it with this
preface:

“We have often asked ourselves, and it is a difficult
question to answer, whether the demagogues are notable more for their stupidity
or their boastfulness. A fourth letter from London has increased our
perplexity. There they are, we do not know how many poor wretches, who are so
tormented by the longing to write and to see their names published in the
reactionary press that they are undeterred even by the prospect of
infinite humiliation and mortification. What do they care for the laughter and
the indignation of the public — the Journal des Débats, the
Assemblée rationale and the Patrie will find space for their
stylistic exercises; to achieve this no cost to the cause of cosmopolitan
democracy can be too high.... In the name of literary commiseration we include
the following letter from ‘Citizen’ Barthélemy — it is a
novel, and, we hope, the last proof of the authenticity of Blanqui’s
famous toast whose existence they first all denied and now fight among
themselves for the right to acknowledge.”

XI

“The actual force of events”, to use one of Arnold's
all-pervading beautiful forms, now took the following course. On 24 February,
Ruge had compromised himself and the German émigrés in the presence of
foreigners. Hence the few émigrés who still felt inclined to go along
with him felt insecure and without any support. Arnold put the blame
on the division in the emigration and pressed harder than ever for unity.
Compromised as he was, he still reached eagerly for the chance to compromise
himself further.

Hence the Anniversary of the March revolution in Vienna was used to
give a German banquet. The chivalrous Willich declined the invitation; as he
belonged to “citizen” Louis Blanc he could not collaborate with
“citizen” Ruge who belonged to “citizen&lrquo; Ledru.
Likewise the ex-deputies Reichenbach, Schramm, Bucher, etc., recoiled from
Ruge’s presence. Not counting the silent guests there appeared Mazzini,
Ruge, Struve, Tausenau, Haug, Ronge and Kinkel — all of whom spoke.

Ruge filled the role of “the complete fool” as even his friends
admitted. The German public was however to experience even greater things.
Tausenau’s clowning, Struve’s croaking, Haug’s meanderings,
Ronge’s litanies turned the whole audience to stone and the majority
drifted away even before that flower of rhetoric, Jeremiah-Kinkel, who had been
saved for the dessert, could begin his speech. “In the name of the
martyrs” for the martyrs, Gottfried spoke as a martyr and uttered
lachrymose words of reconciliation to all ’from the simple defender of
the constitution down to the red republican”. At the same time as all
these republicans, and even red republicans, like Kinkel, groaned away in this
fashion, they also knelt down before the English constitution in humble
adoration, a contradiction to which the Morning Chronicle politely drew their
attention the following morning.

The same evening Ruge saw the fulfilment of his desires as can be seen from
a proclamation whose most brilliant sections we offer here:

To the Germans!

“Brothers and friends in Germany! We, the undersigned,
constitute at present and until such time as you decide differently, the
committee for German affairs" (irrespective which affairs).

“The Central Committee of the European democratic
movement has sent us Arnold Ruge, the Baden revolution has sent Gustav Struve,
the Viennese revolution has sent us Ernst Haug, the religious movement has sent
us Johannes Ronge and prison has sent us Gottfried Kinkel, we have invited the
social-democratic workers to send a representative to our midst.

“German brothers! Events have deprived you of your
freedom ... we know that you are incapable of abandoning your freedom for ever
and we have omitted nothing" (in the way of committees and manifestoes) "that
might accelerate your recovery of it.

“When we ... when we gave our guarantee and our
support to the Mazzini loan, when we ... when we invoked the Holy Alliance of
peoples against the unholy alliance of their oppressors, we only did, as you
know, what you wished with all your hearts to see done.... The tyrants have
been arraigned before the universal court of mankind in the great trial of
freedom” (and with Arnold as public prosecutor, the “tyrants”
can sleep in peace) ... “arson, murder, pillaging, hunger and bankruptcy
will soon be widespread throughout Germany.

“You have the example of France before your eyes
— Smouldering with fury it is more united than ever in its determination
to liberate itself (I ask you, who on earth could have foreseen the 2
December!) — look at Hungary, even the Croats have been converted”
(thanks to the Deutscher Zuschauer and Ruge’s wood-shaving
coats) — “and believe us, for we know, when we say that Poland is
immortal” (Mr. Darasz confided this piece of information to them under
solemn oath of secrecy).

“Force against force — that is the justice that
is being prepared. And we shall leave nothing undone to bring into being a
more effective provisional government” (aha!) “than the
Vorparlament [54] and a
more potent arm of the people than the National Assembly” (see below what
these gentlemen brought into being when they attempted to lead each other by
the nose).

“Our draft proposals concerning the finances and the
press” (Articles 1 and 2 of the strong provisional government — the
Customs Officer, Christian Müller, is to be given the task of implementing this
measure) “shall be presented separately. We wish only to say that every
purchase for the Italian Loan will be of immediate benefit to our Committee and
to our cause and that for the moment you can help in a practical way above all
by ensuring a liberal supply of money. We shall then know how to
translate this money into public opinion and public violence. (With Arnold
as translator) ”... We say to you: Subscribe 10 million Francs and we
shall liberate the Continent!

“Germans, remember...” (that you sing baritone
and light fires on the mountains) "... Lend us your thoughts" (which we need
almost as badly as your money), “your purse” (yes, don't forget
that) “and your arm! We expect your zeal to increase with the intensity
of your sufferings and that the Committee shall be adequately strengthened for
the hour of decision by your present contributions.” (If not, they would
have to resort to spirituous liquor which would be against Gustav's
principles.)

“All democrats are instructed to publicise
our appeal” (the Customs Officer, Christian Müller, will take care of the
rest).

“London, 13 March 1851

The Committee for German Affairs

Arnold Ruge, Gustav Struve, Ernst Haug, Johannes Ronge, Gottfried
Kinkel”

Our readers are now acquainted with Gottfried, they are also
acquainted with Gustav; Arnold's "frequent appearances" have likewise been
repeated often enough. So there remain but two members of the “effective
provisional government” whom we have still to introduce.

Johannes Ronge or Johannes Kurzweg as he likes to be known in his
intimate circle, is certainly not the author of the Book of
Revelations. There is nothing mysterious about him, he is banal,
hackneyed, as insipid as water, luke-warm dish-water. As is well known Johannes
became famous when he refused to permit the Holy Mantle [55] in Trier to intercede
for him — though it is wholly unimportant who intercedes for Johannes.
When Johannes first made his appearance the elderly Paulus [56] expressed his regrets
that Hegel was dead as he would no longer be able to regard him as
shallow were he alive and he added that the late lamented Krug was lucky to be
dead as he thereby escaped the danger of acquiring a reputation for profundity.
Johannes is one of those phenomena often met with in history who only begin to
understand a movement centuries after its rise and fall and who then like
children reproduce the content of the movement as if it had just been
discovered, regurgitating it in the most feeble, colourless and philistinic
manner imaginable. Such craftsmanship does not last very long and soon our
Johannes found himself in a daily deteriorating situation in Germany. His
watered-down version of the Enlightenment went out of fashion and Johannes made
a pilgrimage to England where we see him reappear, without any notable success,
as the rival of Padre Gavazzi. [57] The ungainly, sallow, tedious village parson
naturally paled by the side of the fiery, histrionic Italian monk and the
English bet heavily that this arid Johannes could not be the man who had set
the deep-thinking German nation in motion. But he was consoled by Arnold Ruge
who found that the German-Catholicism of our Johannes was remarkably similar to
his own brand of atheism.

Ludwig von Hauck had been a captain of engineers in the Imperial Austrian
army, then co-editor of the Constitution in Vienna, later still leader
of a battalion in the Viennese National Guard, where he defended the Burgtor
against the Imperial army on October 30 with great courage, abandoning his post
only after all was lost. He escaped to Hungary, joined up with Bem's army in
Siebenburgen where in consequence of his velour he advanced to the rank of
colonel in the general staff. After Görgy surrendered at Vilagos Ludwig Hauck
was taken prisoner and died like a hero on one of the many gallows that the
Austrians erected in Hungary to avenge their repeated defeats and to express
their fury at the protection Russia had extended and which they so bitterly
resented. In London Haug was long thought to be the incarcerated Hauck, an
officer, who had so distinguished himself in the Hungarian campaign. However,
it now seems to be established that he is not the late Hauck. Just as he was
unable to prevent Mazzini from improvising him into a general after the fall of
Rome, so too he could do nothing to stop Arnold Ruge from transforming him into
the representative of the Viennese revolution and a member of the strong
provisional government. Later he gave aesthetic lectures about the economic
foundations of the cosmogony of universal history from a geological standpoint
and with musical accompaniment. Among the émigrés this melancholic man
is known as "the poor wretch", or as the French say, "la bonne
bête".

Arnold could not believe his good fortune. He had a manifesto, a strong
provisional government, a loan of ten million francs and even a homunculus to
produce a weekly magazine with the modest title Kosmos, edited by
General Haug.

The manifesto came and went unread. The Kosmos died of malnutrition
in the third number, the money failed to roll in, the provisional government
dissolved into its components once more.

At first, the Kosmos contained advertisements for Kinkel's
lectures, for the worthy Willich's appeals for money for the Schleswig-Holstein
refugees and for Göhringer's saloon. It contained further a lampoon by Arnold.
The old joker invented a certain hospitable friend called Müller in Germany
whose guest, Schulze, he pretended to be. Müller expresses astonishment at what
he reads in the papers about English hospitality; he fears that all this
“sybaritism” may distract Schulze from his “affairs of
state” — but he does not grudge him this as when Schulze returns to
Germany he will be so overwhelmed by state affairs that he will have to deny
himself the pleasures of Müller's hospitality. Finally, Müller exclaims:
“Surely it was not the traitor Radowitz, but Mazzini, Ledru-Rollin,
Citizen Willich, Kinkel and yourself” (Arnold Ruge) "who were invited to
Windsor Castle?"

If after all this the Kosmos folded up after the third issue the
failure could not be put down to lack of publicity, for at every possible
English meeting the speakers would find it pressed into their hands with the
urgent request to recommend it as they would find their own principles
specially represented in it.

Scarcely had the subscriptions for the ten-million-Franc loan been opened
than the rumour went around that a list of contributors to a fund to dispatch
Struve (and Amalia) to America, was circulating in the City.

“When the Committee resolved to publish a German
weekly with Haug as editor, Struve protested as he wanted the post of editor
for himself and wished the journal to bear the title Deutscher
Zuschauer. Having protested he resolved to go to America.”

Thus far the report in the Deutsche Schnellpost of New
York. It remains silent about the fact (and Heinzen had his reasons for this)
that as Gustav was a collaborator on the Duke of Brunswick’s
Deutscher Londoner Zeitung Mazzini had struck his name off the list of
the German Committee. Gustav soon acclimatised his Deutscher Zuschauer
in New York. But soon after came the news from over the ocean:
“Gustav’s Zuschauer is dead.” As he says, this was
not for the lack of subscribers, nor because he had no leisure for writing but
simply because of a dearth of paying subscribers. However, the
democratic revision of Rotteck's Universal History could not be
postponed any longer, so great was the need for it, and as he had already begun
it 15 years previously he would give the subscribers a corresponding number of
issues of the Universal History instead of the Deutscher
Zuschauer. He would have to request payment in advance for this to which
in the circumstances no one could object. As long as Gustav had remained on
this side of the Atlantic Heinzen regarded him along with Ruge as the greatest
man in Europe. Scarcely had he reached the other side than a great scandal
arose between them.

Gustav writes:

“When on 6 June in Karlsruhe Heinzen saw that cannon
was being brought up he left for Strasbourg with female companions.”

Whereupon Heinzen called Gustav “a soothsayer”.

Arnold was busy broadcasting the virtues of the Kosmos in the
journal of his faithful disciple Heinzen, when it failed to appear, and at
about the time when the strong provisional government was disintegrating
Rodomonte-Heinzen was busy proclaiming “military obedience” towards
it in his journal. Heinzen is famous for his love of the military in
peacetime.

“Shortly after Struve's departure Kinkel too
resigned from the Committee which was thereby reduced to impotence.“
(Deutsche Schnellpost, No. 23.)

With this the strong provisional government dwindled still
further and only Messrs. Ruge, Ronge, and Haug remained in it. Even Arnold
realised that with this Trinity nothing at all could be brought into existence,
let alone a cosmos. Nevertheless through all the permutations, variations and
combinations it remained the nucleus of all his subsequent attempts to form
committees. An indefatigable man, he saw no reason to throw in his hand; after
all his aim was merely to do something that would have the appearance of
action, the semblance of profound political schemes, something that, above all,
would provide matter for self-important consultations, frequent appearances and
complacent gossip.

As for Gottfried, his dramatic lectures for respectable city merchants did
not allow him to compromise himself. But on the other hand, it was altogether
too evident that the purpose of the manifesto of March 13 was none other than
to provide support for the place Arnold had usurped in the European Central
Committee. Even Gottfried could not fail to realise this: but it was not in his
interest to grant Ruge such recognition. So it came to pass that shortly after
the manifesto had been published, the Kölnische Zeitung printed a
declaration by that dama acerba, Mockel. Her husband, she wrote, had
not signed the appeal, he was not interested in public loans and had resigned
from the newly-formed committee. Whereupon Arnold gossiped in the New York
Schnellpost to the effect that Kinkel had been prevented by illness
from signing the manifesto, but he gave his approval, the plan to issue it had
been conceived in his room, he had himself taken responsibility for despatching
a number of copies to Germany and he only left the committee because it elected
General Haug president in preference to himself. Arnold accompanied this
declaration with angry attacks on Kinkel's vanity, calling him “absolute
martyr” and “the Beckerath of the democrats” and affirming
his suspicions of Mrs. Johanna Kinkel who had access to such prohibited
journals as the Kölnische Zeitung.

In the meantime, Arnold's seed had not fallen on stony soil. Kinkel's
“beautiful soul” resolved to turn the tables on his rivals and to
raise the treasure of revolution alone. Johanna's statement dissociating him
from this hare-brained scheme had scarcely appeared in the Kölnische
Zeitung when Gottfried launched his own appeal in the transatlantic papers
with the comment that the money should be sent to the man “who inspires
the most confidence”. And who could this man be but Gottfried Kinkel? For
the time being he demanded an advance payment of 500 pounds sterling with which
to manufacture revolutionary paper money. Ruge, not to be outdone, had the
Schnellpost declare that he was the treasurer of the Democratic
Central Committee and that Mazzini notes were already available and could be
purchased from him. Whoever wished to lose 500 pounds sterling would do better
to take the available notes than to speculate in something that did not even
exist. And Rodomonte-Heinzen roared that unless Mr. Kinkel abandoned his
manoeuvres he would be branded publicly as an “enemy of the
revolution”. Gottfried had counter-articles published in the
New-Yorker Staatszeitung, the direct rival of the
Schnellpost. In this way full-scale hostilities were in progress on
the other side of the Atlantic while kisses of Judas were still being exchanged
in this side.

By issuing an appeal for a national loan in his own name Gottfried had
shocked the democratic rank and file, as he soon realised. To make good his
blunder he now declared that “this appeal for money, for a German
national loan did not proceed from him. In all likelihood what had happened was
that some all too zealous friends in America had made free with his
name.”

This declaration provoked the following answer from Dr. Wiss in the
Schnellpost:

“It is generally known that the appeal to agitate for a
German Loan was sent to me by Gottfried Kinkel with the urgent request
to publicise it in all the German newspapers and I am ready and willing to show
this letter to anyone who is in doubt on this point. If Kinkel has now really
alleged the contrary the only honourable course for him to pursue is to retract
his statements publicly and to publish my correspondence with him from which it
will become plain to the Party that I was quite independent and certainly that
I did not exhibit ‘an excess of zeal’. Should he not have been guilty of these
allegations it was Kinkel's duty to denounce the journalist responsible for
printing them as an evil slanderer, or if there had been a misunderstanding, as
an irresponsible and unscrupulous gossip. For my part I am unable to believe
Kinkel capable of such unmitigated perfidy. Dr. C. Wiss.” (Weekly supplement of
the Deutsche Schnellpost.)

What was Kinkel to do? Once again he thrust his aspra
donzella into the breach, he denounced Mockel as the “irresponsible,
unscrupulous gossip”, he claimed that his wife had promoted the loan behind his
back. It cannot be denied that this tactic was highly “aesthetic”.

Thus did Gottfried sway like a reed, now advancing, now retreating, now
launching a project, now dissociating himself from it, always tacking to adjust
to the wind of popularity. While he officially allowed the aesthetic
bourgeoisie to fete and feast him in London as the martyr of the Revolution
behind the backs of the same people he indulged in forbidden commerce with the
mob of the Emigration as represented by Willich. While living in circumstances
that could be described as luxurious in comparison with his modest situation in
Bonn, he wrote to St. Louis that he was living as befitted the "representative
of poverty". In this way he behaved towards the bourgeoisie as etiquette
required, while at the same time he deferred humbly to the taste of the
proletariat. But as a man whose imagination far outweighed his understanding he
could not help falling into the bad manners and the arrogant postures of the
parvenu and this alienated many a pompous bonhomme from him. Wholly
characteristic of him was the article on the Great Exhibition that he wrote for
Kosmos. He admired nothing so much as the giant mirror that was
exhibited in the Crystal Palace. The objective world reduces itself to a
mirror, the subjective world to a cliché. Under the pretext of seeing only the
beautiful side of things he aestheticises everything and this process he
designates poetry, self-sacrifice or religion, as the occasion demands.
Fundamentally, everything is used to exalt himself. It is inevitable that in
practice the ugly side should make its appearance, as imagination turns into
lies and enthusiasm into baseness. In any case it was to be expected that
Gottfried would soon cast off his lion's skin when he fell into the hands of
old, experienced clowns like Gustav and Arnold.

Contents | Notes | Marx/Engels
Archive

Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 1852

Heroes of the Exile

XII

The Great Industrial Exhibition inaugurated a new epoch in the
Emigration. The great throng of German Philistines that flooded into London
during the summer, felt ill at ease in the bustle of the great Crystal Palace
and in the even larger town of London with its noise, its din and its clamour.
And when the toil and the labour of the day, the dutiful inspection of the
Exhibition and the other sights had been completed in the sweat of his brow,
the German Philistine could recover at his ease with Schärttner at the Hanau or
Göhringer at the Star, with their beery cosiness, their smoke-filled fug and
their public-house politics. Here “the whole of the fatherland could be
seen” and in addition all the greatest men of Germany could be seen
gratis. There they all sat, the members of parliament, the deputies of
Chambers, the generals, the Club orators of the halcyon days of 1848 and 1849,
they smoked their pipes just like ordinary people and debated the loftiest
interests of the fatherland day after day, in public and with unshakeable
dignity. This was the place where for the price of a few bottles of extremely
cheap wine the German citizen could discover exactly what went on at the most
secret meetings of the European cabinets. This was the place where he could
learn to within a minute when “it would all start”. In the meantime
one bottle after another was started and all the Parties went home unsteadily
but strengthened in the knowledge that they had made their contribution to the
salvation of the fatherland. Never has the Emigration drunk more and cheaper
than during the period when the solvent masses of German Philistines were in
London.

The true organisation of the Emigration was in fact this tavern
organisation presided over by Silenus-Schärttner in Long Acre which
experienced its heyday thanks to the Exhibition. Here the true Central
Committee sat in perpetual session. All other committees, organisations,
party-formations were just trimmings, the patriotic arabesques of this primeval
German tavern society of idlers.

In addition the Emigration was strengthened numerically at the time by the
arrival of Messrs. Meyen, Faucher, Sigel, Goegg and Fickler, etc.

Meyen was a little porcupine who had come into the world without
any quills and who under the name Poinsinet, was once described by Goethe in
this way:

“In literature, as in society, one often encounters
such curious little mannikins. Endowed with some small talent they endeavour
always to claim the attention of the public and as they can easily be seen
through by all they are the source of much amusement. However, they always
manage to profit sufficiently. They live, produce, are mentioned everywhere and
are even accorded a favourable reception. Their failures do not disconcert
them; they regard them as exceptional and look to the future for greater
success. Poinsinet is a figure of this sort in the French literary world. It
goes almost beyond belief to see what has been done with him, how he has been
fooled and mystified and even his sad death by drowning in Spain does not
diminish the ridiculous impression made by his life, just as a frog made of
fireworks does not attain to dignity by concluding a lengthy series of sputters
with a loud bang.” [58]

Writers contemporary with him pass on the following information:
Eduard Meyen belonged to the “Resolute” group which represented the
Berliner intelligentsia as against the mass stupidity of the rest of Germany.
He too had a Maybug Club in Berlin with his friends Mügge, Klein, Zabel, Buhl
etc. Each of these maybugs sat on his own little leaf [Blättchen — "leaf" and "newspaper"].
Eduard Meyen’s paper was called the Mannheimer Abendblättchen
and here, every week, after enormous efforts, he deposited a small green turd
of correspondence. Our Maybug really did progress to the point where he was
about to publish a monthly periodical; contributions from various
people landed on his desk, the publisher waited but the whole project collapsed
because Eduard after eight months in cold sweat declared that he could not
finish the prospectus. As Eduard took all his childish activities seriously he
was widely regarded in Berlin after the March Revolution as a man who meant
business. In London he worked together with Faucher on a German edition of the
Illustrated London News under the editorship and censorship of an old
woman who had known some German twenty years before, but he was discarded as
useless after he had attempted with great tenacity to insert a profound article
about sculpture that he had had published ten years previously in Berlin. But
when, later on, the Kinkel-emigration made him their secretary he realised that
he was really a practical homme d'état and he announced in a
lithographed leaflet that he had arrived at the “tranquillity of a point
of view”. After his death a whole heap of titles for future projects will
be found among his papers.

Conjointly with Meyen we must necessarily consider Oppenheim, his
co-editor and co-secretary. It has been claimed that Oppenheim is not so much a
man as an allegorical figure: the goddess of boredom it is reported, came down
to Frankfurt on Main and assumed the shape of this son of a Jewish jeweller.
When Voltaire wrote: “Tous les genres vent loons, excepté legenre
ennuyeux”, he must have had a premonition of our Heinrich Bernhard
Oppenheim. We prefer Oppenheim the writer to Oppenheim the orator. His writings
may be avoided, but his spoken delivery — c’est
impossible. The pythagorean metempsychosis may have some foundation in
reality but the name borne by Heinrich Bernhard Oppenheim in former ages can no
longer be discovered as no man ever made a name for himself through being an
unbearable chatterbox. His life may be epitomised by its three climactic
moments: Arnold Ruge’s editor — Brentano’s editor —
Kinkel’s editor.

The third member of the trio is Mr. Julius Faucher. He is one of those
Berlin Huguenots who know how to exploit their minor talent with great
commercial adroitness. He made his public debut as the Lieutenant Pistol of the
Free Trade Party in which capacity he was employed by Hamburg commercial
interests to make propaganda. During the revolutionary disturbances they
allowed him to preach free trade in the apparently chaotic form of anarchism.
When this ceased to be relevant to the times he was dismissed and, together
with Meyen, he became joint editor of the Berlin Abendpost. Under the
presence of wishing to abolish the state and introduce anarchy he refrained
from dangerous opposition towards the existing government and when, later on,
the paper failed because it could no longer afford the deposit, the Neue
Preussische Zeitung commiserated with Faucher, the only able writer among
the democrats. This cosy relationship with the Neue Preussische
Zeitung soon became so intimate that Faucher began to act as its
correspondent in London. Faucher’s activity in the London Emigration did
not last long; his free trade inclined him towards commerce where he found his
true calling, to which he returned with great energy and in which he achieved
wonders never seen before: namely a price-list that assesses goods according to
a completely sliding scale. As is well known, the Breslauer Zeitung
was indiscreet enough to inform the general public of this document.

This three-star constellation of the Berlin intelligentsia can be contrasted
with the three-star constellation of wholesome South German principles: Sigel,
Fickler, Goegg. Franz Sigel, whom his friend Goegg describes as a short,
beardless man, bearing a strong resemblance to Napoleon, is, again according to
Goegg, “a hero”, “a man of the future”, “above
all a genius, intellectually creative and constantly hatching new
plans”.

Between ourselves, General Siegel is a young Baden lieutenant of principle
and ambition. He read in an account of the campaigns of the French Revolution
that the step from sub-lieutenant to supreme general is mere child's play and
from that moment on this little beardless man firmly believed that Franz Sigel
must become supreme commander in a revolutionary army. His wish was granted
thanks to the Baden insurrection of 1849 and a popularity with the army arising
from a confusion of names. The battles he fought on the Neckar and did not
fight in the Black Forest are well known; his retreat to Switzerland has been
praised even by the enemy as a timely and correct manoeuvre. His military plans
here bear witness to his study of the [French] Revolutionary Wars. In order to
remain faithful to the revolutionary tradition Hero Sigel, ignoring the enemy
and operational and withdrawal lines and similar bagatelles, went
conscientiously from one Moreau position to the next. And if he did not manage
to parody Moreau's campaigns [59] in every detail, if he crossed the Rhine at
Eglichau and not at Paradies, this was the fault of the enemy who was too
ignorant to appreciate such a learned manoeuvre. In his orders of the day and
in his instructions Sigel emerges as a preacher and if he has an inferior style
to Napoleon, he has more principle. Later, he concerned himself with devising a
handbook for revolutionary officers in all branches of warfare from which we
are in a position to offer the following important extract:

“an officer of the revolution must carry the following
articles according to regulations: 1 head-covering and cap, 1 sabre with belt,
1 black, red and yellow [60]
camel-hair sash, 2 pairs of black leather gloves, 2 battle coats, 1 cloak, 1
pair cloth trousers, 1 tie, 2 pairs of boots or shoes, 1 black leather
travelling case — 12" wide, 10" high, 4" deep, 6 shirts, 3 pairs of
underpants, 8 pairs of socks, 6 handkerchiefs, 2 towels, 1 washing and shaving
kit, 1 writing implement, 1 writing tablet with letters patent, 1 clothes
brush, 1 copy of service regulations.”

Joseph Fickler —

“the model of a decent, resolute, imperturbably
tenacious man of the people whom the people of the whole Baden upland and the
Lake District supported as one man and whose struggles and sufferings over many
years had earned him a popularity approaching that of Brentano”
(according to the testimony of his friend Goegg).

As befits a decent, resolute, imperturbably tenacious man of the
people, Joseph Fickler has a fleshy full-moon face, a fat craw and a paunch to
match. The only fact known about his early life is that he earned a livelihood
with the aid of a carving from the 15th century and with relics relating to the
Council of Constance. He allowed travellers and foreign art-lovers to inspect
these curiosities in exchange for money and incidentally sold them
“antique” souvenirs of which Fickler, as he loved to relate, would
constantly make up a new supply in all their authentic
“antiquity”.

His only deeds during the Revolution were firstly his arrest by Mathy [61] after the Vorparlament,
and, second, his arrest by Romer in Stuttgart in June 1849. Thanks to these
arrests he was happily deprived of the opportunity to compromise himself. The
Württemberg democrats deposited 1000 guilders as bail for him, whereupon
Fickler went to Thurgau incognito and to the great distress of his guarantors
no more was heard of him. It is undeniable that he successfully translated the
feelings and opinions of the lakeside peasants into printers' ink in his
Lake Journals; for the rest he shares the opinion of his friend Ruge
that much study makes you stupid and for this reason he warned his friend Goegg
not to visit the library of the British Museum.

Amandus Goegg, lovable, as his name indicates, is no great orator,
but “an unassuming citizen whose noble and modest bearing earns him the
friendship of people everywhere” (Westamerikanische Blätter). From
sheer nobility Goegg became a member of the provisional government in Baden,
where, as he admits, he could do nothing against Brentano and in all modesty he
assumed the title of Dictator. No one denies that his achievements as Finance
Minister were modest. In all modesty he proclaimed the “Social-democratic
Republic” in Donaueschingen the day before the final retreat to Switzerland
actually took place, although it had been decreed before. In all modesty he
later declared (See Janus by Heinzen, 1852) that the Paris proletariat had lost
on December 2 because it did not possess his own Franco-Badenese democratic
experience nor the insights available elsewhere in the frenchified Germany of
the South. Anyone who desires further proofs of Goegg’s modesty and of the
existence of a “Goegg Party” will find them in the book The Baden
Revolution in Retrospect. Paris 1850, written by himself. A fitting climax
to his modesty came in a public meeting in Cincinnati when he declared that
“reputable men came to him after the bankruptcy of the Baden Revolution and had
announced that in that revolution men of all the German tribes had taken an
active part. It was therefore to be regarded as a German matter just as the
Rome uprising was of concern to the whole of Italy. As he was the man who had
held out they said that he must become the German Mazzini. His modesty
compelled him to refuse.”

Why? A man who was once “dictator” and who to cap it all, is the bosom
friend of “Napoleon” Sigel, could surely also become the “German Mazzini”.

Once the Emigration was augmented by these and similar, less noteworthy
arrivals, it could proceed to those mighty battles that the reader shall learn
of in the next canto.

Contents | Notes | Marx/Engels
Archive

Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 1852

Heroes of the Exile

XIII

Chi mi dara la voce e le parole,

E un proferir magnanimo e profondo!

Che mai cosa piufiera sotto il sole

Nonfu veduta in tutto quanto il mondo;

L'altre battagliefur rose e viole,

Al raccontar di questa mi confondo;

Perche il valor, e'l pregio della terra

Afronte son condotti in questa guerra.

(Boiardo, Orlando Inamorato, Canto 27)

[Now who will give me words and who the tongue,

To sing of such brave deeds in sonorous sounds!

For ne'er was strife upon this earth begun

More proudly fought on bloodier battle grounds;

Compared to this all other wars are roses

To tell of it my Iyric art confounds

For on this earth there ne'er was seen such glory

Or noble velour bright as in this story]

The latest fashionable arrivals had made up the full complement
of the Emigration and the time had now come for a more comprehensive
“organisation”, to round it off upwards to a full dozen. As might
have been expected these attempts degenerated into bitter feuds. The paper war
conducted in the transatlantic journals now reached its climax. The privations
of individuals, intrigues, plots, self-praise — the heroes spent their
energies in such paltry activities. But the Emigration did have one achievement
to its credit: a history of its own, lying outside world history, with its own
political petti-foggery running parallel to public affairs. And the very fact
that they fought each other so bitterly led each to believe in the importance
of the other. Beneath the façade of all these strivings and conflicts lay the
speculation in democratic party funds, “the Holy Grail”, and this
transformed these transcendental rivalries, these disputes about the
Emperor’s beard, into ordinary quarrels among fools. Anyone who wishes to
pursue the study of this great war between the frogs and the mice will find all
the decisive original documents in the New-Yorker Schnellpost, the New
York Deutsche Zeitung, the Allgemeine Deutsche Zeitung and
the Staatszeitung, in the Baltimore Correspondent, in the
Wecker [Clarion] and in other German-American papers. However, this
display of alleged connections and imagined conspiracies, this whole hue and
cry raised by the émigrés was not without serious consequences. It
provided the governments with the pretext they needed to arrest all sorts of
people in Germany, to suppress the indigenous movements and to use these
wretched strawmen in London as scarecrows with which to frighten the German
middle classes. Far from constituting any danger to existing circumstances
these heroes of the exile wished only that everything should die down in
Germany so that their voice might be heard the better and that the general
level of thought should decline so far that even men of their stature might
appear outstanding.

The newly-arrived South German bonhommes, lacking in any definite
commitment, found themselves in an excellent position to mediate between the
various cliques and, at the same time, to gather the mass of émigrés
around the leaders as a kind of chorus. Their sturdy sense of duty impelled
them not to forgo this opportunity.

At the same time, however, they could already see Ledru-Rollin where he saw
himself, namely in the chair of the president of France. As the most important
neighbours of France it was vital for them to obtain recognition from the
provisional government of France as the provisional overlords of Germany. Sigel
especially wished to see his supreme command guaranteed by Ledru. But the way
to Ledru led over Arnold’s corpse. However, they were still impressed by
Arnold’s persona and he still passed as the philosophical
Northern Light who would illumine their South German twilight. So they turned
to Ruge.

On the opposing side stood in the first instance Kinkel with his
immediate entourage — Schurz, Strodtmann, Schimmelpfennig, Techow etc.;
then came the former deputies and members of parliament, led by
Reichenbach with Meyen and Oppenheim as the representatives of
literature; and, lastly, Willich with his host which, however, remained in the
background. The roles were distributed as follows: Kinkel playing a
passion-flower represented the German Philistines in general; Reichenbach
playing a Count represented the bourgeoisie; Willich, playing Willich
represented the proletariat.

The first thing to say about August Willich is that Gustav always
felt secretly mistrustful of him because of his pointed skull signifying that
the enormous overgrowth of self-esteem had stunted all other qualities.

A German Philistine who once caught sight of ex-Lieutenant Willich in a
London pub snatched up his hat and fled exclaiming: My God, he looks just like
Jesus Christ! In order to increase the similarity Willich became a carpenter
for a while before the Revolution. Later on he emerged as a partisan leader in
the campaign in Baden and the Palatinate.

The partisan leader, a descendant of the old Italian condottiere is a
peculiar phenomenon of more recent wars, especially in Germany. The partisan
leader, accustomed to act on his own initiative, is reluctant to subordinate
himself to a more general command. His men owe their allegiance only to him,
but he is likewise wholly dependent on them. For this reason the discipline in
a free corps is somewhat arbitrary; according to circumstances it may be
savagely strict, but mostly it is extremely lax. The partisan leader cannot
always act the martinet, he must often flatter his men and win them over
individually with the aid of physical caresses; the normal military practices
are of little use here and boldness must be supplemented by other qualities if
the leader is to retain the respect of his subordinates. If he is not noble he
must at least have a noble consciousness to be complemented as always by
cunning, the talent for intrigue and a covert practical baseness. In this way
he not only wins over his soldiers but also bribes the inhabitants, surprises
the enemy and contrives matters so that even his opponents acknowledge his
strength of character. But all this does not suffice to hold together a free
corps whose members either come from the Lumpenproletariat or are soon
assimilated into it. What is needed in addition is a higher ideal. The partisan
leader must therefore have a nucleus of idées fixes, he must be a man
of principle in permanent pursuit of his mission to redeem the world. By means
of sermons at the front and sustained didactic propaganda he must impart a
consciousness of this higher ideal to every man individually and in this way he
will transform the whole troop into sons within the faith. If this higher ideal
is tinged with philosophy or mysticism or anything that surpasses normal
understanding, if it is something Hegelian by nature (as was the case with the
ideas that General Willisen [62] tried to infuse into the Prussian army), then so
much the better. For this ensures that the noble consciousness will enter into
each and every partisan and the deeds of the whole corps thereby attain to a
speculative consecration which exalts them far above the level of ordinary
unreflecting courage and in any case the fame of such an army depends less on
its achievements than on its messianic calling. The strength of a corps can
only be enhanced if all the warriors are made to swear an oath that they will
not survive the destruction of the cause for which they are fighting and would
prefer to be massacred to the last man beneath the apple tree on the frontier
while singing a hymn. Of course, such a corps and such a leader inevitably feel
degraded by contact with ordinary profane soldiers and they will make every
effort either to keep at a distance from the army or else to shake off the
society of the uncircumcised. They hate nothing more than a large army and a
large war where their cunning buttressed by spiritual faith can achieve little
if the normal rules of war are disregarded. The partisan leader must then be a
crusader in the full sense of the word, he must be Peter the Hermit and Walther
von Habenichts [63] rolled
into one. Faced with the heterogeneous elements and the informal mode of life
of his corps he must always uphold virtue. He must not allow his men to drink
him under the table and so he must only drink in solitude, for instance at
night in bed. If it should happen to him, as it might to any fallible human
being, that he find himself returning to barracks late at night after
inordinate indulgence in the pleasures of this life, he will take care not to
enter through the main gate, but to go round the side and climb over the wall
to avoid giving offence. Feminine charms should leave him cold, but it will
make a good impression if he, like Cromwell, takes his NCOs or a tailor's
apprentice into his bed from time to time. In general he cannot lead too strict
and ascetic a life. Behind the cavalieri della ventura in his corps
stand the cavalieri del dente [64] who live mainly from requisitions and free
quarters to all of which Walther von Habenichts has to turn a blind eye so that
Peter the Hermit has always to be at hand with the consolation that such
unpleasant measures contribute to the salvation of the nation and so are in the
interest of the victims themselves.

All the qualities that the partisan leader must possess in wartime reappear
in peacetime in a modified form but one that can scarcely be regarded as an
improvement. Above all else he must preserve the core of the regiment for later
on and hence keep his recruiting officers in a state of constant activity. The
core consisting of the remnants of the free corps and the general mob of
émigrés is put into barracks either at government expense (as in
Besançon) or by some other means. The consecration in the service of an ideal
must not be lacking and it is provided by a barracks-communism that ascribes a
higher significance to the custom of holding ordinary civic actions in
contempt. As this communist barracks is no longer subject to the articles of
war, but only to the moral authority and the dictates of self-sacrifice, it is
inevitable that quarrels should break out over the communal funds. From these
disputes moral authority does not always emerge unscathed. If there is an
artisan’s club anywhere in the vicinity it can be employed as a
recruiting base and the artisans are given the prospect of a jolly life full of
adventures in exchange for the oppressive work of the present. By pointing to
the higher ethical significance of the barracks for the future of the
proletariat, it is even possible to induce the club to make financial
contributions. In both the barracks and the club the sermonising and the
patriarchal and gossipy style of personal relations will not fail to impress.
Even in peacetime the partisan does not lose his indispensable assurance and
just as in wartime every setback spurred him on to proclaim victory on the
morrow, so now he is for ever expounding on the moral certainty and the
philosophical inevitability with which "it" will start to happen
within the next fortnight. As he must needs have an enemy and as the noble man
is necessarily opposed by the ignoble ones he discovers in them a raging
hostility towards himself, he imagines that they hate him merely because of his
well-deserved popularity and would gladly poison him or stab him. With this in
mind he resolves always to conceal a long dagger beneath his pillow. Just as
the partisan leader in war will never succeed unless he assumes that the
population reveres him, likewise in peace he will not indeed manage to form any
lasting political groupings but he will constantly suppose them to exist and
from this all sorts of strange mystifications can arise. The talent for
requisitioning and obtaining free quarters appears again in the form of a cosy
parasitism. By contrast, the strict asceticism of our Orlando, like everything
that is good and great, is subject to terrible temptations in times of peace.
Boiardo says in Canto 24:

Turpin behauptet, daß der Graf von Brava

Jungfräulich war auf Lebenszeit und keusch.

Glaubt ihr davon, was euch beliebt, ihr Herren —

[Turpin claims that the Count of Brava

Was virginal and chaste his whole life long.

Of that you may believe, Sirs, what you will — ]

But we also learn that later on Count Brava lost his reason at
the sight of the beautiful Angelica and Astolf had to go to the moon to recover
it for him, as Master Lodovico Ariosto so charmingly narrates. Our modern
Orlando, however, mistook himself for the poet who tells how he, too, loved so
greatly that he lost his reason and tried to find it with his lips and hands on
the bosom of his Angelica and was thrown out of the house for his pains.

In politics the partisan leader will display his superiority in all matters
of tactics. In conformity with the notion of a partisan he will go from one
party to the next. Petty intrigues, sordid hole-and-corner activities, the
occasional lie, morally outraged perfidy will be the natural symptoms of the
noble consciousness. His faith in his mission and in the higher meaning of his
words and deeds will induce him to declare emphatically: "I never lie!" The
idées fixes become a splendid cloak for his secret treachery and cause
the simpletons of the Emigration, who have no ideas at all, to
conclude that he, the man of fixed ideas, is simply a fool. And our worthy
slyboots could desire nothing better.

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza rolled into one, as much in love with his
knapsack as with his idées fixes, with the free provisions of the
itinerant knight as much as with renown, Willich is the man of the duodecimal
[65] war and the
microscopic intrigue. He conceals his cunning beneath the mask of character.
His real future lies in the prairies of the Rio Grande del Norte.

Concerning the relations between the two wings of the Emigration we have
described, a letter from Mr. Goegg in the Deutsche Schnellpost in New
York is very revealing:

“They (the South Germans) resolved to bolster up the
reputation of the moribund central committee by attempting to unite
with the other factions. But there is little prospect of success for this well
intentioned idea. Kinkel continues to intrigue, has formed a committee
consisting of his rescuer, his biographer and a number of Prussian lieutenants.
Their aim is to work together in secret, to expand, if possible to gain
possession of the democratic funds, and then suddenly tear off their mask and
appear publicly as the powerful Kinkel party. This is neither honest nor just
nor sensible!”

The “honesty” of the intentions of the South Germans
can be seen from the following letter from Mr. Sigel to the same newspaper:

“If we, the few men with honourable
intentions, have in part resorted to conspiracies, this is due to the
need to protect ourselves against the terrible perfidy and the presumptuousness
of Kinkel and his colleagues and to show them that they are not born to rule.
Our chief aim was to force Kinkel to come to a large meeting in order
to prove to him and to what he calls his close political friends that not all
that glitters is gold. The devil take the instrument” (i.e. Schurz),
“and the devil take the singer too” [66] (i.e. Kinkel). (Weekly edition of the
New-Yorker Deutsche Zeitung, September 24 1851).

The strange constitution of the two factions that rebuke each
other for being “north” and “south” can be seen from
the fact that at the head of the South German elements stood the
“mind” of Ruge, while at the head of the North German side were the
“feelings” of Kinkel.

In order to understand the great struggle that was now waged we must waste a
few words on the diplomacy of these two world-shaking parties.

Arnold (and his henchmen likewise) was concerned above all to form a
“closed” society with the official appearance of
“revolutionary activity”. This society would then give birth to his
beloved “Committee for German Affairs” and this committee would
then propel Ruge into the European Central Committee. Arnold had been
indefatigable in his efforts to realise this aim since the summer of 1850. He
had hoped that the South Germans would provide “that happy medium where
he could dominate in comfort”. The official establishment of the
Emigration and the formation of committees was the necessary policy of Arnold
and his allies.

Kinkel and his cohorts, on the other hand, had to try and undermine
everything that could legitimise the position Ruge had usurped in the European
Central Committee. In reply to his appeal for an advance of £500 sterling
Kinkel had received the promise of some money from New Orleans, whereupon he
had formed a secret finance committee together with Willich,
Schimmelpfennig, Reichenbach, Techow and Schurz, etc. They reasoned: once we
have the money we shall have the Emigration; once we have the Emigration we
shall also have the government in Germany. Their aim, therefore, was to occupy
the whole Emigration with formal meetings but to undermine any attempt at
setting up an official society that went beyond a “loose
organisation” and above all to undermine all proposals to form
committees. This would delay the enemy faction, block their activities and
enable them to manoeuvre behind their backs.

Both parties, i.e. all the “distinguished men” had one thing in
common: they both led the mass of émigrés by the nose, they concealed
from them their real objectives, used them as mere tools and dropped them as
soon as they had served their purpose.

Let us take a look at these democratic Machiavellis, Talleyrands and
Metternichs and take note of their actions.

Scene 1. July 14, 1851. — After a "“private
understanding with Kinkel to make common cause” had fallen through, Ruge,
Goegg, Sigel, Fickler and Ronge invited the distinguished men of all shades of
opinion to a meeting in Fickler’s home on July 14th. Twenty-six people
appeared. Fickler proposed that a “private circle” of German
refugees should be formed and this in turn would give birth to a
“business committee for the advancement of revolutionary
objectives”. This was opposed mainly by Kinkel and six of his supporters.
After a violent debate lasting several hours Fickler’s motion was passed
(16 votes to 10). Kinkel and the minority declared themselves unable to
participate any further and took their departure.

Scene 2. July 20th. — The above majority constituted
itself as a society. Joined, among others, by Tausenau, who had been introduced
by Fickler.

If Ronge was the Luther and Kinkel the Melanchton then Tausenau is the
Abraham a Sancta Clara [67] of the Gemman democrats. If the two augurs in
Cicero could not look each other in the face without laughing then Mr. Tausenau
cannot catch sight of his own earnest features in the mirror without bursting
into laughter. If Ruge had discovered in the Badeners people whom he
impressed, Fate now had its revenge when it introduced him to the Austrian
Tausenau, a man who impressed him.

At the suggestion of Goegg and Tausenau the negotiations were postponed in
order to try once again to bring about a union with Kinkel's faction.

Scene 3. July 27th. — Session in the Cranbourne Hotel.
The “distinguished” Emigration there to a man. Kinkel's group
appeared but not with the intention of joining the society already in
existence; on the contrary, they pressed for the formation of an “open
discussion club without a business committee and without definite
objectives”. Schurz who acted as Kinkel's mentor throughout all
these parliamentary negotiations, proposed:

“The present company should form itself into a private
political society with the name German Émigré Club and should accept as new
members other citizens from among the German refugees on the nomination of a
member and after a majority vote in favour.”

Passed unanimously. The society resolved to meet every
Friday.

“The passing of this motion was welcomed with general
applause and with the cry: ‘Long live the German republic!!!’
Everyone felt that they had done their duty by being generally open-minded and
that they had achieved something positive serving the cause of
revolution.” (Goegg, Weekly edition of the Deutsche Schnellpost,
August 20, 1851.)

Eduard Meyen was so delighted with this success that he waxed
ecstatic in his lithographed report:

“The whole Emigration now form a coherent phalanx up
to and including Bucher and with the sole exception of the incorrigible Marx
clique.”

This same notice of Meyen’s can be found also in the
Berliner lithographische Korrespondenz.

In this way, thanks to a general open-mindedness and to the accompaniment of
three cheers for the German Republic the great Émigré Club which was to hold
such inspiring meetings and which was to dissolve in satisfaction a few weeks
after Kinkel’s departure for America, came into being. Its dissolution
did not of course prevent it from playing an important part as a living entity
in America.

Scene 4. August 1st. — Second meeting in the
Cranbourne Hotel.

“Unfortunately we must already report today that the
expectations raised by the formation of this club have been sadly
disappointed.” (Goegg, loc. cit., August 27th.)

Kinkel introduced six Prussian refugees and six Prussian
visitors to the Great Exhibition into the club without obtaining a majority
decision. Damm (President, former president of the Baden Constituent
Assembly) expressed his astonishment at this treacherous infringement of the
statutes. [“Damm is here!” “Who is here?” “Damm
is here!” “Who?” “Damm, Damm, surely you know
Damm?”]

Kinkel explained: “The Club is only a loosely organised
society with no other purpose than for people to get to know each other and to
have discussions that are open to everyone. It is therefore desirable for
visitors to be admitted to the Club in large numbers.”

Student Schurz attempted to cover up quickly for the Professor’s lack
of tact by moving an amendment to permit the admission of visitors. Motion
passed. Abraham a Sancta Clara Tausenau rose and put the two following motions
with a perfectly straight face:

“1. A commission (the committee)
‘should be set up to report weekly on current affairs, particularly in
Germany. These reports are to be preserved in the archive of the Club and
published at an appropriate time. 2. There should be a commission (the
committee) to deposit in the archive all possible details concerning violations
of the law and acts of cruelty towards the supporters of democracy committed by
the servants of the reaction during the last three years and at the present
time.’

“Reichenbach opposed this vigorously: ‘He saw
suspicious motives lurking behind these seemingly harmless proposals and also
the wish to use the election of the members of this commission as a device to
give the Club an official character not desired by himself or his
friends.’

“Schimmelpfennig and Schurz: ‘These commissions
could arrogate powers unto themselves that might be of a conspiratorial nature
and gradually lead to an official committee.’

“Meyer: ‘I want words, not
deeds.’”

According to Goegg's account the majority seemed inclined to
accept the motion; Machiavelli Schurz proposed an adjournment. Abraham a Sancta
Clara Tausenau agreed to the proposal so as not to seem unfriendly. Kinkel
expressed the opinion that the vote should be postponed until the next meeting
chiefly because his supporters were in the minority that evening and so he and
his friends would be unable in the circumstances to regard the vote as
“binding on their conscience”. Adjournment agreed.

Scene 5. August 8th. — Third meeting in the Cranbourne
Hotel. Discussion of the Tausenau motions. — Ignoring the agreement,
Kinkel/Willich had brought along the “rank and file refugees”,
le menu peuple, so as to “bind their consciences” this
time. — Schurz moved an amendment proposing voluntary lectures on current
affairs and in accordance with a previous arrangement Meyen immediately
volunteered to speak on Prussia, Schurz on France, Oppenheim on England and
Kinkel on America and the future (since his immediate future lay in America).
Tausenau's proposals were rejected. He declared movingly that his only wish was
to sacrifice his just anger on the altar of the nation and to remain within the
bosom of his allies. But the Ruge/Fickler contingent at once assumed the
outraged indignation of beautiful souls who have been swindled.

Intermezzo. — Kinkel had finally received £160
sterling from New Orleans and together with other distinguished heroes he had
set about investing it for the revolution. The Ruge/Fickler faction, already
embittered by the recent vote, now learned of this. They had no time to lose,
action was essential. They founded a new cesspool and concealed its foul
stagnation under the name of the Agitation Club. Its members were
Tausenau, Frank, Goegg, Sigel, Hertle, Ronge, Haug, Fickler and Ruge. The Club
immediately announced in the English press:

“Its aims are not to discuss but to work, it would
produce not words but deeds and above all it appeals to likeminded comrades to
make donations. The Agitation Club appoints Tausenau to be its executive leader
and its foreign minister. It also recognises Ruge's position in the European
Central Committee” (as Imperial Administrator) [68] “as well as his
previous activity on behalf of and in the name of the German people.”

The new combination does not conceal the original constellation:
Ruge, Ronge and Haug. After the struggles and the efforts of so many years Ruge
had finally reached his goal: he was acknowledged to be the fifth wheel on the
central carriage of democracy and had a clearly — all too clearly —
defined part of the people behind him, consisting of eight men in all. But even
this pleasure was poisoned for him as his recognition was purchased at the cost
of an indirect slight and was agreed to only on the condition imposed by the
peasant Fickler that Ruge should henceforth cease to “broadcast his
rubbish to the whole world”.

The coarse Fickler regarded as “distinguished” only those
writings by Ruge which he had not read and did not need to read.

Scene 6. August 22nd. — The Cranbourne Hotel. Firstly,
there was a “diplomatic masterstroke” (vide Goegg) on the part of
Schurz: he proposed the formation of a general refugee committee to comprise
six members taken from the different factions together with five co-opted
members of the already existing refugee committee of the Willich Artisan Club.
(This would have given the Kinkel/Willich wing a permanent majority). Agreed.
The elections were carried out but rejected by the members of the Rugean part
of the state, which meant the complete collapse of the diplomatic master
stroke. How seriously this refugee committee was meant to be taken can be seen
from the fact that four days later Willich resigned from the committee of
artisans and refugees which had only had a nominal existence for a long time,
following upon repeated, wholly disrespectful revolts on the part of the
“rank and file refugees” which had made the dissolution of the
committee an inevitability. — Interpellation concerning the emergence in
public of the Agitation Club. Motion: that the Émigré Club should have nothing
to do with the Agitation Club and should publicly dissociate itself from all
its actions. Furious attacks on the “Agitators” Goegg and Sigel
junior (i.e. senior, see below) in their presence. Rudolph Schramm declared
that his old friend Ruge was a minion of Mazzini and a “gossipy old
woman”. Tu quoque, Brute! Goegg retorted, not as a great orator
but as an honest citizen and he launched a bitter attack on the ambiguous,
slack, perfidious, unctuous Kinkel.

“It is irresponsible to prevent those who wish to work
from doing so, but these people want a fictitious, inactive union that they can
use as a cover for certain purposes.”

When Goegg referred to the public announcement about the
Agitator Club in the English papers Kinkel arose majestically and said that
“He already controlled the whole American press and had taken steps to
ensure his control of the French press too.”

The motion of the German faction was passed and provoked a declaration from
“the Agitators” that the members of their club could no longer
remain within the Émigré Club.

Thus arose the terrible gulf between the Émigré Club and the Agitators' Club
which gapes through the whole history of the modern world.

The most curious fact about it is that both creatures only survived until
their separation and now they vegetate in the Kaulbachian [69] battle of the ghosts that still rages in
German-American meetings and papers and no doubt will continue to rage to the
end of time.

The whole session was all the more stormy as the undisciplined Schramm went
so far as to attack Willich, claiming that the Émigré Club degraded
itself by its connections with that knight. The chairman, who happened to be
the timorous Meyen, had already lost control several times in despair. But the
debate about the Agitators' Club and the resignation of its members brought the
tumult to a climax. To the accompaniment of shouts, drumming, crashes, threats
and raging the edifying meeting went on until 2 a.m. when the landlord turned
off the gas and so plunged the heated antagonists into darkness. This brought
all plans to save the nation to an abrupt end.

At the end of August the chivalrous Willich and the cosy Kinkel made an
attempt to smash the Agitators' Club by putting a proposal to the worthy
Fickler.

“He should join with them and their closer political friends
in forming a Finance Committee to manage the money that had come in from New
Orleans. This committee should continue to function until it is
superseded by a general finance committee of the< revolution. However,
the acceptance of this offer would imply the dissolution of all German
revolutionary and agitatorial societies that had existed hitherto.”

The worthy Fickler rejected the idea of this “imposed, secret
and irresponsible committee” with indignation.

“How”, he exclaimed, “can a mere finance committee hope to
unite all the revolutionary parties around it? The money that has arrived and
that is still to come can never suffice to persuade the widely divergent
strands of the democrats to sacrifice their autonomy.”

Thus instead of achieving the hoped-for destruction of the
opposition this attempted seduction enabled Tausenau to declare that the breach
between the two mighty parties of Emigration and Agitation had become
irreparable.

Contents | Notes | Marx/Engels
Archive

Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 1852

Heroes of the Exile

XIV

To show how pleasantly the war was waged between Emigration and
Agitation we append here a few excerpts from the German-American papers.

Agitation.

Ruge declared that Kinkel was an “agent of the Prince of Prussia”. Another
agitator discovered that the outstanding men of the Émigré Club consisted of
“Pastor Kinkel together with three Prussian lieutenants, two mediocre Berlin
literati and one student”.

Sigel wrote: “It cannot be denied that Willich has gained some support. But
when a man has been a preacher for three years and only tells people what they
wish to hear, he would have to be very stupid not to be able to win some of
them over. The Kinkelites are attempting to take these supporters over. The
Willich supporters are whoring with the Kinkel supporters.”

A fourth agitator declared that Kinkel's supporters are “idolators”.
Tausenau gave this description of the Émigré Club.

“Divergent interests beneath the mask of conciliatoriness,
the systematic gerrymandering of majorities, the emergence of unknown
quantities as organising party leaders, attempts to impose a secret finance
committee and all the other slippery manoeuvres with which immature
politicians of all ages have tried to control the fates of their country
in exile, while the first glow of the revolution disperses all such vanities
like a morning mist.”

Lastly, Rodomonte-Heinzen announced that the only reputable
refugees in England personally known to him were Ruge, Goegg, Fickler and
Sigel. The members of the Émigré Club were “egoists, royalists and communists”.
Kinkel was “an incurably vain fool and an aristocratic adventurer”, Meyen,
Oppenheim and Willich, etc. were people “who do not even come up to his,
Heinzen's, knee and as for Ruge, they do not even reach to his ankle”. (New
York Schnellpost, New-Yorker Deutsche Zeitung, Wecker, etc. 1851.)

Emigration

“What is the purpose of an imposed committee, that stands
firmly in mid-air, that confers authority on itself without consulting the
people whom it claims to represent or asking them whether they wish to be
represented by such people?” — “Everyone who knows Ruge, knows that the
mania for proclamations is his incurable disease.” — “In parliament Ruge
did not even acquire the influence of a Simon of Trier or a Raveaux.” [70] “Where revolutionary energy in action, talent for
organisation, discretion or reticence are necessary, Ruge is downright
dangerous because he cannot hold his tongue, he cannot hold his ink and always
claims that he represents everybody. When Ruge meets Mazzini and Ledru-Rollin
this is translated into Rugean and published in all the papers as: Germany,
France and Italy have banded together fraternally to serve the revolution.”
— “This pretentious imposition of a committee, this boastful inactivity
determined Ruge’s most intimate and intelligent friends, such as Oppenheim,
Meyen and Schramm to join forces with other men.” “Behind Ruge there is no
clearly defined section of the people, but only a clearly outlined pigtail of
peace.” — “How many hundreds of people ask themselves daily who is this
Tausenau and there is no one, no one who can give an answer. Here and there you
can find a Viennese who will assure you that he is one of those democrats with
whom the reaction used to reproach the Viennese democrats so as to put them in
a bad light. But that is the concern of the Viennese. At any rate Tausenau is
an unknown quantity, and whether he is a quantity of any kind is even more
dubious.”

“Let us take a look at these worthy men who regard everyone else as an
immature politician. Sigel, the supreme commander. If anyone ever asks the muse
of history how such an insipid nonentity was given the supreme command she will
be completely at a loss for a reply. Sigel is only his brother's brother. His
brother became a popular officer as a result of his critical remarks about the
government, remarks which had been provoked by his frequent arrests for
disorderly behaviour. The younger Sigel thought this reason enough in the early
confusion prevailing at the outbreak of revolution to proclaim himself supreme
commander and minister of war. The Baden artillery which had often proved its
worth had plenty of older and more experienced officers who should have taken
precedence over this young milksop Lieutenant Sigel, and they were more than a
little indignant when they had to obey an unknown man whose inexperience was
only matched by his incompetence. But there was Brentano, who was so mindless
and treacherous as to permit anything that might ruin the revolution .... The
total incapacity that Sigel displayed during the whole Baden campaign .... It
is worthy of note that Sigel left the bravest soldiers of the republican army
in the lurch in Rastatt and in the Black Forest without the reinforcements he
had promised while he himself drove around Zurich with the epaulettes
and the carriage of Prince von Furstenberg and paraded as an interesting
unfortunate supreme commander. This is the true magnitude of this mature
politician who, understandably proud of his earlier heroic deeds, imposed
himself as supreme commander for a second time, on this occasion in the
Agitators’ Club. This is the great hero, the brother of his brother.”

“It is really laughable when such people” (as the Agitators) “reproach
others with half-heartedness, for they are political nonentities who
are neither half nor whole.” — “Personal ambition is the whole secret of
their fundamental position.” — “As a club the Agitators’ Club has meaning
only as a private institution, like a literary circle or a billiard club, and
therefore it has no claim to be taken into consideration or given a voice.”
— “You have cast the dice! Let the uninitiated be initiated so that they
may judge for themselves what kind of people you are!” — (Baltimore
Correspondent.)

It must be confessed that in their understanding of each other
these gentlemen have almost achieved an understanding of themselves.

XV

In the meantime the secret finance committee of the “Émigrés”
had elected an executive committee consisting of Kinkel, Willich and
Reichenbach and it now resolved to take serious measures in connection
with the German loan. As reported in the New York Schnellpost, the
New-Yorker Deutsche Zeitung and the Baltimore Correspondent
at the end of 1851, Student Schurz was sent on a mission to France, Belgium and
Switzerland where he sought out all old, forgotten, dead and missing
parliamentarians, Reichregents, deputies and other distinguished men, right
down to the late lamented Raveaux, to get them to guarantee the loan. The
forgotten wretches hastened to give their guarantee. For what else was the
guarantee of the loan if not a mutual guarantee of government posts in
partibus; and in the same way Messrs. Kinkel, Willich and Reichenbach obtained
by this means guarantees of their future prospects. And these
sorrowing bonhommes in Switzerland were so obsessed with “organisation” and the
guarantee of future posts that they had long before worked out a plan by which
government posts would be awarded according to seniority — which produced
a terrible scandal about who were to have Nos. 1, 2 and 3. Suffice it to say
that Student Schurz brought back the guarantee in his pocket and so they all
went to work. Some days earlier Kinkel had, it is true, promised in another
meeting with the “Agitators” that he would not go ahead with a loan without
them. For that very reason he departed taking the signatures of the guarantors
and carte blanche from Reichenbach and Willich — ostensibly to
find customers for his aesthetic lectures in the north of England, but in
reality to go to Liverpool and embark for New York where he hoped to play
Parzival and to discover the Holy Grail, the gold of the democratic
parties.

And now begins that sweet-sounding, strange, magniloquent, fabulous, true
and adventurous history of the great battles fought on both sides of the
Atlantic Ocean between the Émigrés and the Agitators. It was a war waged with
renewed bitterness and with indefatigable zeal. In it we witness Gottfried's
crusade in the course of which he contends with Kossuth and after great labours
and indescribable temptations he finally returns home with the Grail in the
bag.

Or bei signori, io vi lascio al presente,

E se voi tornerete in questo loco,

Diro questa baffaglia dov'io lasso

Ch'un altra nofu mai di tal fracasso.

(Boiardo, Bk I, Canto 26)

[And there, kind Sirs, I leave you for the present,

If one day you return unto this place

I'll give you further news of this great war

So full of mighty deeds ne'er done before.]

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Heroes of the Exile

Notes

[2] Klopstock's Messias.

[3]Siegwart: Eine
Klostergeschichte by Miller appeared in 1776 and is typical of the
sentimental trend in literature at the time.

[4] Goethe, Faust I. Faust's
Study. Translated by Louis Macneice and E. L. Stahl.

[5] Ibid.

[6] A reference to the Confessions of a
beautiful soul which occur in Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's
Apprenticeship and which epitomise the cult of sentiment.

[7] Wagner was the naive assistant of
Faust.

[8] Wolfram von Eschenbach and Gottfried
von Strasbourg were the two chief exponents of the courtly epic in Germany.
Their principal works were Parzival (Wolfram) and Tristan
(Gottfried).

[9] Platen (1796-1835) was a
neo-classical poet who attacked both the Romantics and the Philistines;
essentially second-rate he was himself the object of a notoriously violent
satire by Heine.

[10] Chamisso, the well-known author of
Peter Schlemihl also published the Deutscher Musenalmanach
which appeared in Leipzig from 1833 to 1839. Albert Knapp was the editor of
Christoterpe. Ein Taschenbuch für christliche Leser, Heidelberg
1833-53.

[11] The supreme Hindu deity Shiva was
also known as Mahadeva. In the form used by Marx, Mahadoh, there is an echo of
Goethe's poem Der Gott und die Bajadere.

[12] The conflict between duty and
inclination is seen by the mature Schiller as central to tragedy.

[13] Christian Heinrich Spiess
(1755-99), Heinrich Clauren (177I-1854), and Karl Gottlob Cramer (1758-1817)
were all writers of popular novels or adventure stories.

[14] Heinrich von Ofterdingen
by Novalis was a paradigmatic work of the German Romantic school. The hero --
modelled on a mediaeval poet of that name -- spends his life in a search for
the "blue flower" which becomes a symbol of that infinite romantic longing for
the ideal, poetic realm removed from that of reality.

[15] The concluding lines of Goethe's
Zahme Xenien in which he makes fum of Pustkuchen's
Wanderjahre, a work parasitic on his own Wilhem Meister and one which
was for a while thought to be from his own pen. Goethe's own Italian Journey
marks a decisive change in his career.

[16] Kotzebue was an immensely popular
writer of superficial melodramas.

[17] Hegel, The Phenomenology of
Mind, Berlin 1832, pp. 392 ff.

[18] Schiller's Kabale und
Liebe was one of the chief works of the German Storm and Stress period.

[19] Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling
(1740-1817) a sentimental, pietistic writer.

[20] Bettina von Arnim had managed to
captivate the aging Goethe while she was herself scarcely more than a
precocious child. Her publication of Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem
Kinde brought her a certain notoriety.

[21] The critical movement, i.e. the
Young Hegelians, Strauss, Bruno Bauer and Feuerbach.

[22] Tale by Clemens Brentano, one of
the chief exponents of German Romanticism.

[23] The Göttinger Hain poets (Holty
and Voss were the most important) were active from 1772 to 1774. Influenced by
Klopstock and Bürger they played an important role in the formation of German
literature before subsiding into philistinism.

[24] The reference is to the artisans'
congresses that took place in various towns in Germany in 1848 and which
produced programmes for restoring the guilds to their former prosperity in
accordance with Wmkelblech's utopian theories.

[25] The dictated constitution was
introduced by Frederick William IV on December 5, 1848. The Lower Chamber met
on February 26, 1849, but was dissolved by the government on April 27, 1849.

[26] The battle of Rastatt took place
on June 29 & 30, 1849. The defeat of the democratic forces at the hands of
the Prussian troops marked the end of the Baden campagne.

[27] The reference is to Goethe's
celebrated novel, The Sufferings of Young Werther.

[28] May 1852, i.e. the French
presidential election which the democratic movement and especially the
émigré's hoped would inaugurate a new democratic epoch.

[29] I.e. the campagne for the Imperial
Constitution whose defeat at Rastatt ended the revolutionary struggles.

[30] The Camphausen Ministry in Prussia
lasted from March to June 1848.

[31] The Prussian Assembly was
dissolved in November 1848.

[32] The Neue Preussische
Zeitung also known as the "Kreuzzeitung" was founded in June 1848. It was
the organ of the extreme right-wing court camarilla. As such it opposed
Manteuffel's more moderate conservatism.

[33] The Dresden Uprising lasted from
May 3 to May 8, 1849. It broke out when the King of Saxony refused to recognise
the Imperial Constitution. The insurrection was led by Bakunin and Samuel
Tzschirner and involved workers and artisans. Hence an appeal to the bourgeois
democrats of Leipzig went unheeded.

[34] The reference is to June 13, 1849,
when Louis Napoleon defeated a challenge to his power by Ledru-Rollin and the
Montagne. The influence of the Montagne was now broken and Ledru and others
fled into exile.

[35] Brüggemann was chief editor of the
Kölnische Zeitung, 1840-1855.

[36] Arnold Winkelried was the
half-legendary popular hero of the Swiss war of liberation against the
Habsburgs. According to tradition he opened the attack in the decisive battle
of Sempach (1386) with the cry "Der Freiheit eine Gasse!"

[37] Boiardo, L'Orlando
inamorato, canto 17.

[38] I.e. the Karlsruher
Zeitung.

[39] A popular sentimental novel by J.
T. Hermes.

[40] The March Clubs were the branches,
existing in various German cities of the Central March Club, that had been
founded in November 1848 by members of the Frankfurt Left. They were frequency
attacked by Marx and Engels in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung for their
failure to take action.

[41] Ludwig Börne was the founder of
modern polemical German literature. Widely read in his day he exercised a
profound influence on the style of Engels and perhaps also Marx. He is now
unjustly neglected.

[42] Jakob Venedey, Preussen und
Preussentum. Mannheim 1839.

[43] Alcina figures both in the
Orlandofurioso of Ariosto and the Orlando Inamorato of
Boiardo.

[44] The “wet” Quakers were
a reformist trend within the movement in the Twenties of the 19th century.

[45] See Note 3 to the "Revelations".

[46] Bronzell was the site of an
unimportant skirmish between Prussian and Austrian troops on November 8, 1850.
It resulted from the claims of both sides to have the sole right to intervene
in the affairs of Hesse and to crush an uprising there. Austria received
diplomatic support from Russia and so Prussia had to yield. The agreement then
reached at Olmütz effectively consolidated the Reaction.

[47] I.e. in Die Jobsiade. Ein
komisches Heldengedicht by K. A. Kortum.

[48] The Hambacher Fest was a political
demonstration by South German liberals and radicals in the castle of Hambach
(in the Bavarian Palatinate) on May 27, 1832. It resulted in the complete
abolition of the freedom of the press and association.

[49] The invasion of Savoy was
organised by Mazzini and took place in 1834. A detachment of émigrés
of various nationalities marched on Savoy under the leadership of Ramorino, but
was defeated by Piedmontese troops.

[50] In June 1844 the Bandiera
brothers, who were members of a secret conspiratorial organisation, landed on
the Calabrian coast with the intention of sparking off an insurrection against
the Neapolitan Bourbons and the Austrian yoke. They were betrayed by one of
their number, taken prisoner and shot.

[51] The Dukes of Augustenburg were a
branch of the Holstein Ducal House. Their denial of the claims of the Danish
kings to Schleswig-Holstem was a factor in German Danish relations and the
complicated Schleswig-Holstein Question.

[52] At the Warsaw Conference in
October 1850 which was attended by Russia, Austria and Prussia the attempt was
made to force Prussia to abandon all plans to unite Germany under its own
hegemony.

[53] The anniversary of the abdication
of Louis Philippe on February 24, 1848.

[54] The Vorpariament met in Frankfurt
from March 31 and April 4, 1848, pending the election of an all-German Assembly
and the formulation of a definitive constitution. It was moderate, i.e.
constitutionalist and monarchist in character.

[55] A famous relic in Trier, said to
be the seamless coat of Christ for which thc soldiers at the Crucifixion cast
lots (see John I9, 23).

[56] Paulus was a Protestant
theologiam, Wilhelm Traugott Krug was Kent's successor in the Konigsberg chair
of philosophy.

[57] Alessandro Gavazzi was an Italian
priest who took part in the Revolution of 1848-49 in Italy. After the defeat of
the Revolution he emigrated to England, agitated against the Catholic Church
and the temporal power of the Pope. Later a supporter of Garibaldi.

[58] Goethe, Anmerkungen über
Personen und Gegenstande, deren im dem Dialog “Rameau's Neffe”
erwähnt wird

[59] Jean-Victor Moreau, a general in
the French Revolutionary army; as commander of the Rhine Moselle Army he gained
fame with a brilliantly conducted retreat in face of superior enemy forces in
1797.

[60] Black, red and yellow or gold were
the colours of the revolutionaries in 1848.

[61] Both Mathy and Romer were liberals
in the Frankfurt National Assembly. Romer was also prime minister of
Württemberg (1848-49).

[62] The reference is to Willesen's
book Theorie des Grossen Krieges angewendet auf den russisch-polnischen
Feldzug von 1831 (1840) in which he based the science of war on abstract
propositions rather than on the observable facts.

[63] Both Peter the Hermit and Walther
von Habenichts were peasant leaders in the First Crusade.

[64] Cavalieri della ventura
and cavalier) del dense are, respectively, "knights of fortune" and
"knights of the knapsack".

[65] The duodecimal, i.e. petty, war.

[66] Goethe, Faust I.

[67] Abraham a Sancta Clara (1664-1709)
was Court preacher in Vienna. He is known for his biting satires.

[68] Imperial Administrator
(Reichsverweser) is a reference to the appointment of Archduke Johann
to this post in 1848. It points to both the grandeur and the meaninglessness of
Ruge's office.

[69] Kaulbach's painting, the Battle of
the Huns, shows the ghosts of the warriors who fell on the Catalaunian Plains
in A.D. 451 continuing to fight.

[70] Ludwig Simon was a lawyer from
Trier who became a left-wing member of the Frankfurt National Assembly; Franz
Raveaux was one ofthe leaders of the Left-Centre in the Vorparlament and
National Assembly; later he joined the provisional government in Baden. Both
emigrated after the collapse of the revolution.

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