Karl Marx

The New Ministry

From the English.

*New-York Daily Tribune*, No. 5489, November 24, 1858

Berlin, November 6, 1858

After much coming and going, the new Ministry has at last been formed, which may best be characterised as a Ministry of the Princess of Prussia. It bears a more liberal complexion than the Berlin philistines dared to hope; and, as was to be expected from a lady’s choice, little heed has been paid to the harmony of its different elements during the putting of it together, so that the main object aimed at—to gain a temporary popularity—has been just barely attained. As befits a real lady, the Princess says an affable word to everybody: to the Catholics by appointing a Catholic <Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen> as Prime Minister, a thing unheard of in the annals of Prussia; to the fanatical Protestants by giving the Ministry of Public Worship to an Evangelical Pietist <von Bethmann-Hollweg>; to the anti-Russian current by entrusting the War Ministry to a General <von Bonin> who had at the time been dismissed from that post at the express demand of Czar Nicholas; to the anti-Austrian jealousy by conferring the Ministry of Foreign Affairs upon a man <Baron von Schleinitz> who had once before resigned this post so as not to have to submit to Prince Schwarzenberg’s orders; to the bureaucratic tendency of mind by appointing a survivor from the good old times of Frederick William III to the Home Office <von Flottwell>—the Minister who is the head of the whole bureaucratic army, police as well as government <Regierung>—; to the Liberals by granting a seat without portfolio in the Cabinet—a post similar to that of Lord President of the Council in an English Ministry—to a man <von Auerswald> who had been Prime Minister in the first Cabinet formed by the revolution of 1848; to the Free Traders by installing Herr von Patow in the Finance Ministry and to the Protectionists by leaving Herr von der Heydt in the Ministry of Commerce; to the nobility by calling a Prince of the Royal House to the head of the Cabinet and filling all political posts with nobles; to the bourgeoisie by leaving the special Ministries, that is to say, those of Justice, Commerce, Worship, and the Interior, to non-noble or ennobled bourgeois; to the enemies of the Camarilla by forming the great majority of the new Cabinet of personal enemies of Gerlach and Co.; and to the Conservatives, who fear that something like a change of ministry in the parliamentary sense might arise in Prussia, by allowing some ministers, who had been Manteuffel’s colleagues, selected by himself, and who had countersigned those decrees by which the coup d’état of December 1848 was proclaimed, to retain their salaries.

Thus eclecticism is the specific feature of the new Cabinet—an eclecticism which proceeds from the affectation of popularity, but is kept within bounds by the firm resolution to sacrifice nothing important to this same popularity. Of one characteristic of the new Cabinet I will only give a hint—a nuance which is quite indifferent to the cool political observer, but to the Berlin rumour-monger of the highest interest. Among the newly appointed ministers there is not one whose name does not resemble a trump card played against the Queen of Prussia, or a personal epigram which her malicious sister-in-law directs at her. The general impression which the appointment of the new Cabinet has made among those Berliners who think a little more, I should like to convey in the words of one of my Berlin friends. The official announcement appeared only in this evening’s edition of the *Staats-Anzeiger*, that is to say, towards 6 o’clock p.m.; nevertheless, the exact list of the appointees was circulating freely long before that time among the groups of people assembling “Unter den Linden.” When I met there my friend just mentioned, a commonplace Berlin beer-politician, I asked him what he thought of the new Cabinet and what was generally thought about it “in the town.” But before I communicate his answer, I must tell you what a commonplace Berlin beer-politician is. He is a man permeated by the idea that Berlin is the first city of the world; that nowhere except in Berlin can one find *Geist* (the concept is untranslatable, although the English ghost is etymologically the same word; the French esprit is something quite different); and that *Weißbier*—a beverage abominable to the taste of every travelled barbarian—is the very same drink mentioned in the Iliad under the name of nectar and in the Edda under the name of mead. Apart from these harmless prejudices, our average Berlin luminary is an incorrigible know-it-all with a loose tongue, a passionate babbler, very much inclined to dabble in a certain sort of low humour, known in Germany as *Berliner Witz*, which is rather a play on words than a play of thought, a curious mixture of a small dose of irony, a small dose of scepticism, and a large dose of vulgarity—in general, no very lofty specimen of the human race and really not a very amusing one, but nevertheless a rather characteristic type. Well, my Berlin friend answered my question in a truly Berlin mocking tone with the following verses from Schiller’s “Song of the Bell.” En passant, I might observe that our average Berliner usually praises only Goethe, but quotes only Schiller:

O soft desire, sweet hope,
The first love’s golden time!
The eye sees heaven open,
The heart revels in bliss—
O that it might remain forever green,
The beautiful time of young love.

Let us now return from the poetical Berlin beer-politician to the new Prussian Cabinet, and, remembering the old French proverb “à tout seigneur tout honneur” [“Honour to whom honour is due”], it is the Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, the Prime Minister and intimate friend of the Princess of Prussia, who first claims our attention. He, the father of the Queen of Portugal, firmly declined to become the father-in-law of the second French Empire. Nevertheless, he is closely related to Bonaparte. His mother was the sister of Murat, one of the kings improvised by Napoleon I, and his wife is the second daughter of the widowed Grand Duchess of Baden, Stéphanie, née Beauharnais. In this way the Prince is a connecting link of family relations between the Prussian, Coburg, and Bonaparte dynasties. The South German Liberals have much maligned him because in 1849 he abdicated the throne of his state of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen and sold it, according to the family compact, to the reigning line of the Hohenzollerns in Prussia. When he concluded the bargain, no German principality had even the value of its threefold annual income, and least of all could the Prince be expected to prolong the existence of the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen nation for the sake of the demagogues of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. Besides, Austria disliked the hoisting of the Prussian colours in South Germany quite as much as the little demagogues of Baden and Württemberg. After the abdication, the Prince entered Prussian service in the rank of general and pitched his tents in Düsseldorf, a city of paintings, sculptures, and barracks, where formerly a lateral line of the Prussian dynasty used to maintain a small court. In order to punish the Düsseldorfers for their participation in the revolution of 1848, which had its climax in a demonstration of the masses against the King during a drive of his through the town, Düsseldorf was deprived of the princely court of Prince Frederick and reduced to the category of ordinary towns, which must eke out their existence without the custom of a court. Thus the appearance of the Prince of Hohenzollern in Düsseldorf became a veritable event. Without doing anything remarkable, he shone by his mere presence, much like that great man of whom Goethe says that he already pays by what he is and not by what he does. From Düsseldorf his popularity spread like wildfire. That he is a member of the dynasty and at the same time a member of the Catholic Church did the rest. For the bigoted part of the population of Rhenish Prussia, indeed, no other quality is required. You may be sure that the powerful and excellently organised Catholic clergy of Rhenish Prussia, Westphalia, Silesia, and Posen will exert all their forces in support of the Ministry headed by a Catholic, and it is, in fact, only desirable if they will do so. Nothing did so much harm to the revolution of 1848 as the oppositional attitude of the Catholic clergy. It drew enormous advantage from the revolution, for example: the right of unrestricted communication with the Pope, the establishment of convents for nuns and monks, and, what is especially important, the acquisition of landed property. In return for these privileges, the holy fathers naturally turned furiously against the revolution when it had suffered a defeat. They acted as the most merciless tools of the reaction, and it is good that they now receive no occasion to pass over again into the camp of the opposition. I shall still find an opportunity to speak about the other ministers.