Postscript

[to ‘Enthüllungen über den Kommunisten-Prozeß zu Köln’]

From: ‘Enthüllungen über den Kommunistenprozeß zu Köln’, New Printing, Leipzig 1875.

The ‘Revelations concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne’, whose republication the *Volksstaat* considered timely, originally appeared in Boston, Massachusetts, and in Basel. The latter edition was largely confiscated at the German frontier. The pamphlet saw the light a few weeks after the close of the trial. At that time it was above all necessary to lose no time, and therefore a number of individual errors were unavoidable. Thus, for example, in the naming of the Cologne jurors. Thus, it is supposed that not M. Heß, but a certain Levy was the author of the Red Catechism. Thus W. Hirsch asserts in his ‘Justification’ that Cherval’s escape from the Paris prison was a put-up job between Greif, the French police and Cherval himself, in order to use the latter as a mouchard in London during the court proceedings. This is probable because a forgery of bills committed in Prussia and the consequent danger of extradition must have brought Crämer (this being Cherval’s real name) to heel. My account of the affair is based on Cherval’s ‘own confessions’ to one of my friends. Hirsch’s statement casts an even more glaring light on Stieber’s perjury, the intrigues of the Prussian legation in London and in Paris, the shameless interventions of Hinckeldey.

When the *Volksstaat* began to reprint the pamphlet in its columns, I hesitated for a moment whether it might not be appropriate to omit Section VI (the Willich-Schapper faction). On closer consideration, however, any mutilation of the text appeared as a falsification of a historical document.

The violent suppression of a revolution leaves in the minds of its participants, especially those hurled from the home scene into exile, a shock that makes even capable personalities, for a shorter or longer time, irresponsible, so to speak. They cannot find their way into the course of history, they will not see that the form of the movement has changed. Hence playing at conspiracy and revolution, equally compromising for themselves and for the cause they serve; hence also the mistakes of Schapper and Willich. Willich showed in the North American Civil War that he is more than a fantast, and Schapper, lifelong pioneer of the labour movement, recognised and admitted, soon after the end of the Cologne trial, his momentary aberration. Many years later, on his deathbed, a day before his death, he still spoke to me with biting irony of that time of ‘refugee buffooneries’. – On the other hand, the circumstances in which the ‘Revelations’ were written explain the bitterness of the attack on the involuntary helpers of the common enemy. In moments of crisis, brainlessness becomes a crime against the party, which demands public atonement.

“The whole existence of the political police depends on the outcome of this trial!”
In these words, which Hinckeldey wrote to the legation in London during the Cologne court proceedings (see my pamphlet ‘Herr Vogt’, p. 271), he betrayed the secret of the Communist trial. “The whole existence of the political police” – that is not only the existence and activity of the personnel directly entrusted with this specialty. It is the subordination of the entire machinery of government, including the courts (see the Prussian disciplinary law for judicial officials of 7 May 1851) and the press (see the Reptile Fund), to that institution, just as the entire state system in Venice was subject to the State Inquisition. The political police, crippled in Prussia during the revolutionary storm, required a transformation for which the Second French Empire was and remained the model.

After the downfall of the Revolution of 1848, the German labour movement existed only in the form of theoretical propaganda, moreover confined to narrow circles, and the Prussian government was never for a moment deceived as to its practical harmlessness. For it, the communist witch-hunt served only as a prelude to the reactionary crusade against the liberal bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie itself steeled the chief weapon of this reaction, the political police, by condemning the workers’ representatives and acquitting Hinckeldey-Stieber. Thus Stieber earned his spurs before the Assizes in Cologne. At that time, Stieber was the name of a subordinate police individual, on a wild hunt for increases in salary and office; now Stieber means the unrestricted rule of the political police in the new Holy Prussian-German Empire. He has thus transformed himself, so to speak, into a moral person – moral in the figurative sense, as for instance the Reichstag is a moral person. And this time the political police does not strike at the worker in order to hit the bourgeois. On the contrary. Precisely in his capacity as dictator of the German liberal bourgeoisie, Bismarck imagines himself strong enough to be able to Stieber the workers’ party out of the world. The growth of Stieber’s stature can therefore measure for the German proletariat the progress of the movement that it itself has made since the Cologne Communist trial.

The infallibility of the Pope is a childish trifle compared with the infallibility of the political police. After having for whole decades in Prussia thrown youthful hotheads into the lock-up on account of their enthusiasm for German unity, German Empire, German emperorship, it is now even locking up old bald-heads who refuse to be enthusiastic for those gifts of God. Today it is striving just as vainly to root out the *enemies of the Reich* as it formerly strove to root out the *friends of the Reich*. What a striking proof that it is not called upon to make history, even if only the history of the quarrel over the Emperor’s beard!

The Cologne Communist trial itself stigmatises the impotence of state power in its struggle against social development. The Royal Prussian public prosecutor finally grounded the guilt of the accused on the fact that they had secretly disseminated the state-endangering principles of the *‘Communist Manifesto’*. And are not those very same principles being proclaimed twenty years later in Germany in the open street? Do they not even resound from the rostrum of the Reichstag? Have they not, in the shape of the *Programme of the International Working Men’s Association*, travelled around the world, in defiance of all government hue and cry? Society does not, after all, find its equilibrium until it revolves around the sun of labour.

The ‘Revelations’ say in conclusion: “Jena! … that is the last word for a government which needs such means to survive, and for a society which needs such a government for protection. That is the last word of the Communist trial – *Jena!*” A successful prophecy this, sniggers the first Treitschke who comes along, with proud reference to Prussia’s latest feat of arms and the Mauser rifle. For me it is enough to recall that there is not only an *inner Düppel*, but also an inner Jena.

London, 8 January 1875

Karl Marx