111 

I 

On February 4, Mr. von Kardorff questioned the Imperial 
government about the high taxes imposed on German “Sprit” * in 
England and Italy. He drew the attention of the honourable 
gentlemen to the fact that (as reported by the Kélnische Zeitung”) 

“in our eastern and northern provinces vast stretches of somewhat infertile, 
sterile land, covering hundreds of square miles, have, as a result of potato 
cultivation on a very large scale, successfully developed into arable land with a 
relatively high crop yield, and that the reason for growing potatoes here lies in 
turn in the fact that scattered throughout these regions are numerous distilleries 
where Sprit is manufactured as an agricultural side-line. Whereas in earlier times 
there used to be roughly 1,000 people to the square mile living in these parts, the 
land is now able to support roughly 3,000 people per square mile as a result of 
Sprit manufacture, because the distilleries provide an essential market for the 
potatoes which, on account of their bulk, are difficult to transport and cannot be 
transported at all in winter due to the frost. Secondly, the distilleries convert the 
potatoes into valuable and easily transportable alcohol, and, ultimately, make the 
Jand more fertile thanks to the numerous residues which can be used for fodder. 
Just how important the interests in question are, will be clear to anyone who 
considers that the taxation on spirits provides us with some 36 million marks of 
state revenue, despite the fact that Germany levies the lowest tax on spirits in the 
world, one fifth of that imposed in Russia, for example”. 

The Prussian Junkers must really have been getting above 
themselves recently, daring, as they have, to draw the attention of 
the world to their “Sprit industry”, commonly known as schnapps 
distilling. 

In the last century only small quantities of schnapps were 
distilled in Germany, and from grain only. Although they did not 

a Spirit.— Ed. 
b Kélnische Zeitung, No. 36, February 5, 1876 (in the section Verhandlungen des 
Deutschen Reichstages).— Ed. 

know how to remove the fusel oil which the schnapps also 
contained (we shall be returning to this point later), as they were 
still completely ignorant of the fusel oil’s existence; they did know 
from experience that the quality of the schnapps improved 
considerably after it was stored for some time, that it lost its 
burning taste, and that when consumed it was less intoxicating and 
less damaging to one’s health. The petty-bourgeois conditions 
under which it was distilled at that time and the still undeveloped 
demand, which was more concerned with quality than quantity, 
made it possible almost everywhere to store the product in cellars 
for years, thus giving it a less harmful character as the more 
damaging constituent parts were converted in a gradual chemical 
process. At the end of the last century we thus find distilling being 
carried out on a fairly wide scale mainly restricted to a few 
towns— Münster, Ulrichstein, Nordhausen and others—and their 
products usually bearing the epithet “old”. 

About the beginning of this century the distilleries increased in 
number in the countryside as side-lines of the larger landed 
proprietors and tenants, especially in Hanover and Brunswick. 
They found a market, on the one hand, due to the steady increase 
in the consumption of schnapps, and, on the other hand, due to 
the needs of the ever-growing and ever-warring armies which, 
for their part, again carried the taste for schnapps constantly 
further afield. Thus after the peace of 1814° the distilling 
industry was able to extend further and further and, in the form 
already described, quite different from that of the old town 
distilleries, to gain a firm foothold as a side-line run by the 
managers of large estates on the Lower Rhine, Prussian Saxony, 
Brandenburg and Lusatia. 

However, the turning-point for the distilling industry was the 
discovery that one could produce schnapps profitably not only 
from grain but also from potatoes. That revolutionised the whole 
industry. On the one hand, the main activity of the distilling 
industry shifted once and for all from the town to the countryside, 
and the petty-bourgeois producers of the good old drink were 
ousted more and more by the infamous producers of potato 
rot-gut, the big landowners. On the other hand, and this is 
historically of much greater significance, the big grain-distilling 
landowner was displaced by the big potato-distilling landowner; the 
distilling industry moved increasingly from the fertile grain-grow- 
ing land to the infertile potato-growing land, in other words from 
North-West Germany to North-East Germany—to Old Prussia east 
of the Elbe. 

Prussian Schnapps in the German Reichstag 113 

This turning-point came at the time of the harvest failure and 
famine of 1816. Despite the improved harvests of the two 
succeeding years, grain prices remained so high as a consequence 
of the continuing export of grain to England and other countries 
that it became almost impossible to use grain for distilling 
purposes. A hogshead of schnapps, which had only cost 39 talers 
in 1813, was sold in 1817 for 70 talers. At this point potatoes 
replaced grain and in 1823 a hogshead of schnapps was to be had 
for as little as 14 to 17 talers! 

How was it, then, that the poor Junkers from the east of the 
Elbe, allegedly totally ruined by the war and the sacrifices they 
had made for their fatherland, obtained the means with which to 
convert their pressing mortgage debts into lucrative schnapps 
distilleries? It is true that the favourable trading conditions of the 
years 1816 to 1819 brought them very good returns and increased 
their credit as a result of the generally rising price of land, but this 
was far from sufficient. On top of that our patriotic Junkers 
received, in the first instance, state aid in various direct and 
indirect forms, and, secondly, there was a further factor at work, 
to which we must devote our particular attention. It will be 
remembered that in Prussia in 1811 the commutation of statute 
labour, and the dispute between the peasants and the landlords in 
general, were settled in law in such a way that payment in kind 
could be transformed into money payment.* This could be turned 
into capital and commuted either in cash in specific instalments, or 
by the peasant ceding a piece of land to the lord, or in a 
combination of cash and of land. This law remained a dead letter 
until the high grain prices of 1816 to 1819 put the peasants in a 
position to proceed with commutation. From 1819 onwards 
commutation went ahead rapidly in Brandenburg, more slowly in 
Pomerania, and slower still in Posen and Prussia. The money thus 
lawfully but unjustly misappropriated from the peasants (for they 
had had statute labour unjustly forced upon them), in so far as it 
was not immediately squandered according to traditional aristocra- 
tic custom, was employed mainly to finance the setting-up of 
distilleries. The distilling industry also expanded to the same 
extent in the three other provinces mentioned, as the peasants 
provided the financial means for it through the commutation of 
their statute labour. The schnapps industry of the Prussian 

a Edikt die Regulirung der gutsherrlichen und bduerlichen Verhdltnisse betreffend, vom 
14. September, 1811. In: Gesezt-Sammlung für die Kéniglichen Preußischen Staaten, 
No. 21, Berlin, 1811.— Ed. 

Junkers was thus founded literally on the money taken from the 
peasants. And business boomed, particularly after 1825. Just two 
years later, in 1827, 125 million quarts of schnapps were distilled 
in Prussia, that is 10'/, quarts per head of the population, at an 
overall value of 15 million talers; in contrast to this, Hanover, 
fifteen years earlier Germany’s first schnapps state, produced a 
mere 18 million quarts. 

It will be evident that from now on the whole of Germany was 
caught in a veritable tidal wave of Prussian potato rot-gut, at least 
wherever the single states or customs unions of single states did 
not manage to stem the flow by raising customs barriers against it. 
Fourteen talers an awm consisting of 180 quarts, that is a quart for 
2 groschen and 4 pfennigs on the wholesale market! Drunkenness, 
which previously had cost three and four times as much, was 
something available, day in day out, even to the very poorest now 
that a man could stay deeply under the influence for a whole week 
at a cost of 15 silver groschen. 

The effects of these quite unprecedentedly low schnapps prices, 
which were felt at different places at different times but almost 
always completely without warning, were quite incredible. I can 
still well remember how, at the end of the twenties, the low cost of 
schnapps suddenly overtook the industrial area of the Lower 
Rhine and the Mark. In the Berg country particularly, and most 
notably in Elberfeld-Barmen, the mass of the working population 
fell victim to drink. From nine in the evening, in great crowds and 
arm in arm, taking up the whole width of the street, the “soused 
men” tottered their way, bawling discordantly, from one inn to the 
other and finally back home. Given the level of education of the 
workers at that time and the utter hopelessness of their situation, 
it was not surprising. Especially in blessed Wuppertal, where for 
sixty years one industry has given way to another, and where as a 
result one section of the workers was constantly oppressed if not 
unemployed, whilst another section (at that time the dye-workers) 
was well paid by the prevailing standards. And if, as was the case 
at that time, the workers of Wuppertal had only a choice between 
the earthly schnapps of the public houses and the divine schnapps 
of the pietistic priests—is it any wonder that they preferred the 
former, as bad as it was? 

And it was very bad. It was sent out and drunk new, just as it 
emerged from the cooling apparatus, without further purification 
and containing all its fusel oils. All schnapps that is distilled from 
the husks of pressed grapes, from beet, grain or potatoes contains 
this fusel oil, which is a mixture of higher alcohols, i.e., of liquids 

Prussian Schnapps in the German Reichstag 115 

of a similar composition to that of ordinary alcohol but containing 
more carbon and hydrogen (including primary propyl alcohol, 
isobutyl alcohol, but overwhelmingly amyl alcohol). All these types 
of alcohol are more noxious than the normal spirits of wine (ethyl 
alcohol), and the dose required to produce a toxic effect is much 
lower than with the latter. Professor Binz at Bonn proved 
recently,’ after conducting numerous experiments, that the intox- 
icating effects of our alcoholic beverages, as well as the unpleasant 
after-effects they produce in the form of a laudable hangover or 
the more serious symptoms of illness and poisoning, are attribut- 
able much less to the usual spirits of wine, or ethyl alcohol, than to 
the higher alcohols, in other words fusel oil. Nor do they simply 
have a more intoxicating and more destructive effect, they also 
determine the nature of the intoxication. Everyone knows from his 
own observations, if not from experience, what the different 
effects on the brain are from getting drunk on wine (even 
different sorts of wine), on beer and on schnapps. The more fusel 
oil in the drink and the more unwholesome the composition of 
that fuse] oil, the more excessive and wild the intoxication. But it 
is well known that of all distilled spirits new, unpurified potato 
schnapps contains the greatest quantity of fusel oil with the least 
favourable composition. The effect of such unusually large 
quantities of that drink on such an excitable and_ volatile 
population as that to be found in the Berg country was therefore 
just what one might have expected. The drunkenness proved to 
be of a totally different nature. That merry-making which 
previously ended in good-natured tipsiness and only seldom in 
excess, where of course it was then not uncommon for the knife to 
be involved, that kind of merry-making now degenerated into a 
riot and inevitably ended in a brawl, there never being any lack of 
knife wounds, and the fatal stabbings constantly increasing in their 
frequency. The priests put it down to increasing godlessness, the 
lawyers and other philistines to the dances held in public houses. 
The real cause was Prussian fusel oil flooding onto the scene, 
simply having its normal physiological effect and dispatching 
hundreds of poor souls off to prison, to work on fortress 
construction. 

The acute effect of cheap schnapps continued to be felt for 
years, until it gradually more or less petered out. But its influence 

a See Carl Binz’s speech on the intoxicating effect of alcoholic beverages, Berliner 
klinische Wochenschrift, No. 4, January 24, 1876 (in the section Niederrheinische 
Gesellschaft in Bonn. Sitzung vom 3. Juni 1875).— Ed. 

10* 

on people’s morals lingered on; for the working class schnapps 
was more of a need in life than it had been before, and its quality, 
even if it did improve a little, stayed well below that of the old 
grain spirit. 

And what happened in the Berg country also happened 
elsewhere. At no time were the lamentations of the philistines 
about an increase in excessive schnapps consumption among the 
workers more widespread, more unanimous and more clamorous 
than during the period from 1825 to 1835. It is even open to 
question whether or not that state of dullness in which the North 
German workers passively witnessed the events of 1830, without 
being affected by them, was not due largely to schnapps, which at 
that time had them more than ever in its grip. Serious and 
especially successful uprisings occurred only in wine-producing 
regions, or in those German states which had more or less 
protected themselves against Prussian schnapps by means of 
tariffs.'°’ That was not the first time that schnapps had saved the 
Prussian state. 

The only industry to have had more devastating direct 
effects—and even then not on its own people, but on foreigners— 
was the Anglo-Indian opium industry used to poison China. 

In the meantime schnapps production continued on its merry 
way, expanding further and further eastwards, and forcing acre 
upon acre of the North-East German desert of sand and marshes 
to surrender to the potato. Not content with bestowing its favours 
on its own country, it strove to make the blessings of old-Prussian 
fusel oil available to foreign lands. Ordinary schnapps was distilled 
once more, so that part of the water contained in it could be 
removed, and the aqueous and impure spirit of wine thus 
obtained was called Sprit, which is the Prussian translation of the 
word Spiritus. The higher alcohols all have higher boiling points 
than ethyl alcohol. Whilst the latter boils at 78'/:° on the 
centigrade thermometer, the boiling point of primary propyl 
alcohol is 97°, that of isobutyl alcohol 109° and that of amyl 
alcohol 132°. Now one would think that with careful distillation at 
least the major part of the latter, the main constituent of fusel oil, 
would be left behind along with a part of the isobutyl alcohol, and 
that at the very most a part of the latter would be distilled along 
with most of the primary propyl alcohol, which, however, is 
present in fusel oil in only very small quantities. But even the 
scientific chemists forgo using distillation to separate the three 
lower alcohols concerned here, and can only extract amy] alcohol 
from fusel oil by a process of fractionated distillation, which 

Prussian Schnapps in the German Reichstag 117 

cannot be applied in a distillery. As it is, distilling in a schnapps 
factory in the country is a pretty unsophisticated business. No 
wonder then that the Sprit produced at the beginning of the 
forties still contained considerable amounts of fusel oil, as anyone 
could easily tell by smelling it; pure or only aqueous spirit of wine 
is almost odourless. 

This Sprit went mainly to Hamburg. What happened to it? Part 
went to countries which did not bar its entry by means of 
tariffs—Stettin was also involved in this export trade; but the 
major portion was used in Hamburg and Bremen for the 
adulteration of rum. Distilled in the West Indies partly from sugar 
cane itself, but mainly from the waste products of the cane during 
the sugar-making process, this was the only spirit still able to 
compete, because of its low production costs, with potato schnapps 
as a sort of luxury drink for the masses. Now to produce a “fine” 
but also cheap rum, they would take, for example, a barrel of 
really fine Jamaica rum, three to four barrels of cheap, bad 
Barbary rum and two to three barrels of Prussian potato 
Sprit—and this or a similar mixture produced the required result. 
This “poison”, as merchants themselves involved in the adultera- 
tion have called it in my presence, was shipped to Denmark, 
Sweden, Norway and Russia. To a very significant extent, 
however, it also made its way up the Elbe or via Stettin to the 
regions from which the noble Sprit had originally come, and was 
partly drunk there as rum, and partly smuggled into Austria and 
Poland. 

The Hamburg merchants did not stop at producing adulterated 
rum. It was their own peculiar kind of ingenuity which made them 
the first to see the world-shaking role that Prussian schnapps was 
destined to play in the future. They had already tried their hands 
at all sorts of other drinks, and even at the end of the thirties 
nobody in the North German territories outside Prussia who knew 
anything about wine would take French white wines from 
Hamburg, because it was generally claimed that they were 
sweetened there with lead acetate and thus contaminated. 
Nevertheless, potato Sprit soon became the basis for an ever- 
growing liquor adulteration business. Rum was followed by 
cognac, which required somewhat more skill in its treatment. Soon 
they began treating wine with Sprii, and finally they got round, 
without using any wine at all, to producing port and Spanish wines 
from Sprit, water and vegetable juices, which were often displaced 
by chemicals. Business flourished all the more when such practices 
were either directly forbidden in many countries, or came so close 

to breaking the law that it was not considered advisable to try 
one’s hand at them. But Hamburg was the centre of unrestricted 
free trade, and so “for Hamburg’s health and happiness” they 
went on adulterating to their heart’s content. 

However, the adulteration business did not remain a monopoly 
for long. After the revolution of 1848, when in France the 
exclusive domination of big finance capital and a few prominent 
industrial magnates was temporarily replaced by the rule of the 
whole bourgeoisie, the French producers and traders began to 
realise what magic powers lay dormant in such a barrel of Prussian 
potato Sprit. They began to adulterate their cognac whilst it was 
still at home instead of sending it abroad in its pure state, and 
even more to ennoble the cognac (which is what, for the sake of 
brevity, I call all schnapps distilled from the husks of pressed 
grapes) intended for home consumption by adding considerable 
quantities of Prussian potato Sprit. This made cognac—the only 
spirit to be consumed on a large scale in France—significantly 
cheaper. The Second Empire supported this manoeuvre, of 
course, in the interests of the suffering masses, and thus we find 
on the fall of the Napoleonic dynasty that, thanks to the merciful 
effects of old Prussian schnapps, drunkenness, almost unknown 
there previously, had grown to significant proportions in France. 

An unprecedented series of bad vintages and finally the 
commercial treaty of 1860, which opened up England to the 
French wine trade, gave rise to a new advance. The weak wines 
from bad years, whose acidity was not to be removed with sugar, 
needed to have alcohol added to them so that they would keep. 
They were therefore mixed with Prussian Sprit. Furthermore, the 
English palate was accustomed to strong wines—the natural 
French country wines, which were now sent for export in great 
quantities, were too weak and too cold for the English. What 
better to give them robustness and warmth than Prussian Sprit? 
Bordeaux increasingly became the centre for the adulteration of 
French, Spanish and Italian wines, which were transformed there 
into “fine Bordeaux”, and—for the use of Prussian Sprit. 

Indeed, Spanish and Italian wines. Since the consumption of 
French red wines—and no bourgeois will drink any other—has 
increased so enormously in England, North and South America, 
and the colonies, even the almost inexhaustible abundance of 
wines in France no longer suffices. Almost all the useful vintage — 
from Northern Spain, including the whole of the vintage from 
Rioja in the Ebro valley, which is rich in wines, goes to Bordeaux. 
And Genoa, Leghorn and Naples send whole shiploads of wine to 

Prussian Schnapps in the German Reichstag 119 

the same place. Whilst Prussian Sprit makes these wines capable of 
withstanding transport by sea, the export trade forces up the price 
of wine in Spain and Italy to such an extent that it is way beyond 
the means of the working population, who used to drink it every 
day. In its place they drink schnapps, and the main ingredient of 
that schnapps is once again—Prussian potato Sprit. Indeed, Mr. 
von Kardorff complains in the Reichstag that in Italy this is not 
yet happening on a large enough scale. 

Wherever we turn we find Prussian Sprit. Prussian Sprit extends 
incomparably further than the arm of the imperial German 
government. And wherever we find this Sprit it serves one main 
purpose—that of adulteration. It is used to make Southern 
European wines suitable for shipment and thus to deprive the 
indigenous working population of them. And just as Achilles’ 
lance heals the wounds which it has made,’ so Prussian Sprit at 
the same time offers the working classes who have been robbed of 
their wine a substitute in the form of adulterated schnapps! Potato 
Sprit is to Prussia what iron and cottons are to England, the article 
which represents her on the world market. The latest adept and, 
at the same time, regenerator of socialism, Mr. Eugen Duhring, 
may well therefore extol the virtues of distilling as “primarily a ... 
natural link (of industry) with agriculture”, and proclaim trium- 
phantly: 

“The production of spirits is of such significance that it will tend to be 
underrated rather than overrated!” 4 

To be sure, the Prussian for “Anch’io son pittore” (I too am a 
painter, as Correggio said '™*) is “I too am a schnapps distiller”. 

However, we have by no means exhausted the wondrous 
exploits of Prussian potato schnapps. 

’ 

‘Whereas in earlier times,” says Mr. von Kardorff, “there used to be roughly 
1,000 people to the square mile living in these parts, the land is now able to 

And on the whole that is correct. I do not know what period 
Mr. von Kardorff refers to when he quotes the population as 
being a thousand per square mile. There must certainly have been 
such a period. If, however, we exclude the provinces of Saxony 
and Silesia, where distilling has a less conspicuous part to play 

aE, Dihring, Cursus der National- und Socialékonomie, Berlin, 1873, pp. 263- 
64.— Ed. 
b See this volume, p. 111.— Ed. 

alongside other industries, and also Posen, the greater part of 
which frustrates all government efforts by continuing to display no 
especial desire to be anything other than Polish, then we are left 
with the three provinces of Brandenburg, Pomerania and Prussia. 
Together these three provinces cover a surface area of 2,415 
square miles. In 1817 they had a total population of 3,479,825, or 
1,441 per square mile; in 1871 it was 7,432,407, or 3,078 per 
square mile. We quite agree with Mr. von Kardorff in regarding 
the growth in population mainly as a consequence, direct or 
indirect, of schnapps distilling. If we add the Altmark, northern 
agricultural Lower Silesia, and the predominantly German part of 
Posen, where the population will have developed in a similar way, 
then we have the actual schnapps-producing area, and at one and 
the same time the heart of the Prussian monarchy. And this opens up 
an entirely new perspective. Distilling now reveals itself as being 
the real material basis of present-day Prussia. Without it the 
Prussian Junkers would have perished; their estates would have 
been bought up in part by large land magnates who would have 
formed a less numerous aristocracy along English lines '”*; in part 
they would have been broken up and would have formed the basis 
for an independent peasantry. Without it the heart of Prussia 
would have remained a land with a population of about 2,000 
inhabitants to the square mile, incapable of playing any part in 
history, either good or bad, until bourgeois industry developed 
sufficiently to rule the roost socially and perhaps politically here as 
well. Distilling has given a different turn to developments. On 
ground which produces practically nothing except potatoes and 
clod-hopping Junkers, and the latter en masse, it was able to defy 
the competition of the world. Favoured more and more by 
demand—for reasons already explained—it was able to elevate 
itself to the position of the world’s central schnapps-producing 
factory. Under the prevailing social relations, this meant nothing 
other than the development, on the one hand, of a class of 
medium-size landowners whose younger sons provided the main 
material for the army officers and for the bureaucracy, i.e., a new 
lease of life for the Junkers, and, on the other hand, the 
development of a relatively rapidly growing class of semi- 
bondsmen, from which the mass of the “core regiments” of the 
army are recruited. If anyone is interested in the situation of 
this mass of workers, who are free in name, but for the most 
part kept almost completely in bondage to the squire by means of 
annual contracts, through payments in kind, through housing 
conditions, and finally by the manorial police, which with the 

Prussian Schnapps in the German Reichstag 121 

advent of the new district regulations only assumed a different 
form, he can consult the writings of Professor von der Goltz.’*” In 
short, then, the question is: What was it that enabled Prussia more 
or less to digest the morsels west of the Elbe that it swallowed in 
1815,'* to stifle the revolution in Berlin in 1848, to assume the 
leadership of German reaction in 1849 despite the uprisings in 
Rhenish Westphalia,’ to wage war with Austria in 1866, and in 
1871 to get the whole of Littlke Germany’ to accept the 
leadership of this most backward, most stable, least educated, still 
semi-feudal part of Germany? It was the distilling of schnapps. 

122 

il 

Meanwhile let us return to the Reichstag.* The protagonists in 
the debate are Mr. von Kardorff, Mr. von Delbriick and the 
Hamburg representative in the Federal Council’*’ Kriiger.” 
Listening to this debate, it seems almost as if we are doing a shameful 
wrong to Prussian potato spirits. It is not Prussian but rather Russian 
Sprit which is causing all the trouble. Mr. von Kardorff complains 
that Hamburg industrialists are converting Russian schnapps 
(which, as Mr. Kriiger expressly emphasises, is distilled from grain, 
not potatoes) into Sprit, “sending it out as German Sprit, and thus 
damaging the reputation of German Sprit”. Mr. Delbriick “has 
been told that passing it off as Sprit in this way would involve 
great difficulties, since as yet no one has succeeded in producing 
odourless Sprit from Russian schnapps as has been done with 
German schnapps’. However, he added cautiously: “Of course, 
gentlemen, I am in no position to judge.” 

So, it is not Prussian potato spirit but Russian grain spirit which 
is causing all the trouble. Prussian potato Sprit is “odourless’, i.e. 
free from fusel oil; no one has as yet managed to produce an 
odourless Russian Sprit from grain, and it therefore contains fusel 
oil, and if it is sold as Prussian Sprit, then it detracts from the 
reputation that the latter has as being free from fusel oil. If we 
accept this, however, then we have, in a roguish and most disloyal 

a See this volume, p. 111.— Ed 

b See the speeches made by W. von Kardorff, M. F. R. von Delbriick and 
D. Ch. F. Kriiger in the German Reichstag on February 4, 1876, Kélnische Zeitung, 
No. 36, February 5, 1876 (in the section Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstages).— 
Ed. 

Prussian Schnapps in the German Reichstag 123 

manner, slandered Prussian Sprit, free from fusel oil as it is. Let us 
examine the position as it really is. 

Indeed a process exists for removing fusel oil from schnapps by 
treating it with red-hot charcoal. As a consequence of this the 
Sprit which has come onto the market recently has generally 
contained less fusel oil. However, there is the following difference 
between the two kinds of Sprit that we are concerned with here: 
grain spirit can be freed of fusel oil completely without any great 
effort, whilst, on the other hand, removing fusel oil from potato 
Sprit is a much more difficult process, and is actually impossible in 
large-scale production, so that even the purest spirit distilled from 
potato schnapps always leaves behind a smell of fusel oil when 
rubbed onto the hand. Therefore it is a rule that only spirit 
distilled from grain is used by dispensing chemists and in the 
making of fine liqueurs, and never Sprit distilled from potatoes, or 
at least this should be the case (for adulteration takes place here 
too!). 

And a few days after the Kolnische Zeitung reported on the 
above schnapps debate it carried (February 8, first page) in its 
miscellaneous reports the following plaintive cry from a tippler on 
the Rhine: 

“It would be particularly desirable now to prove that potato Sprit is being added to 
weak wine as well. A disconcerting dazed feeling in the head afterwards does indeed 
point to it, too late however. Potato Sprit still has fusel oil in it, the otherwise 
unpleasant smell of which is concealed by the wine’s own particular taste. This kind 
of adulteration is among the most common.” 2 

Finally, in order to pacify the old-Prussian schnapps distillers, 
Mr. Kriiger lets the doubtful fact be known that Russian spirit 
distilled from grain is fetching four marks more on the Hamburg 
market than Prussian potato Sprit, On February 7 the latter was 
quoted in Hamburg at 35 marks for 100 litres, and that means 
that Russian spirit fetches a price which is 12% better than that 
paid for Prussian Sprit, the reputation of which it is allegedly 
damaging! 

And now, after hearing all these facts, look at the expression of 
injured innocence of this maligned, “odourless”, reputation- 
conscious and virtuous Prussian product, allegedly so completely 
free of fusel oil, and which costs only 35 pfennigs a litre, cheaper 
than beer! If one examines that debate in the light of these facts, 

a Kélnische Zeitung, No. 39, February 8, 1876 (in the section Vermischte 
Nachrichten).— Ed. 

is One not tempted to ask: Just exactly who is making a fool of 
whom? 

The benign influence of Prussian fusel oil is world-embracing, 
for it finds its way, with potato Sprit, into every kind of drink. 
From the sour, weak and badly seasoned Mosel wine and Rhine 
wine, which is magically transformed with the aid of potato sugar 
and potato Sprit into Brauneberger and Niersteiner, from the bad 
red wine which has been flooding England since Gladstone’s 
commercial treaty,** and which is called “Gladstone” there, to the 
Chateau Lafitte and champagne, port and Madeira, which the 
bourgeois drink in India, China, Australia and America, there is 
not a drink in whose composition Prussian fusel oil does not play a 
part. The production of these drinks is flourishing wherever wine 
is grown and wherever wine is stored in great quantities, and the 
producers hail potato Sprit with dithyrambic shouts of joy. But 
what about the consumers? Well, the consumers become aware of 
it when they suffer that “disconcerting dazed feeling in the head”, 
which is how fusel oil confers its blessings on one, and they try to 
avoid suffering its blessings. In Italy, as Mr. von Kardorff says, the 
commercial treaty '** is applied in such a way as to make Prussian 
Sprit pay far too high a tariff. Belgium, America and England 
make it impossible to export Sprit to them by levying high tariffs. 
In France the customs officials stick red labels on barrels of Sprit, 
so as to distinguish them as Prussian—which is really quite the 
first time that the French customs officials have done anything 
beneficial to the community! In short, things have gone so far that 
Mr. von Kardorff cries out in desperation: 

“Gentlemen, if you visualise the position of the German Sprit industry you will 
find that all countries ave closing their borders to our Sprit in the greatest of fear!” 

Naturally enough. The gracious effects of this Sprit have 
gradually become known the world over, and the only way to 
avoid that “disconcerting dazed feeling in the head” is not to allow 
the confounded rot-gut into the country in the first place. 

And now, on top of this, a storm cloud is rising from the East, 
heavy and moist, above the heads of the hard-pressed schnapps 
Junkers. Their big brother in Russia, the last refuge of all 
time-honoured institutions for combatting modern destructive 
mania, has also begun to distill schnapps and to export it, and it is 
grain schnapps, and, what is more, he is supplying it just as 
cheaply as the Prussian Junkers their potato schnapps. The 
production and export of this Russian schnapps is increasing year 
by year, and, though it may so far have been purified into Sprit in 
Hamburg, Mr. Delbrtick now tells us that 

Prussian Schnapps in the German Reichstag 125 

“in the Russian ports ... already in the process of being constructed are a 
number of plants, equipped with first-rate apparatus for the purification of Russian 
schnapps”? 

and he tells the Junker gentlemen to expect Russian competition 
to outstrip them with every passing year. Mr. von Kardorff is only 
too well aware of this and he demands that the government forbid 
the transporting of Russian spirits across Germany forthwith. 

As a free conservative member of parliament, Mr. von Kardorff 
really ought to be in a better position to appreciate the attitude of 
the German imperial government with respect to Russia. After the 
annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, and the scandalous war reparations 
of five thousand million,’ as a result of which France was bound 
to become an ally of each and every enemy of Germany, and given 
the policy of seeking to be respected, or rather feared, but never 
looked on with affection by others, there remained only one 
choice: either quickly to defeat Russia as well, or to secure the 
alliance with Russia (in as much as Russia can be depended upon) 
by becoming the obedient servant of Russian diplomacy. As they 
were unable to decide in favour of the first alternative, they were 
obliged to choose the second. Prussia, and with it the empire, is 
once more as dependent on Russia as it was after 1815 and 1850; 
and just as in 1815 the “Holy Alliance” serves as the cloak for 
this dependence. The result of all those glorious victories is that 
Germany continues, as before, to be the fifth wheel on the coach 
of Europe. And then Bismarck is surprised that the German 
public should continue to be concerned about affairs abroad 
where the really crucial decisions are being taken, instead of being 
concerned about the doings of the imperial government, which is 
of no consequence in Europe, and about the speeches in the 
Reichstag, which is of no consequence in Germany! Forbid the 
transporting of Russian Sprit across Germany! I should like to see 
the Imperial Chancellor who would dare such a thing without at 
the same time having a declaration of war against Russia safely in 
his pocket! And with Mr. von Kardorff making such a curious 
demand of the imperial government one might almost be led to 
believe that not only drinking schnapps but even the very act of 
distilling it was sufficient to cloud the mind. For indeed more 
famous distillers of schnapps than Mr. von Kardorff have lately 
made up their minds to do things for which, from their own point 
of view, there has been absolutely no rational explanation. 

a See this volume, p. 122.— Ed. 

For the rest, nothing is easier to understand than the fact that 
the Russian competition should be filling our schnapps Junkers 
with an uncanny feeling of dread. In the interior of Russia there 
are great tracts of land where grain is to be had just as cheaply as 
potatoes are in Prussia. In addition to that, fuel is mostly cheaper 
in Russia than in our distilling districts. All the necessary material 
conditions are on hand. Small wonder then that a section of the 
Russian nobility should do just as the Prussian Junkers do and 
invest in distilleries the money advanced by the state as credit to 
the peasants for commutation of statute labour. Nor is it any 
wonder that these distilleries should spread rapidly, given the 
constantly growing market and the preference that there will be 
for schnapps distilled from grain costing the same or slightly more 
than schnapps distilled from potatoes, and that even now the time 
can be envisaged when their product pushes Prussian potato Sprit 
off the market completely. Complaining and moaning will be to no 
avail. The laws of capitalist production, as long as it continues to 
exist, are just as unrelenting for Junkers as for Jews. Thanks to 
the Russian competition, the day is fast approaching when Holy 
Ilion will collapse, when the glorious Prussian schnapps industry 
will vanish from the world market and continue at most to 
befuddle the home market. But on the day that the distiller’s 
helmet is wrested from the Prussian Junkers and they are left only 
with their coats of arms or at most their army helmets, on that day 
Prussia is finished. Irrespective of the course that world history 
might otherwise take, and disregarding the possibility, probability 
or even inevitability of fresh wars or upheavals—the competition 
from Russian schnapps alone is bound to ruin Prussia by 
destroying the industry which keeps the agriculture of the eastern 
provinces at its present level of development. In so doing, it also 
destroys the conditions essential for the life of the Junkers east of 
the Elbe and of their 3,000 bondsmen to the square mile; and in 
doing that, it destroys the basis of the Prussian state: the material 
that goes to make up the officers as well as the non-commissioned 
officers and the soldiers who obey their orders whatever happens, 
and in addition to that the material that goes to make up the core 
of the bureaucracy, the material that stamps its specific character 
on present-day Prussia. With the collapse of schnapps distilling, 
Prussian militarism collapses, and without it Prussia is nothing. 
Then those eastern provinces will sink back into that station in 
Germany that befits them in accordance with their low population 
density, their industry, which is enslaved to agriculture, their 
semi-feudal conditions, and their lack of bourgeois development 

Prussian Schnapps in the German Reichstag 127 

and general culture. Then, relieved of the pressure of this 
semi-medieval rule, the remaining regions of the German Empire 
will heave a sigh of relief and assume the position befitting them 
in accordance with their industrial development and more 
advanced culture. The eastern provinces themselves will seek out 
other industries, less dependent on agriculture and conceding Jess 
ground to the feudal mode of production, and in the intervening 
period they will place their army at the disposal not of the 
Prussian state but of Social-Democracy. The rest of the world will 
rejoice to see the end at last of Prussian fusel-oil poisoning; but the 
Prussian Junkers and the Prussian state, then at last “dissolved into 
Germany”,” will have to console themselves with the words of the 
poet: 

Surviving immortal in song, 
In life it must perish.> 

a Frederick William IV, “An mein Volk und die deutsche Nation, am 21. Marz 
1848”. In: Reden, Proklamationen, Botschaften, Erlasse und Ordres, Berlin, 1851, 
p. 10.— Ed. 

b F. Schiller, Die Gétter Griechenlands— Ed. 

Frederick Engels 

WILHELM WOLFF '“° 

Written between June and September 
1876 

28, 30, 31, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45 and 47, 
July 1, 8, 22 and 29,’ September 30, 
October 7, 14, 21 and 28, November 4