Journeyman’s Song  
By Georg Weerth (1846)

When cherry trees were blooming,  
We lodged there at the time,  
When cherry trees were blooming,  
In Frankfurt once did lodge.

The innkeeper addressed us:  
“Your coats are shabby wear!”  
“You lousy innkeeper,  
That’s none of your affair!

Pour out your wine before us,  
Give us your beer as well;  
With beer and wine before us  
A roasted beast as well.”

The cock crows in the bunghole –  
A truly noble flow.  
It tastes inside our mouths  
Just like urinio.

He brought us then a hare  
In parsley sauce arrayed,  
Before this dead hare we  
Were terribly afraid.

And when we lay in bed  
With our night-prayer rite,  
The bedbugs pricked us there  
From morning until night.

This happened once in Frankfurt,  
In that fair city, yes,  
He knows it who has lived there  
And suffered sore distress.

This poem by our friend Weerth I found again among Marx’s posthumous papers. Weerth, the first and most important poet of the German proletariat, was born of Rhenish parents in Detmold, where his father was a church superintendent. When I was staying in Manchester in 1843, Weerth came to Bradford as a clerk for his German firm, and we spent many cheerful Sundays together. In 1845, when Marx and I were living in Brussels, Weerth took over the continental agency of his commercial house and arranged things so that he could likewise make his headquarters in Brussels. After the March revolution of 1848, we all met again in Cologne to found the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung*. Weerth took over the feuilleton, and I doubt whether any other newspaper ever had one so funny and biting. One of his principal works was “Leben und Thaten des berühmten Ritters Schnapphahnski” [Life and Deeds of the Famous Knight Schnapphahnski], describing the adventures of Prince Lichnowski, whom Heine in his *Atta Troll* had so named. All the facts are true;

how we came to know of them may be told on some other occasion. These Schnapphahnski feuilletons were published as a book by Hoffmann & Campe in 1849 and are still extremely amusing today. But when Schnapphahnski-Lichnowski, on 18 September 1848, rode out with the Prussian General von Auerswald (likewise a member of parliament) to spy on the peasant columns that were coming to the aid of the Frankfurt barricade fighters, on which occasion he and Auerswald were deservedly beaten to death by the peasants as spies, the German Imperial Regency brought an indictment against Weerth for defamation of the dead Lichnowski, and Weerth, who had long since been in England, got three months’ imprisonment, long after the reaction had put an end to the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung*. He duly served these three months, however, because his business affairs obliged him to visit Germany from time to time.

In 1850–51 he travelled to Spain, then to the West Indies and across almost all of South America, on behalf of another Bradford firm. After a

short visit to Europe he returned to his beloved West Indies. There he did not wish to deny himself the pleasure of looking upon the real original of Louis-Napoleon III, the Negro king Soulouque of Haiti. But, as W. Wolff wrote to Marx on 28 August 1856,

“he ran into difficulties with the quarantine authorities, had to abandon his project and during the tour contracted the germs of (yellow) fever, which he took with him to Havana. He took to his bed, an inflammation of the brain set in, and – on 30 July – our Weerth died in Havana.”

I have called him the first and  
most important  
poet of the German proletariat. In fact, his socialist and political poems are far superior to those of Freiligrath in originality, wit and, above all, sensuous fire. He often used Heine’s forms, but only to fill them with a wholly original, independent content. At the same time, he differed from most poets in that his poems, once written down, were a matter of total indifference to him. After he had sent a copy to Marx or me, he would leave the verses lying about, and it was often difficult to induce him to have them printed anywhere. Only during the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* was it otherwise. The reason is shown by the following extract from a letter from Weerth to Marx, Hamburg, 28 April 1851:

“By the way, I hope to see you again in London at the beginning of July, for I can no longer endure these grasshoppers in Hamburg. A brilliant existence threatens me here, but I recoil from it. Any other would seize it with both hands. But I am too old to become a philistine, and, across the sea, there lies the distant West…

I have written all sorts of things lately, but have finished nothing, for I see no purpose, no goal in authorship. When *you* write something on political economy, that makes sense and has meaning. But *I*? Crack feeble jokes, make bad jests to coax a silly smile from the patriotic mugs – truly, I know nothing more pitiable! My literary activity decidedly went under with the ‘*Neue Rheinische Zeitung*’.

I must confess: however sorry I feel to have lost the last three years for nothing and nothing again, I am just as glad when I think of our Cologne residence. We did *not* compromise ourselves. That is the main thing! Since Frederick the Great, no one has treated the German people so *en canaille* as the ‘*Neue Rheinische Zeitung*’.

I do not mean that this was my merit; but I was there …

O Portugal! O Spain!” (W. had just come from there.) “If only we had your beautiful sky, your wine, your oranges and myrtles! But not even that! Nothing but rain and long noses and smoked meat!

In rain with a long nose your

G. Weerth.”

What Weerth was a master in, where he surpassed Heine (because he was healthier and more genuine) and where he is excelled in the German language only by Goethe, is the expression of natural, robust sensuality and carnal lust. Many of the readers of the *Sozialdemokrat* would be horrified if I were to reprint the individual feuilletons of the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* here. It does not, however, occur to me to do so. Yet I cannot suppress the remark that the moment must after all come for the German socialists, too, when they openly cast off this last German philistine prejudice, the hypocritical petty-bourgeois moral prudery, which anyway serves only as a cloak for furtive smut. When, for example, one reads Freiligrath’s poems, one would really think that people had no genitals at all. And yet no one took more delight in a quiet filthy joke than precisely Freiligrath, who was so ultra-chaste in his poetry. It is high time that at least the German workers accustom themselves to speaking of things they do themselves daily or nightly, of natural, indispensable and extremely pleasurable things, as unabashedly as the Romance peoples, as Homer and Plato, as Horace and Juvenal, as the Old Testament and the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung*.

Incidentally, Weerth also wrote less offensive pieces, and from these I shall take the liberty of sending some from time to time to the feuilleton of the *Sozialdemokrat*.

F. Engels