A friend sends me the Magdeburg Volksstimme of September 16. 
In an article therein, signed Paul Ernst, I find the following 
passage: 

“And if Engels now describes our opposition as ‘student revolt’, I would ask him 
to demonstrate where we have championed other views but his own and Marx’s; 
and if I have depicted our parliamentary Social Democrats as partly very 
petty-bourgeois in character, Engels need only look at what he himself wrote in 
1887 in the Preface to his Housing Question.” 2 

My dealing with German writers over the years have enriched 
me with many curious experiences. But it seems that there are 
even greater treats in store. I am supposed to tell Mr. Paul Ernst 
where ‘‘we” have championed other views, etc. Well, as far as the 
“we” is concerned, that is, the “opposition” which entered on to 
the scene with such high and mighty airs and made such a 
faint-hearted exit, and which I described as revolts by men of 
letters and students,'’** we can keep it short: in just about every 
article which they publish. 

But as far as Mr. Ernst himself is concerned, I need not tell him 
that again. For I have already told him so—four months ago, in 
fact—and I suppose I must now plague the public, for better or 
for worse, with my “Ernst”? correspondence. 

On May 31 this year Mr. Ernst wrote to me from Goérbersdorf 
that Mr. Hermann Bahr was reproaching him in the Freie Bühne 
for wrongly applying the Marxist method of viewing history with 

regard to the Scandinavian women’s movement,* and would I 
please 

“say in a few lines whether my view corresponds with Marx’s or not, and 
furthermore permit me to use the letter against Bahr”. 

I replied to him on June 5 that I could not become involved in 
his dispute with Mr. Bahr, and that I was quite unfamiliar with the 
“Scandinavian women’s movement”.” I then went on: 

“As regards your attempt to handle the matter in a materialist 
way, I should say first of all that the materialist method turns into 
its opposite if, in an historical study, it is used not as a guide but 
rather as a ready-made pattern in accordance with which one 
tailors the historical facts. And if Mr. Bahr believes he has caught 
you out in this respect, it seems to me that he may not be 
altogether unjustified. 

“You subsume the whole of Norway and everything that 
happens there under one category, philistinism, and then un- 
hesitatingly and erroneously apply to that Norwegian philistinism 
your opinion of German philistinism. But here there are two facts 
which present an insuperable obstacle. 

“Firstly: When, throughout Europe, the victory over Napoleon 
turned out into the victory of reaction over the Revolution, the 
fear inspired by the latter sufficing only in its cradle, France, to 
wrest a bourgeois-liberal constitution'? from the returning 
legitimists, Norway took occasion to give itself a constitution that 
was far more democratic' than any of its coevals in Europe. 

“And, secondly, Norway has, during the past twenty years, 
experienced a literary revival unparalleled in any other country 
during that period save Russia. Philistine or not, this people has 
been far more creative than all the rest and is, indeed, putting its 
stamp on other literatures, not least the German. 

“These facts, in my view, render it necessary to examine 
Norwegian ‘philistinism’ in the light of its particular characteristics. 

“And in so doing you will probably find that a very important 
distinction emerges. In Germany philistinism was born of a failed 
revolution, a development that was interrupted and repressed. Its 
idiosyncratic, abnormally pronounced character made up of 
cowardice, bigotry, ineptitude, and a total lack of initiative, 

resulted from the Thirty Years’ War and the period that 
ensued—the very time in which practically all the great nations 
were experiencing a rapid rise. That character persisted, even 
after Germany had again been gripped by the historical move- 
ment, and was strong enough to imprint itself, more or less a 
generalised German type, on all the other social classes in 
Germany until such time as our working class broke out of these 

it is precisely because they have completely shaken off 
German philistine bigotry. 

“Hence German philistinism is not a normal historical phase but 
a caricature taken to extremes, a form of degeneration, just as 
your Polish Jew is a caricature of the Jews. The English, French, 
etc., lower middle class is not at all on the same level as your 
German lower middle class. 

“In Norway, on the other hand, the class of small peasants and 
the lower middle class with a slight admixture of middle class 
elements—as it existed, say, in England and France in the 
seventeenth century—have, for several centuries, constituted the 
normal state of society. Here there is no question of an archaic 
state of affairs having been forcibly imposed upon them by the 
failure of a great movement or by a Thirty Years War. The 
country has been retarded by its isolation and by its natural 
circumstances, but its state was commensurate with the conditions 
of its production, and hence normal. It is only quite recently that 
large-scale industry has, sporadically and on a very small scale, 
begun to come into the country, where, however, there is no place 
for the most powerful lever for the concentration of capital—the 
stock exchange; and even the tremendous expansion of maritime 
trade has proved to be a conservative factor. For whereas 
everywhere else steam is superseding sail, Norway is enormously 
increasing the number of its sailing vessels and possesses, if not 
the largest, then certainly the second largest, fleet of windjammers 
in the world, most of them owned by small and medium-sized 
shipping firms, as in England in, say, 1720. But nevertheless this 
has brought some animation into the old, sluggish existence— 
animation which finds expression in, among other things, the 
literary revival. 

“The Norwegian peasant was never a serf, so that the whole 
process takes place against an entirely different background, as in 
Castile. The lower middle class Norwegian is the son of a free 
peasant and, such being the case, is a man compared with the 
degenerate German philistine. And whatever the failings of, for 

example, Ibsen’s plays, these reflect a world which is, it is true, 
lower middle and middle class, but utterly different from the 
German world—a world in which people still have character and 
initiative and act independently if, by the standards of other 
countries, often eccentrically. Personally, I would prefer to get to 
know all I could about things of this sort before passing 
judgment.” 

So here I told Mr. Ernst, albeit politely, but nonetheless clearly 
and firmly, “where” —namely, in the article from the Freie Bühne 
which he sent to me himself. When I demonstrate to him that he 
uses the Marxist approach as nothing but a pattern to which he 
tailors the historical facts that is precisely an example of the 
“considerable misunderstanding” of the same approach with 
which I reproached the gentlemen.* And when I prove to him, 
using his own example of Norway, that his pattern of philistinism 
on German lines flies in the face of the historical facts when 
applied to Norway, I thereby catch him in advance and in person 
displaying the ‘gross ignorance of the decisive historical facts on 
every occasion’, with which I also reproached those gentlemen.° 

And now look at the affected primness which Mr. Ernst feigns, 
like a country maiden treated like “one of those” by some 
blueblooded scoundrel in the streets of Berlin! He appears before 
me four months after the above letter, the picture of outraged 
virtue, demanding that I should tell him “where?”. Mr. Ernst 
appears to have but two literary frames of mind. First he lets fly 
with impudence and self-assurance, as if there really was more to 
it than hot air; and when people proceed to defend themselves, 
[he protests that] he has said nothing at all and bemoans the base 
disregard shown to his pure feelings. Outraged virtue in his letter 
to me in which he complains that Mr. Bahr has treated him “with 
quite unbelievable insolence”! Injured innocence in his reply to 
me, in which he quite naively asks “where?”, while he must have 
known the answer for a good four months. An unrecognised 
noble soul in the Magdeburg Volksstimme, in which he also asks old 
Bremer, who had quite rightly rapped his knuckles, “Where?” 

And the sigh asks always: where? 
Always, where? 

Does Mr. Ernst still want to know “where”? Well, let him turn, 
for example, to the article in the Volks-Tribtune on the “Dangers of 

Marxism”,? in which he appropriates without hesitation the odd 
assertion of the metaphysicist Duhring—as if, according to Marx, 
history makes itself quite automatically, without the cooperation of 
human beings (who after all are making it!), and as if these human 
beings were simply played like mere chessmen by the economic 
conditions (which are the work of men themselves!). A man who is 
capable of confusing the distortion of Marxist theory by an 
opponent such as Dithring with this theory itself must turn 
elsewhere for help—lI give up. 

Perhaps I may now be excused from answering any more 
“wheres”? Mr. Ernst is so prolific, he turns.,out articles with such 
alacrity that one comes across them everywhere. And when you 
imagine that you have finally seen the last of them, he turns up 
again as the author of sundry anonymous pieces. Then a mere 
mortal like myself is unable to keep up and is tempted to wish that 
instead of prescribing his remedies so freely, Mr. Ernst should 
have something prescribed for himself. 

He says further: 

“If I have depicted our parliamentary Social Democrats as partly very 
petty-bourgeois in character, Engels need only”, etc. 

Partly very petty-bourgeois? In the article in the Sdchsische 
Arbeiter-Zeitung which forced me to reply,” it says that petty- 
bourgeois parliamentary socialism has now a majority in Germany. 
And I said that I knew nothing about this. Now Mr. Ernst merely 
wishes to defend the assertion that the parliamentary group is 
“partly” very petty-bourgeois. Again the unrecognised noble soul, 
to whom the wicked world imputes all kinds of outrages. Who has 
ever denied that the petty-bourgeois tendency is represented not 
only in the parliamentary group but also in the party as a whole? 
Every party has a right wing and a left wing, and that the right 
wing of the Social Democratic Party is petty-bourgeois is only in 
the nature of the things. If there is no more to it than that, why 
all the fuss? We have been well aware of this old story for years, 
but it is a far cry from that to a petty-bourgeois majority in the 
parliamentary group or in the party itself. If this danger were to 
pose a threat, we should not wait for the warnings of these strange 
loyal Eckarts. For the time being the vigorous and_ joyful 
proletarian struggle '”* against the Anti-Socialist Law and the rapid 
economic development have increasingly deprived this petty- 

bourgeois element of ground, air and light, whereas the pro- 
letarian element has grown more and more powerful. 

There is, however, one thing which I can divulge to Mr. Paul 
Ernst by way of conclusion: there is something that is far more 
dangerous to the party than a petty-bourgeois group which can be 
consigned to the lumber-room at the next elections. I am referring 
to a clique of loud-mouthed men of letters and _ students, 
particularly when they are incapable of seeing the simplest things 
with their own eyes and of impartially weighing up the relative 
importance of the available facts or the strength of the forces 
involved when assessing an economic or political situation, and 
hence seek to force on the party tactics that are utterly insane, as 
gentlemen such as Bruno Wille and Teistler in particular, and to a 
lesser extent Mr. Ernst, have amply demonstrated. And this clique 
becomes even more dangerous if it unites to form a mutual 
assurance society, setting in motion all the means of organised 
advertising in order to smuggle its members into the editorial 
chairs of the party newspapers and control the party by means of 
the party press. Twelve years ago the Anti-Socialist Law saved us 
from this danger, which was already overtaking us, even then. 
Now that this law is going, the danger is back again. And I trust 
this will make it quite clear to Mr. Paul Ernst exactly why I am 
willing to fight tooth and nail to prevent myself from being 
identified with the elements of such a clique. 

London, October 1, 1890 
Frederick Engels 

No. 232, October 5, 1890 paper