Cologne, August 7. (The Debate on Poland in Frankfurt.)

*Neue Rheinische Zeitung* No. 70, August 9, 1848

The Assembly, whose debates never lost the character of genuine German *Gemütlichkeit* even in the most excited moments, has at last bestirred itself on the Posen question. Here, where Prussian shrapnel shells and obedient decisions of the Federal Diet had prepared the ground for it, it had to take a decisive resolution; no mediation was possible here; it had to save Germany’s honour or once again besmirch it. The Assembly has lived up to our expectations; it has sanctioned the seven partitions of Poland, it has shifted the disgrace of 1772, 1794 and 1815 from the shoulders of the German princes on to its own shoulders.

More than that! The Frankfurt Assembly has declared the seven partitions of Poland to be as many benefits lavished upon the Poles. Has not the forcible intrusion of the Jewish-Germanic race raised Poland to a height of culture, to a level of science of which the country formerly had no inkling? Blinded, ungrateful Poles! Had you not been partitioned, you yourselves would have to petition the Frankfurt Assembly for the favour of being partitioned!

Pastor Bonavita Blank of the Paradies monastery near Schaffhausen trained magpies and starlings to fly in and out. He had cut out the lower half of their beaks so that they could not look for their own food but could only receive it from his hand. The philistines who from afar saw the birds flying on to the shoulders of the reverend gentleman and consorting familiarly with him admired his high culture and learning. – The birds, says his biographer, loved him as their benefactor. And the fettered, mutilated, branded Poles refuse to love their Prussian benefactors!

We can describe the benefits conferred upon the Poles by Prussianism no better than by going into the report of the international law committee of the learned historiographer, Herr Stenzel, the report which forms the basis of the debate.

The report first relates, entirely in the style of the most commonplace diplomatic documents, the creation of the Grand Duchy of Posen in 1815 by “incorporation” and “amalgamation”. Then follow the promises made at the same time by Frederick William III to the Posnans: maintenance of nationality, language and religion, appointment of a native governor, participation in the famous Prussian constitution. What became of these promises is known. The freedom of trade between the three fragments of Poland, which the Congress of Vienna was able to decree all the more calmly as it was impracticable, naturally never came into force.

Now comes the population ratio. Herr Stenzel calculates that in 1843 the Grand Duchy had 790,000 Poles, 420,000 Germans and almost 80,000 Jews, a total of almost 1,300,000 inhabitants.

Opposed to Herr Stenzel’s assertion are the Polish assertions, among others that of Archbishop Przyluski, according to which far more than 800,000 Poles, and after deduction of the Jews, officials and soldiers, barely 250,000 Germans live in Posen.

Let us, however, keep to Herr Stenzel’s assertion. It is entirely sufficient for our purposes. Let us concede, to spare ourselves any further debate, that 420,000 Germans live in Posen. Who are these Germans, brought up to half a million by the addition of the Jews?

The Slavs are a predominantly agricultural people, little skilled in the pursuit of urban trades as they were previously possible in Slavonic countries. Trade on its first, crudest level, where it was still mere huckstering, was left to the peddling Jews. As culture and population increased, as the need for urban trades and urban concentration made itself felt, Germans migrated into the Slavonic countries. The Germans, who in general attained their highest flowering in the petty burgherdom of the mediaeval imperial cities, in the sluggish, caravan-like inland trade and limited maritime trade, in the guild handicraft of the 14th and 15th centuries – these Germans proved their calling to become the philistines of world history especially by the fact that to this very day they form the core of the petty bourgeoisie of all Eastern and Northern Europe, indeed of America. In Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw and Cracow, in Stockholm and Copenhagen, in Pest, Odessa and Jassy, in New York and Philadelphia, the artisans, shopkeepers and small middlemen are for the most part, often for the greatest part, Germans or of German descent. In all these cities there are quarters where only German is spoken; some cities, like Pest, are even almost entirely German.

This German immigration has proceeded almost uninterruptedly, especially into the Slavonic countries, since the 12th and 13th centuries. Since the Reformation, moreover, whole masses of Germans were from time to time driven into Poland by sectarian persecutions, where they were received with open arms. In other Slavonic countries, in Bohemia, Moravia, etc., the Slavonic population was decimated by German wars of conquest, and the German population increased by invasion.

The state of affairs is clearest precisely in Poland. The German philistines who have been settled there for centuries have never considered themselves politically part of Germany – any more than the Germans in North America, the “French colony” in Berlin or the 15,000 French in Montevideo do France. As far as was possible in the decentralised times of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they have become Poles, German-speaking Poles; they had long since completely renounced all connection with the mother country.

But they brought culture, education and learning, trade and industry to Poland! – To be sure, they brought petty trade and guild handicrafts; by their consumption and the limited intercourse they established, they raised production to some extent. Of great education and learning, little has been heard in all Poland up to 1772, and since then also in Austrian and Russian Poland. We shall speak more closely of the Prussian part.

In return for this, the Germans in Poland prevented the formation of Polish towns with a Polish bourgeoisie; they obstructed centralisation, the most powerful political means of rapidly developing a country, by their different language, by their cutting themselves off from the Polish population, by their thousand-fold varying privileges and municipal legal constitutions. Almost every town had its own law; indeed in mixed towns different law existed and often still exists for Germans, for Poles and for Jews. The German Poles have remained at the most subordinate level of industry; they have neither accumulated large capitals nor known how to appropriate large-scale industry, nor have they gained possession of extensive trade connections. The Englishman Cockerill first had to come to Warsaw before industry could take root in Poland. Petty trade, handicraft, and at most corn trade and manufacture (weaving, etc.) on the most limited scale – that was the whole activity of the German Poles. And that they imported German philistinism, German philistine narrow-mindedness into Poland, that they combine in themselves the bad qualities of both nations without the good ones, must likewise not be forgotten among the merits of the German Poles.

Herr Stenzel seeks to arouse the sympathy of the Germans for the German Poles: “When the kings … especially in the 17th century, became ever more powerless, and were also no longer able to protect even the native Polish peasants against the harshest oppression by the nobility, the German villages and towns also decayed, many of which came into the possession of the nobility. Only the larger royal towns saved a part of their old liberties” (read: privileges).

Is Herr Stenzel perhaps demanding that the Poles should have protected the (incidentally also “native”) “Germans” (read: German Poles) better than themselves? It surely goes without saying that the foreigners who have immigrated into a country can demand nothing more than to share good days and bad with the original population!

Let us now come to the benefits which the Poles owe specifically to the Prussian government.

In 1772 the Netze District was robbed by Frederick II, and in the following year the Bromberg Canal was built, which established an inland waterway between the Oder and the Vistula. “The environs which for centuries had been in dispute between Poland and Pomerania, rendered waste in many places by countless devastations and great swamps, were now made arable and populated by numerous colonists.”

So the first partition of Poland was no robbery. Frederick II merely seized a territory that had been “in dispute for centuries.” But how long has there been no independent Pomerania that could have disputed this territory? For how many centuries had it really no longer been disputed with the Poles? And what is the purpose anyway of this rusty and rotten theory of “disputes” and “claims”, which was good enough in the 17th and 18th centuries to cover the nakedness of trade and rounding-off interests – what use is it in the year 1848, when the ground has been cut from under the feet of all historical right and wrong?

Incidentally Herr Stenzel ought to consider that according to this lumber-room doctrine, the Rhine frontier between France and Germany has been “in dispute for thousands of years” and the Poles could assert claims to feudal sovereignty over the province of Prussia and even over Pomerania!

Enough. The Netze District became Prussian and was thus no longer “in dispute”. Frederick II had it colonised by Germans, and thus arose the “Netze brethren” so gloriously mentioned in the Posen affair. Germanisation by state means begins with the year 1773.

“The Jews in the Grand Duchy are, according to all reliable information, throughout Germans and also want to be so … The religious tolerance which formerly prevailed in Poland, as well as several qualities which the Poles lacked, have for centuries given the Jews a deeply penetrating sphere of activity (namely into the purses of the Poles) in Poland. As a rule they are masters of both languages, although in their families, and from youth onwards with their children, they speak German.”

The unexpected sympathy and recognition which the Polish Jews have recently found in Germany has here obtained its official expression. Decried, as far as the influence of the Leipzig Fair extends, as the most complete expression of huckstering, niggardliness and filth, they have suddenly become German brothers; honest Michel presses them to his heart with tears of joy, and Herr Stenzel claims them in the name of the German nation as Germans who also wish to be Germans.

And why should the Polish Jews not be genuine Germans? Do they not speak “in their families, and from youth onwards with their children, German”? And what German into the bargain!

We point out to Herr Stenzel, by the way, that in this way he can claim all Europe and half America, indeed a part of Asia. German, as is well known, is the Jewish world language. In New York as in Constantinople, in Petersburg as in Paris, “the Jews speak German in their families, and from youth onwards with their children”, and in part even more classical German than the “kindred” allies of the Netze brethren, the Posen Jews.

The report now proceeds to portray the national relations as indefinitely as possible and as far as possible in favour of the alleged half-million Germans, consisting of German-Poles, Netze brethren and Jews.  
The peasant landholdings of the Germans were supposedly larger than those of the Polish peasants (we shall see how that comes about).  
Since the first partition of Poland, the hatred between Poles and Germans, especially Prussians, had risen to the highest pitch.  
“Prussia in particular, by introducing its particularly firmly regulated state and administrative arrangements (what German!) and their strict enforcement, disturbed the old rights and traditional institutions of the Poles in the most painful manner.”  
How much the “firmly regulated” and “strictly enforced” measures of the estimable Prussian bureaucracy “disturbed” not only the old customs and traditional institutions, but the whole of social life, industrial and agricultural production, trade, mining, in short all social relations without exception — of this not only the Poles, but also the other Prussians, and especially we Rhinelanders, could tell wondrous tales.  
But Herr Stenzel is not even speaking here of the bureaucracy of 1807–1848, but of that of 1772–1806, of the officials of the most authentic stock-Prussiandom, whose baseness, venality, rapacity and brutality were so brilliantly exposed in the treasons of 1806.  
These officials had supposedly protected the Polish peasants against the nobility and reaped sheer ingratitude; admittedly, the officials would have had to feel “that all giving and imposing of benefits does not compensate for the loss of national independence.”  
We too are familiar with the manner in which the Prussian officials were accustomed, in recent times too, to “give and impose everything”.  
Where is the Rhinelander who has not had dealings with freshly imported old-Prussian officials, and who has not had occasion to admire this incomparable, pert know-all-ness, this impudent meddling, this combination of narrow-mindedness and infallibility, this apodictic rudeness!  
With us, to be sure, the old-Prussian gentlemen soon wore off their hardest edges; they had no Netze brethren, no secret inquisition, no Prussian General Legal Code, and no cudgelling at their disposal, and many a one died of grief at the lack of the latter. But how they must have carried on in Poland, where they could have people beaten and secretly interrogated to their heart’s content, need not be described to us.  
Enough, the Prussian rule of arbitrariness knew how to make itself so popular that “already after the Battle of Jena the hatred of the Poles manifested itself in a general uprising and the expulsion of the Prussian officials”.  
With that, the officialdom’s run came to an end for the time being.  

But in 1815 it returned in a somewhat altered shape. The “reformed”, “educated”, “incorruptible”, “best” officialdom tried its luck on these recalcitrant Poles.  
“Even with the creation of the Grand Duchy of Posen no good understanding could be established, since ... the King of Prussia at that time could impossibly agree to organise a single province entirely independently and to make his state, so to speak, a federal state.”  
Thus the King of Prussia, according to Herr Stenzel, could “impossibly agree” to keep his own promises and the Vienna Treaties!!  
“When in 1830 the sympathies of the Polish nobility for the uprising in Warsaw gave rise to apprehensions and from then on systematic work was carried on to eliminate the Polish nobility, in particular, gradually and completely, through several measures taken (!), especially through the buying up, breaking up and distributing of Polish knight’s estates to Germans, its bitterness against Prussia rose.”  
“Through several measures taken”! Through the prohibition of selling forcibly auctioned estates to Poles, and other such measures which Herr Stenzel covers with the mantle of love.  
What would the Rhinelanders say if the Prussian government had likewise forbidden us to sell judicially sold landed properties to Rhinelanders!  
Pretexts enough would have been at hand: to amalgamate the population of the old and new provinces; to allow the natives of the old provinces to participate in the benefits of parcelling and of the Rhenish legislation; to induce the Rhinelanders to naturalise their industry also in the old provinces through immigration, etc. Reasons enough to bless us likewise with Prussian “colonists”!  
How would we regard a population that bought up our land at ridiculously low prices, with competition excluded, and was supported in this by the state into the bargain; a population that was expressly foisted upon us for the purpose of making the boozy patriotism of “God for King and Fatherland” at home among us?  
And we are after all still Germans, we speak the same language as the old provinces.  
But in Posen these colonists were despatched systematically, with inexorable regularity, to the domains, into the forests, onto the parcelled Polish knight’s estates, in order to drive the native Poles and their language out of their own land and to form a genuinely Prussian province which was to surpass even Pomerania in black-and-white fanaticism.  
And so that the Prussian peasants in Poland should not be without natural superiors, the flower of the Prussian knighthood, a Tresckow, a Lüttichau, were sent after them, who likewise bought up knight’s estates there at ridiculously low prices and with state advances.  
Indeed, after the Polish uprising of 1846, a whole joint-stock company was formed in Berlin, under the gracious protection of high, highest and still higher personages, with the purpose of buying up Polish estates for German knights.  
The hungry poor devils of the nobility of the March and Pomerania foresaw that the Polish trial would ruin a mass of Polish owners of knight’s estates, that their estates would soon be frittered away at dirt-cheap prices. What a feast for many a Uckermark Don Ranudo drowning in debts! A fine knight’s estate for almost nothing, Polish peasants to beat, and on top of that the merit of having obliged King and Fatherland — what a brilliant prospect!  
Thus arose the third German immigration into Poland; Prussian peasants and Prussian nobility, who settled everywhere in Posen and who, supported by the government, came with the open intention not of Germanisation but of Pomerisation.  
If the German-Polish burghers had the excuse of having contributed a little to the promotion of trade, if the Netze brethren could boast of having reclaimed some morasses, this last Prussian invasion lacked all pretext. They had not even introduced parcelling consistently; the Prussian nobility followed on the heels of the Prussian peasants.  
(To be continued.)

*Neue Rheinische Zeitung.* No. 73, 12 August 1848  
** Cologne, 11 August. The Debate on Poland in Frankfurt. (Continuation).  
In the first article we examined the “historical basis” of Stenzel’s report, insofar as it discusses the situation of Posen before the revolution. Today we come to Herr Stenzel’s history of the revolution and counter-revolution in Posen.  
“The German people, always full of sympathy for every unfortunate (as long as sympathy costs nothing), had at all times profoundly felt the great injustice perpetrated by its princes against the Poles.”  
Admittedly, “profoundly felt” in the quiet German heart, where feelings sit so “deep” that they never break out into deeds! Admittedly, “sympathy” through a few alms in 1831, through benefit dinners and Polish balls, as long as the thing was to dance, to drink champagne and to sing: Poland Is Not Yet Lost! But really doing something serious, really making a sacrifice for once — when was that ever the German way!  
“The Germans sincerely offered the brotherly hand, to atone for what their princes had formerly committed.”  
Admittedly, if moving phrases and sluggish pot-house political prattle could “atone” for anything, then no people would stand in history as pure as precisely the Germans.  
“But at the very moment when the Poles struck into it (namely the offered brotherly hand), the interests and aims of both nations already separated. The Poles thought only of the restoration of their old kingdom, at least within the territorial extent before the first partition in 1772.”  
Truly, only the thoughtless, wild enthusiasm into the blue, which has always been a chief ornament of the German national character, could bring it about that the Germans were surprised by the demand of the Poles! The Germans wanted to “atone” for the wrong done to Poland. With what did this wrong begin? Not to speak of earlier treacheries, but certainly with the first partition in 1772. How was this to be “atoned for”? Surely only by restoring the status quo before 1772, or at least by the Germans giving back to the Poles what they had robbed from them since 1772. But the interest of the Germans was opposed to this? Good, then let us speak of interests, and there can be no more talk of sentimentalities about “atonement”, etc., then let us speak the language of cold, unfeeling practice and spare us toast-phrases and feelings of magnanimity.  
Incidentally, first, the Poles by no means “only” “thought” of the restoration of the Poland of 1772. What the Poles “thought” is of little concern to us anyway. For the moment they demanded only the reorganisation of the whole of Posen, and spoke of further eventualities only in case of a German-Polish war against Russia. Secondly, “the interests and aims of both nations separated” only so long as the “interests and aims” of revolutionised Germany in regard to international relations remained exactly the same as those of the old, absolutist Germany. A Russian alliance, at least peace with Russia at any price, if that is Germany’s “interest and aim”, then in Poland everything must indeed remain as before. But we shall see later how very much the real interests of Germany are identical with those of Poland.  
Now comes a lengthy, confused, embarrassed passage in which Herr Stenzel expatiates on how right the German-Poles were when they sought justice for Poland, but at the same time wanted to remain Prussian and German. That the “admittedly” renders the “but” impossible and the “but” renders the “admittedly” impossible is naturally none of Herr Stenzel’s concern.  
To this is appended an equally lengthy and confused historical narrative, in which Herr Stenzel tries to prove in detail that, with the “separating interests and aims of both nations” and the ever-increasing mutual embitterment resulting from it, a bloody clash was inevitable. The Germans held fast to the “national” interest, the Poles merely to the “territorial”. That is, the Germans demanded the partition of the Grand Duchy according to nationalities, the Poles wanted their whole former territory for themselves.  
This is again not true. The Poles demanded reorganisation, but at the same time declared that they were in complete agreement with the cession of the mixed border districts, where the majority was German and wished to be attached to Germany. Only that the people should not be made German or Polish at the discretion of the Prussian officials, but according to their own will.  
“Willisen’s mission,” Herr Stenzel continues, “was naturally bound to fail because of the (alleged, nowhere existing) resistance of the Poles to the cession of the predominantly German districts.” Herr Stenzel,

Stenzel had before him for perusal the 20 declarations of Willisen concerning the Poles, and those of the Poles concerning Willisen. These printed declarations prove the contrary. But that is because, as Mr. Stenzel says, he “is a man who has been occupied with history for many years and has made it his duty to say nothing untrue and to conceal nothing true”!

With the same fidelity that conceals nothing true, Mr. Stenzel lightly passes over the cannibalism perpetrated in Posen, the vile breach of faith of the Convention of Jaroslawiec, the massacres of Trzemeszno, Miloslaw and Wreschen, the devastating fury of a soldiery worthy of the Thirty Years’ War, without mentioning so much as a syllable of them.

Mr. Stenzel now comes to the four new partitions of Poland by the Prussian government. First, the Netze District together with 4 other counties was torn away (14 April); to this were added some parts of other counties, with a total population of 593,390 souls, and they were admitted into the German Confederation (22 April). Then the town and fortress of Posen together with the rest of the left bank of the Warta were added – another 273,500 souls, thus in total more than twice as many as, even according to Prussian figures, Germans residing in all of Posen. This was done by cabinet order of 26 April, and already on 2 May admission into the German Confederation followed.

Mr. Stenzel now whines to the Assembly how absolutely necessary it is that Posen remain in German hands, Posen, an important, mighty fortress, where over 20,000 Germans (most of them Polish Jews) reside, to whom two thirds of the total landed property belongs, etc. That Posen lies in the midst of a purely Polish countryside, that it has been forcibly Germanised, and that Polish Jews are not Germans, is a matter of the utmost indifference to people who “never report anything untrue and never have concealed anything true”, to historians of the calibre of a Mr. Stenzel!

Enough, for military reasons Posen was not to be let out of one’s hands. As if one could not have razed this fortress, which according to Willisen is one of the greatest strategic mistakes, and fortified Breslau instead. But ten million had been sunk into it (incidentally, again not true, scarcely five million) and it is naturally more advantageous to keep the expensive work of art and 20–30 square miles of Polish soil into the bargain.

Once one has the “town and fortress” of Posen, however, the most convenient opportunity presents itself to take still more. “But in order to hold the fortress, one will be compelled to secure for it also the approaches from Glogau, Küstrin and Thorn, as well as a fortress radius towards the east (which need be only 1,000 to 2,000 paces, like that of Maastricht towards Belgium and Limburg.) By this means,” smirks Mr. Stenzel further, “the undisturbed possession of the Bromberg Canal is simultaneously maintained, but at the same time numerous tracts in which the Polish population predominates will also have to be incorporated into the German Confederation.”

For all these reasons, the well-known philanthropist Pfuel von Höllenstein has then also undertaken two new partitions of Poland, whereby all the wishes of Mr. Stenzel are satisfied and three-quarters of the entire Grand Duchy are tacked on to Germany. Mr. Stenzel acknowledges this procedure all the more gratefully as he, the historian, must plainly see in this intensified revival of the Chambers of Reunion of Louis XIV that the Germans have learned to make use of the lessons of history.

The Poles, Mr. Stenzel opines, should console themselves with the fact that their share is more fertile than the incorporated territory, that they have far less landed property than the Germans, and that “no impartial person will deny that the Polish peasant will find his lot far more bearable under a German government than the German under a Polish one”!! Of which history provides remarkable proofs.

Finally, Mr. Stenzel calls out to the Poles that even the little scrap that remains to them will suffice for them, by exercising all civic virtues, “to prepare themselves worthily for the moment which the future still hides from them, and which they, in a very pardonable fashion, perhaps seek to hasten too stormily. There is,” one of their most judicious fellow-citizens very aptly exclaims, “a crown which is also worthy to stir your ambition, it is the civic crown! A German may add: it does not glitter, but it is genuine!”

“It is genuine!” But still more “genuine” are the real reasons for the renewed four partitions of Poland by the Prussian government.

German honest burgher! You believe the partitions were undertaken to rescue your German brothers from Polish rule? to secure for you in the fortress of Posen a bulwark against every attack? To safeguard the roads from Küstrin, Glogau and Bromberg, the Netze Canal? What a delusion! You have been disgracefully deceived. The new partitions of Poland have been carried out for no other reason than to fill the coffers of the Prussian state. The first partitions of Poland up to 1815 were a land grab with armed hand; the partitions of 1848 are a theft.

And now, German honest burgher, take note how you have been deceived!

After the third partition of Poland, Frederick William II confiscated the Polish starosty estates and the estates belonging to the Catholic clergy for the benefit of the state. In particular the estates of the church constituted “a very considerable part of the entire landed property”, as the Taking-Possession Declaration of 28 March 1796 itself stated. These new domains were administered or leased for the royal account, and were so extensive that 34 domain offices and 21 chief forestry departments had to be established for their administration. Each of these domain offices comprised a multitude of localities; for example, to the 10 offices of the Bromberg administrative district a total of 636, and to the single domain office of Mogilno 127 localities.

In addition, in 1796 Frederick William II confiscated the estates and forests of the nunnery of Owinsk and sold them to the merchant von Tresckow (ancestor of the valiant Prussian band-leader Tresckow of the last heroic war); these estates consist of 24 localities together with mills and 20,000 morgen of forest, worth at least 1,000,000 thalers.

Furthermore, the domain offices of Krotoschin, Rozdrazewo, Orpiszewo and Adelnau, worth at least 2 million thalers, were ceded in 1819 to Prince Thurn und Taxis as compensation for the postal monopoly in several provinces that had fallen to Prussia.

All these estates Frederick William II had taken over under the pretext of administering them better. Nevertheless, they, the property of the Polish nation, have been given away, ceded, sold, and the purchase money has flowed into the Prussian state treasury. The domain offices of Gnesen, Skorzencin, Trzemeszno have been broken up and alienated.

Thus there remain still 27 domain offices and the chief forestry departments in the hands of the Prussian government, with a capital value of at the very least twenty million thalers. We are prepared to prove, map in hand, that these domains and forests lie one and all – with very few or no exceptions – in the incorporated part of Posen. In order to save this rich treasure above all from reversion to the Polish nation, it had to be admitted into the German Confederation; and since it could not come to the German Confederation, the German Confederation had to come to it, and three-quarters of Posen were incorporated.

That is the true reason for the four famous partitions of Poland within two months. Not the reclamations of this or that nationality, not allegedly strategic reasons have decided: the location of the domains, the rapacity of the Prussian government alone has determined the boundary line.

While the German burghers shed bloody tears over the imagined sufferings of their poor brothers in Posen, while they enthused over the securing of the German eastern march, while they let themselves be incited against the Poles by lying reports of Polish barbarities, the Prussian government operated very quietly and brought its little sheep into the dry. The groundless and aimless German enthusiasm has served for nothing further than to cloak the filthiest deed of recent history.

Thus, German honest burgher, do your responsible ministers make sport of you!

But in truth, you could have known it beforehand. Where Mr. Hansemann is involved, it is never a question of German nationality, military necessity and other such empty phrases, but always of ready cash and clear profit.

(Continuation follows.)

Neue Rheinische Zeitung. No. 81, 20 August 1848
** Cologne, 19 August. The Poland Debate in Frankfurt (Continuation.) We have followed the report of Mr. Stenzel, the basis of the debate, in its details. We have shown how he falsifies the older and recent history of Poland and of the Germans in Poland, how he displaces the whole question, how the historian Stenzel has been guilty not only of deliberate falsification but also of gross ignorance.

Before we enter upon the debate itself, we must cast yet another glance at the Polish question.

The Posen question, considered in itself, is devoid of all sense, without any possibility of a solution. It is a fragment of the Polish question and can only be solved in and with this. The frontier between Germany and Poland can only be determined when Poland exists again.

But can and will Poland exist again? In the debate this has been denied.

A French historian has said: II y a des peuples nécessaires: there are necessary peoples. Among these necessary peoples, in the 19th century, the Polish people unquestionably belongs.

Poland’s national existence is, however, necessary to no one more than precisely to us Germans.

On what, to begin with, does the power of reaction in Europe since 1815, indeed, in part since the first French Revolution, rest? On the Russo-Prussian-Austrian Holy Alliance. And what holds this Holy Alliance together? The partition of Poland, from which all three allies drew profit.

The rift which the three powers ripped through Poland is the bond that chains them together; the common plunder has made them mutually responsible for one another.

From the moment the first robbery of Poland was committed, Germany fell into dependence on Russia. Russia commanded Prussia and Austria to remain absolute monarchies, and Prussia and Austria had to obey. The in any case slack and timid efforts, especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie, to conquer power, foundered completely on the impossibility of getting loose from Russia, on the backing that Russia offered to the feudal-absolutist class in Prussia.

In addition to this, from the first attempt at oppression by the allies onwards, the Poles not only fought insurrectionally for their independence; they at the same time emerged revolutionarily against their own internal social conditions.

The partition of Poland was brought about through the alliance of the great feudal aristocracy in Poland with the three partitioning powers. It was not a step forward, as the ex-poet Mr. Jordan asserts, it was the last expedient of the great aristocracy to save itself from a revolution; it was reactionary through and through.

The consequence, already of the first partition, was quite naturally an alliance of the remaining classes, i.e., of the nobility, the burghers of the towns, and partly of the peasantry, both against the oppressors of Poland and against the great aristocracy of the country itself.

How well the Poles already understood at that time that their external independence was inseparable from the overthrow of the aristocracy and from agrarian reform at home is demonstrated by the Constitution of 1791. The great agricultural countries between the Baltic and the Black Sea can escape from patriarchal-feudal barbarism only through an agrarian revolution that transforms the serfs or corvée-obligated peasants into free landowners, a revolution exactly the same as the French revolution of 1789 in the countryside. The Polish nation has the merit of having been the first among all its agricultural neighbour peoples to proclaim this. The first attempt at reform was the Constitution of 1791; in the insurrection of 1830 Lelewel declared the agrarian revolution to be the only means of saving the country, but it was recognised too late by the Diet; in the insurrections of 1846 and 1848 it was openly proclaimed.

From the day of their subjugation the Poles acted as revolutionaries, and thereby bound their oppressors all the more firmly to the counter-revolution. They forced their oppressors to uphold the patriarchal-feudal condition not only in Poland but also in their other countries. And particularly since the Cracow insurrection of 1846, the struggle for Polish independence has simultaneously been the struggle of agrarian democracy – the only form possible in Eastern Europe – against patriarchal-feudal absolutism.

Therefore so long as we help oppress Poland, so long as we chain a part of Poland to Germany, we remain chained to Russia and Russian policy, so long we cannot break patriarchal-feudal absolutism thoroughly in our own country. The restoration of a democratic Poland is the first condition for the restoration of a democratic Germany.

The restoration of Poland and its border regulation with Germany is not only necessary, it is by far the most solvable of all the political questions that have arisen in Eastern Europe since the revolution. The independence struggles of the peoples of all tribes intermingled in a motley fashion south of the Carpathians are far more complicated, will cost far more blood, confusion and civil war than the Polish independence struggle and the establishment of the border between Germany and Poland.

It is self-evident that the question is not the restoration of a sham Poland, but the restoration of a state on a viable basis. Poland must have at least the extent of 1772, must possess not only the territories but also the mouths of its great rivers, and must have at least a broad coastal strip on the Baltic. Germany could have guaranteed all this, and yet secure its own interests and honour, if after the revolution it had had the courage, in its own interest, to demand of Russia, arms in hand, the restitution of Poland. That, given the intermingling of German and Polish along the border and especially on the coast, both sides would have to make some mutual concessions, that many a German would have had to become Polish, many a Pole German, was self-evident and would have presented no difficulty.

But after the half-hearted German revolution people lacked the courage to appear so resolutely. Delivering pompous speeches on the liberation of Poland, receiving the Poles passing through at railway stations and offering them the warmest sympathies of the German people (who has not already been offered them?) – that was all well and good; but to start a war with Russia, to call in question the whole European equilibrium, and, above all, to give up some little scrap of the stolen territory – yes, one would have to know nothing of the Germans!

And what was the war with Russia? The war with Russia was the complete, open and real break with our entire shameful past, was the real liberation and unification of Germany, was the establishment of democracy on the ruins of feudality and of the brief dream of rule of the bourgeoisie. The war with Russia was the only possible way to save our honour and our interests vis-à-vis our Slav neighbours, and particularly vis-à-vis the Poles.

But we were philistines and we remained philistines. We made a few dozen revolutions, small and large, of which we ourselves were afraid even before they were completed. After we had filled our mouths very full, we carried out nothing at all. The revolution, instead of widening our horizon, narrowed it. All questions were dealt with in the most timorous, most bigoted, most narrow-minded philistinism, and thus our real interests were naturally compromised once again. From the standpoint of this petty philistinism, the great question of the liberation of Poland was reduced to the puny phrase of the reorganisation of a part of the province of Posen; our enthusiasm for the Poles turned into shrapnel and caustic.

The only possible, the sole solution that would have preserved Germany’s honour and Germany’s interests, we repeat, was the war with Russia. It was not dared, and the inevitable result ensued: the soldiery of the reaction, defeated in Berlin, raised its head again in Posen; under the pretence of saving Germany’s honour and nationality, it planted the banner of counter-revolution and crushed the revolutionary Poles, our allies – and the swindled Germany for a moment cheered its victorious enemies. The new partition of Poland was carried out, and it lacked only the sanction of the German National Assembly.

There was still a way open to the Frankfurt Assembly to repair the matter; one should have excluded the whole of Posen from the German Confederation, and declared the border question open until one could negotiate it *d’égal à égal* with a restored Poland. But that would have been demanding too much of our Frankfurt professors, lawyers and pastors of the National Assembly! The temptation was too great: they, the peaceful burghers who had never fired a musket, were to conquer by standing up and sitting down a country of 500 square miles for Germany, incorporating 800,000 “Netzbrothers”, German-Poles, Jews and Poles, albeit at the cost of the honour and the real, lasting interests of Germany – what a temptation! – They succumbed to it, they confirmed the partition of Poland. For what reasons, we shall see tomorrow.

Neue Rheinische Zeitung. No. 82, 22 August 1848.
Cologne, 21 August. The Polish Debate in Frankfurt. (Continuation.)

We pass over the preliminary question whether the Posen deputies should take part in the deliberations and vote, and proceed immediately to the debate on the main question.

Herr Stenzel, the rapporteur, opened it with a frightfully confused and diffuse speech. He presents himself as an historian and a conscientious man, he speaks of fortresses and fieldworks, heaven and hell, sympathies and German hearts; he goes back to the 11th century to prove that the Polish nobility has always oppressed the peasants; he uses a few meagre data from Polish history as an excuse for an endless stream of the flattest commonplaces about nobility, peasants, towns, benefits of absolute monarchy, etc.; in halting and embarrassed language he excuses the partition of Poland; he sets forth the provisions of the Constitution of 3 May 1791 in so motley a confusion that members who hitherto did not know them now really have no idea where they stand; he is just about to pass on to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw when he is interrupted by the loud cry: that is going too far! and by the President.

The great historical researcher, completely thrown into confusion, continues with the following touching words: “I shall be brief. The question now is: What are we to do. This question is quite natural (! literally). The nobility wants to restore the realm. It claims to be democratic. I do not doubt that it means it honestly. But, gentlemen, it is natural (!) that certain estates harbour great illusions. I believe completely in its sincerity, but if princes and counts are to pass over into the people, I do not know how the fusion will take place (and what business is that of Herr Stenzel!). That is impossible in Poland, etc.”

Herr Stenzel acts as if in Poland the nobility and the aristocracy were one and the same. Lelewel’s *Histoire de Pologne*, which he himself cited, Mieroslawski’s *Débat entre la révolution et la contre-révolution en Pologne*, and a host of other recent writings could instruct the “man who has occupied himself with history for years” better. Most of the “princes and counts” of whom Herr Stenzel speaks are precisely those against whom Polish democracy itself fights.

Therefore, according to Herr Stenzel, one should let the nobility fall with its illusions and found a Poland for the peasant (by annexing piece after piece of Poland to Germany).

“Rather, hold out your hands to the poor peasants so that they may rise up, so that they may perhaps (!) succeed in establishing a free Poland, not only in establishing it but also in preserving it. That, gentlemen, is the main thing!”

And amid the jubilant cry of the windbags of the Centres: Very brave! Excellent! the victory-drunken history researcher leaves the tribune. To present the new partition of Poland as a boon for the Polish peasants – this surprisingly insane twist could not fail to move to tears the mass of good-naturedness and love of humanity assembled in the Centre of the Assembly!

Then comes Herr Goeden of Krotoszyn, a German-Pole of the purest water. After him Herr Senff of Inowroclaw appears, a fine specimen of a “Netzbrother”, a man without guile, who had had himself inscribed against the committee’s motion and spoke in favour of it, so that a speaker against the motion was swindled out of his turn to speak.

The way in which the gentlemen “Netzbrothers” appear here is the drollest comedy in the world, and once again shows what a genuine Prussian is capable of. We all know that the profit-greedy Jewish-Prussian intriguers from Posen fought the Poles in the most intimate harmony with the bureaucracy, with the royal Prussian officer corps and with the Markish and Pomeranian Junkers, in short with everything that was reactionary, Old-Prussian. The betrayal of Poland was the first raising of the shield of the counter-revolution, and no one was more counter-revolutionary than precisely the gentlemen “Netzbrothers”.

And now see these Prussian-fanatical schoolmasters and officials, with God for King and Fatherland, here in Frankfurt, how they declare their counter-revolutionary betrayal of Polish democracy to be a revolution, a real and genuine revolution in the name of the sovereign “Netzbrotherhood”, how they trample on historical right and over the alleged corpse of Poland exclaim: Only the living have right!

But such is the Prussian: on the Spree by the grace of God, on the Warta a sovereign people; on the Spree a pöbel insurrection, on the Warta revolution; on the Spree historical right that has no date at all, on the Warta the right of the living fact that dates from yesterday – and for all that, without guile, honest and brave in the faithful Prussian heart!

Let us hear Herr Goeden.

"For a second time we are called upon to defend a cause of such significance, of such momentous importance for our fatherland that, had it not already vindicated itself to us as a thoroughly legal cause (!), it would necessarily have to be made such (!!) Our right has its roots less in the past than in the hot pulsations (and especially the butt-strokes) of the present. The Polish peasant and burgher felt themselves placed by the (Prussian) seizure in a state of security and well-being such as they had never known (especially not since the Polish-Prussian wars and the partitions of Poland).
The violation of justice inherent in the partition of Poland has been fully atoned for by the humanity of your (the German) people (and especially by the cudgellings of the Prussian officials), by its industry (on stolen and donated Polish landed property), and in April of this year also by its blood!" The blood of Herr Goeden of Krotoszyn! "The revolution is our right, and by virtue of the same we are here! The titles establishing our lawful incorporation into Germany consist no longer in yellowed parchments; we have not been acquired by marriage, not by inheritance, not by purchase or barter; we are Germans and belong to our fatherland because a rational, legal, a sovereign will drives us to it, a will conditioned by our geographical position, our language and custom, our number (!) our property, but above all by our German sentiment and our love of the fatherland. Our rights are so secure, so deeply rooted in the modern consciousness of the world, that it does not even require a German heart to recognise them!"
Long live the sovereign will of the Prussian-Jewish Netze brotherhood, resting on the modern consciousness of the world, supported by the shrapnel revolution, rooted in the hot pulsations of the martial-law present! Long live the Germanism of the Posen bureaucratic salaries, of the robbery of church and starosty estates, and of the cash advances à la Flottwell! After the declamatory knight of the higher entitlement comes the impudent Netze brother. For Herr Senff of Inowroclaw, even the Stenzel motion is still too polite towards the Poles, and he therefore proposes a somewhat coarser wording. With the same effrontery he displayed in having himself put down as a speaker against the motion under this pretext, he declared that it was a heaven-crying injustice to exclude the people of Posen from the vote; "I believe the deputies from Posen are especially called upon to vote, for it is precisely the most important rights of those who sent us here that are at stake."
Herr Senff then goes into the history of Poland since the first partition and enriched it with a series of deliberate falsifications and glaring untruths, in the face of which Herr Stenzel stands forth as the most lamentable bungler. Everything tolerable that exists in Posen owes its origin to the Prussian government and the Netze brothers. "The Grand Duchy of Warsaw came into being. Polish officials took the place of Prussian ones, and by 1814 scarcely a trace was any longer perceptible of the good things the Prussian government had done for these provinces."
Herr Senff is right. Neither of the bondage, nor of the budgeted payments of Polish districts to Prussian educational institutions, e.g. for the University of Halle, nor of the extortions and brutalities of Prussian officials ignorant of Polish was "any longer a trace perceptible". But Poland was not yet lost, for Prussia flourished again by the grace of Russia, and Posen came once more to Prussia. "From then on the endeavours of the Prussian government, directed at improving the conditions of the Province of Posen, were renewed."
Whoever wishes to know more about this should read Flottwell's memorandum of 1841. Until 1830 the government did absolutely nothing. Flottwell found no more than four miles of paved road in the entire Grand Duchy! And are we to enumerate Flottwell's benefactions? Herr Flottwell, a cunning bureaucrat, sought to bribe the Poles by building roads, making rivers navigable, draining marshes, etc., etc.; but he bribed them not with the money of the Prussian government but with their own money. All those improvements were carried out mainly from private or district funds; and if the government here and there contributed some money, it was only the smallest part of the sums it drew from the province in taxes and from the revenue of the Polish national and church domains. Furthermore, the Poles owe to Herr Flottwell not only the continuation of the suspension of the election of Landräte by the districts (since 1826), but also specifically the slow expropriation of Polish landowners through government purchases of auctioned knights' estates, which were resold only to German loyalists (cabinet order of 1833). A final benefaction of Flottwell's administration was the improvement of the school system. But this was again a measure of Prussianisation. The higher schools were to Prussianise the young noblemen and future Catholic clergy, the lower schools the peasants, by means of Prussian teachers. What was meant as regards the educational institutions was betrayed by the Bromberg district president, Herr Wallach, in an unguarded outburst; he wrote to the chief president, Herr Beurmann, that the Polish language was a major obstacle to the spread of education and prosperity among the rural population! Quite correct, of course, if the schoolmaster understands no Polish. – Besides, who paid for these schools was again the Poles themselves, for 1) most of the most important institutes, though not those exactly serving Prussianisation, were founded and endowed from private contributions or by the provincial estates, and 2) even the Prussianisation schools were maintained from the revenues of the monasteries secularised on 31 March 1833, and the state treasury granted only 21,000 talers annually for 10 years. – For the rest, Herr Flottwell concedes that all reforms emanated from the Poles themselves. That the greatest benefactions of the Prussian government consisted in the collection of considerable rents and taxes and in the employment of young men for Prussian military service, Herr Flottwell conceals no less than Herr Senff. In short, all the benefactions of the Prussian government boil down to the provision of posts for Prussian non-commissioned officers in Posen, whether as drill-masters, schoolmasters, gendarmes or tax collectors. We cannot go further into the other groundless aspersions cast upon the Poles or the false statistical information provided by Herr Senff. Enough, Herr Senff speaks solely in order to make the Poles odious before the Assembly. There follows Herr Robert Blum. As usual, he delivers a so-called solid lecture, i.e. a lecture that contains more sentiment than reasons, and more declamation than sentiment, and which moreover, as a piece of declamation, we must confess, produces no greater effect than the modern consciousness of the world of Herr Goeden of Krotoszyn. Poland, the bulwark against northern barbarism – – if the Poles have vices, that is the fault of their oppressors – – old Gagern declares the partition of Poland to be the nightmare that weighs upon our age – – the Poles love their fatherland warmly and we could take a lesson from it – – dangers threatening from Russia – – – – if now the red republic were to triumph in Paris and seek to liberate Poland by force of arms, what then, gentlemen? – – Let us be impartial, etc., etc. We are sorry for Herr Blum, but if one strips all these fine things of their declamatory tinsel, nothing remains but the most banal philistine twaddle, even if, which we readily concede, philistine twaddle on a grand scale and in a sublime strain. Even when Herr Blum opines that the National Assembly must, consistently, proceed in Schleswig, Bohemia, Italian Tyrol, the Russian Baltic provinces, and Alsace according to the same principle as in Posen, that is a reason which has validity only against the thoughtless nationality lies and the comfortable inconsistency of the majority. And when he opines that only with an already existing Poland can Germany negotiate in a decent manner regarding Posen, we shall not deny that, but we must nevertheless remark that this single cogent reason in his speech has already been developed a hundred times, and far better, by the Poles themselves, whereas in Herr Blum's presentation it is shot off as a blunt rhetorical arrow, with "moderation and gentle forbearance", fruitlessly against the hardened breast of the majority. Herr Blum is right when he says that shrapnel shells are not arguments, but he is wrong, and he knows it, when he adopts an impartial "moderate" higher standpoint. Whether Herr Blum is unclear on the Polish question is his own fault. But that he 1) believes he can get the majority to do so much as ask the central authority for a report, and 2) imagines that through the report of these central authority ministers, who on the occasion of 6 August grovelled so ignominiously before Prussian sovereignty lusts – that through the report of these ministers he will gain even the slightest thing, that is bad for Herr Blum. If one wishes to sit on the "decided Left", the first requirement is to cast aside all gentle forbearance and to renounce achieving anything at all, however small, with the majority. On the whole, in the Polish question as always, almost the entire Left indulges in declamations or even in fantastic day-dreams, without entering in the slightest on the factual material, on the practical content of the question. And yet just here the material was so abundant, the facts so striking. Of course, that requires one to study the question, and one can naturally spare oneself that once one has passed through the purgatory of election and is no longer accountable to any human being. We shall come back to the few exceptions in the course of the debate. Tomorrow a little word with Herr Wilhelm Jordan, who is no exception, but this time runs with the great crowd in the literal sense, and for reasons.
(To be continued.)
Neue Rheinische Zeitung. No. 86, 26 August 1848
** Cologne, 25 August. The Polish Debate in Frankfurt. (Continuation.)
At last, thank God, we leave the flat, sandy plain of everyday philistine twaddle to enter the sublimer Alpine regions of the great debate! At last we ascend that cloud-cleaving summit where the eagles nest, where man gazes the divine eye to eye, from whence he looks down contemptuously on the tiny worms that writhe deep, deep below with the few arguments of ordinary common sense! At last, after the skirmishes of a Blum with a Stenzel, a Goeden, a Senff of Inowroclaw, the great battle opens, in which Ariostan heroes strew the bare field with the lance-splinters of their mind! The ranks of the combatants open reverentially, and with brandished sword Herr Wilhelm Jordan of Berlin gallops forward. Who is Herr Wilhelm Jordan of Berlin? Herr Wilhelm Jordan of Berlin was, at the time of the flowering of German literarydom, a man of letters in Königsberg. Semi-clandestine gatherings were held at the Böttchershöfchen; Herr Wilhelm Jordan went there, read a poem: The Ferryman and His God, and was expelled. Herr Wilhelm Jordan of Berlin went to Berlin. There student gatherings were held. Herr Wilhelm Jordan read a poem: The Ferryman and His God, and was expelled. Herr

Wilhelm Jordan of Berlin went to Leipzig. There, too, there were some innocent gatherings. Herr Wilhelm Jordan read out a poem: *Der Schiffer und sein Gott*, and was expelled. Herr Wilhelm Jordan subsequently published several writings: a poem, *Glocke und Kanone*; a collection of Lithuanian folk songs, including some of his own manufacture, namely self-composed Polish songs; translations of George Sand, a journal, the unfathomable “*begriffene Welt*” [Comprehended World], etc., in the service of the justly renowned Herr Otto Wigand, who has not yet got as far as his French original, Herr Pagnerre; furthermore a translation of Lelewel’s *Histoire de Pologne* with a preface gushing with enthusiasm for Poland, etc. The revolution came. En un lugar de la Mancha cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme – in a place in the German Mancha, the March of Brandenburg, where the Don Quixotes grow, a place whose name I cannot recall, Herr Wilhelm Jordan of Berlin presented himself as a candidate for the German National Assembly. The peasants of the district were genially constitutional. Herr Wilhelm Jordan delivered several penetrating speeches, full of the most constitutional geniality. The enchanted peasants elected the great man as their deputy. Hardly arrived in Frankfurt, the noble unaccountable seats himself on the “decided” Left and votes with the republicans. The peasants, who in their capacity as electors had engendered this parliamentary Don Quixote, send him a vote of no confidence, remind him of his promises, recall him. But Herr Wilhelm Jordan considers himself bound by his word as little as a king, and continues, at every opportunity, to let his *Glocke und Kanone* resound in the assembly. Every time Herr Wilhelm Jordan mounted the rostrum of St Paul’s Church, he has basically only read out one poem: *Der Schiffer und sein Gott* – whereby, however, it is not said that he would thereby have deserved to be expelled. Let us listen to the latest peal of bells and the newest cannon thunder of the great Wilhelm Jordan on Poland. “I believe, rather, that we must rise to the world-historical standpoint, from which the Posen affair must be examined in its significance as an episode of the great Polish drama.” With one jerk, the mighty Herr Wilhelm Jordan heaves us high above the clouds, onto the snow-covered, heaven-storming Chimborazo of the “world-historical standpoint” and opens up to us the most immeasurable prospect. But first he disports himself for a moment on the everyday terrain of the “specific” deliberation, and with much success. A few samples: “Later it (the Netze District) came to Prussia through the Treaty of Warsaw (i.e., the first partition), and has remained with Prussia ever since, if one disregards the brief intermediate existence of the Duchy of Warsaw.” Herr Jordan speaks here of the Netze District in contrast to the rest of Posen. He, the knight of the world-historical standpoint, the connoisseur of Polish history, the translator of Lelewel – what source does he follow here? None other than the speech of Herr Senff of Inowroclaw! He follows it so closely that he even entirely forgets that the remaining, Greater Polish part of Posen also “came to Prussia” in 1794 “and has remained with Prussia ever since, if one disregards the brief intermediate existence of the Duchy of Warsaw.” But the Netze brother Senff had not spoken of that, and therefore the “world-historical standpoint” knows no better than that the administrative district of Posen “came to Prussia” only in 1815. “Furthermore, the western districts: Birnbaum, Meseritz, Bomst, Fraustadt have from time immemorial, as you can already deduce from the names of these towns, been German in the overwhelming majority of their inhabitants.” And the district of Miedzychod, Herr Jordan, was “from time immemorial, as you can already deduce from the name, Polish in the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants,” is that not so, Herr Jordan? The district of Miedzychod, however, is none other than the district of Birnbaum. The town is called Miedzychod in Polish. What a support these etymological reunion chambers of the “world-historical standpoint” will find in the Christian-Germanic Herr Leo! Not to mention that Milan, Liège, Geneva, Copenhagen, “as you can already deduce from the names, have been German from time immemorial”; does the “world-historical standpoint” not also “deduce from the names” the immemorial Germanity of Haimons-Eichicht, Wälsch-Leyden, Jenau and Kaltenfelde? The world-historical standpoint will, of course, be at a loss to find these immemorially German names on the map, and it owes it solely to Herr Leo, who fabricated them himself, when it learns that they refer to Le Quesnoi, Lyon, Genoa and Campo Freddo. What will the world-historical standpoint say when the French presently reclaim Cologne, Coblence, Mayence and Francfort as immemorially French territory, and then woe to the world-historical standpoint! However, let us dwell no longer on these petites misères de la vie humaine, which have also happened to greater men. Let us follow Herr Wilhelm Jordan of Berlin into the higher regions of his flight. There we read of the Poles: “one loves them all the more, the further one is from them and the less one knows them, and all the less, the closer one approaches them,” and therefore “this affection rests not so much on a real merit of the Polish character as on a certain cosmopolitan idealism.” But how will the world-historical standpoint explain that the peoples of the earth neither “when one distances oneself from” another people nor when one “approaches it” do they “hold it dear”; that with rare unanimity they despise this people, exploit it, mock it and trample it underfoot? This people are the Germans. The world-historical standpoint will say this rests on a “cosmopolitan materialism,” and thereby it is saved. But unperturbed by such small objections, the world-historical eagle swings its wings ever more boldly, ever higher, until at last, in the pure ether of the idea existing in and for itself, it breaks out into the following heroic-world-historical-Hegelian hymn: “One may readily grant the right to history, which, on the course prescribed to it by necessity, crushes a nationality that is no longer strong enough to sustain itself among nations of equal birth, always inexorably with iron foot; yet it would be inhuman and barbarous to seal oneself off from all sympathy at the sight of the long passion of such a people, and I am far removed from such callousness. (God will not leave you unrewarded, noble Jordan!) But it is one thing to be seized by a tragedy, and another to wish, as it were, to reverse this tragedy. Only the iron necessity to which the hero succumbs makes his fate a true tragedy, and to intervene in the course of this fate, to attempt out of human sympathy to halt the rolling wheel of history and turn it back once more – that would mean exposing oneself to the danger of being crushed by it. To wish to restore Poland simply because its downfall fills one with righteous grief – that I call a feeble-minded sentimentality!” What a wealth of ideas! What depth of wisdom! What a soaring language! Thus speaks the world-historical standpoint, after it has subsequently improved its stenographic speeches. The Poles have the choice: if they wish to play a “true tragedy,” they must let themselves be crushed humbly under the iron foot and the rolling wheel of history and say to Nicholas: Lord, thy will be done! Or if they wish to rebel and see whether they, too, might not once place the “iron foot of history” on the necks of their oppressors, then they are playing no “true tragedy” and Herr Wilhelm Jordan of Berlin can take no further interest in them. Thus speaks the world-historical standpoint, aesthetically cultivated by Professor Rosenkranz. In what did the inexorable, iron necessity consist that momentarily annihilated Poland? In the decay of the nobility democracy based on serfdom, i.e., in the rise of a great aristocracy within the nobility. That was a step forward, insofar as it was the only way to get out of the obsolete condition of nobility democracy. What was the consequence? That the iron foot of history, i.e., the three autocrats of the East, crushed Poland. The aristocracy was forced to ally with foreign powers in order to deal with the nobility democracy. The Polish aristocracy remained, until quite recently, indeed partly up to the present day, the faithful confederate of Poland’s crushers. And in what does the inexorable, the iron necessity consist that Poland must liberate itself again? In that the rule of the aristocracy in Poland, which since 1815 has not ceased, at least in Posen and Galicia, and partly even in Russian Poland, is today just as obsolete and undermined as the democracy of the lesser nobility was in 1772; in that the restoration of agrarian democracy has become for Poland not only a political but also a social vital question; in that the source of existence of the Polish people, agriculture, perishes if the serf or the peasant subject to forced labour does not become a free landed proprietor; in that the agrarian revolution is impossible without the simultaneous conquest of the national existence, of the possession of the Baltic coast and the mouths of the Polish rivers. And that is what Herr Jordan of Berlin calls: wanting to halt the rolling wheel of history and turn it back once more! To be sure, the old Poland of the nobility democracy is long since dead and buried, and only Herr Jordan can expect anyone to reverse the “true tragedy” of this Poland; but this “hero” of the tragedy has begotten a robust son, whose closer acquaintance may well fill many a foppish Berlin littérateur with a shudder; and this son, who is only now preparing to stage his drama and to lay hands on the “rolling wheel of history,” but whose victory is certain – this son is the Poland of the peasant democracy. A little worn-out belletristic pomp, a little affected world-contempt – which in Hegel was audacity, in Herr Jordan becomes a cheap, trite silliness – in short, a little *Glocke* and a little *Kanone*, sound and smoke arranged in wretched sentences, plus a nameless confusion and ignorance of the ordinary historical conditions – to that the whole world-historical standpoint is reduced! Long live the world-historical standpoint with its comprehended world! (To be continued.) Neue Rheinische Zeitung. No. 90, August 31, 1848 ** Cologne, August 26. – The Polish debate in Frankfurt. Second day. The second day of battle presents a picture more grandiose still than the first. To be sure, we lack a Wilhelm Jordan of Berlin, whose lips enchain the hearts of all listeners; but let us be content: a Radowitz, a Wartensleben, a Kerst and a Rodomont-Lichnowski are not to be despised either. Herr Radowitz mounts the tribune first. The chief of the Right speaks briefly, decisively, calculatingly. No more declamation than is strictly necessary. False premises, but tightly compressed, rapidly successive conclusions from these premises. Appeal to the fear of the Right. Cold-blooded certainty of success, based on the cowardice of the majority. Thorough contempt for the whole assembly, Right and Left alike. Such are the basic features of the short speech which Herr

Radowitz has delivered, and we quite understand the effect which these icy and unpretentious few words were bound to produce in an assembly accustomed to hearing the most pompous and hollow rhetorical exercises. Herr Wilhelm Jordan of Berlin would be happy if, with all his “conceptualised” and un-conceptualised world of images, he had produced only a tenth of the effect that Herr Radowitz produced with his short and, at bottom, equally vacuous speech. Herr Radowitz is no “character”, no worthy man of conviction, but he is a figure with sharp, definite contours, of whom one need read only a single speech to know him completely. We have never coveted the honour of being the organ of any parliamentary Left. On the contrary, given the manifold diverse elements of which the democratic party in Germany has been formed, we have considered it urgently necessary to keep a sharper watch on no one than precisely on the democrats. And in view of the lack of energy, decisiveness, talent and knowledge that confronts us, with very few exceptions, among the leaders of all parties, we must be pleased to find in Herr Radowitz at least an adversary of equal standing.

After Herr Radowitz, Herr Schuselka. Despite all preceding warnings, still a moving appeal to the heart. An infinitely diffuse lecture, interrupted by rare historical objections and here and there by a little Austrian practical sense. The general impression is exhausting. Herr Schuselka has gone to Vienna, where he has also been elected to the Diet. There he is in his element. If in Frankfurt he sat on the Left, there he will fall in with the Centre; if in Frankfurt he could play a certain role, in Vienna he makes a fiasco with his first speech. That is the fate of all those belletristic, philosophical and public-house politicians who have used the revolution only to obtain positions for themselves; place them for a moment on genuinely revolutionary ground, and in the twinkling of an eye they have vanished.

Next comes the ci-devant Count v. Wartensleben. Herr Wartensleben steps forward as a comfortable, benevolently gushing worthy man, tells anecdotes about his march as a militiaman to the Polish frontier in 1830, turns into a Sancho Panza by shouting proverbs at the Poles: a sparrow in the hand is better than a hundred on the roof, and in the process manages, with all innocence, to smuggle in the perfidious remark: “How does it come about that not even Polish officials could be found who were willing to undertake the reorganisation in the part to be ceded? I fear they are afraid of themselves; they feel that they are not yet so far advanced as to be able to organise the population peacefully, and for this reason they only adduce the pretence that it is love of their fatherland for Poland which prevents them from even laying the seed for a joyful resurrection!” In other words, the Poles have been fighting for eighty years, sacrificing their lives and their property unceasingly for a cause which they themselves regard as impossible and absurd. Finally, Herr Wartensleben is of the same opinion as Herr Radowitz.

Herr Janiszewski from Posen, a member of the Posen National Committee, mounts the tribune. Herr Janiszewski’s speech is the first piece of genuine parliamentary eloquence that has been delivered from the tribune of St. Paul’s. At long last we hear a speaker who does not merely angle for the applause of the hall, who speaks the language of real, living passion, and who for that very reason produces an entirely different effect from all the speakers before him. Blum’s appeal to the conscience of the Assembly, Jordan’s cheap bombast, Radowitz’s cold consistency, Schuselka’s genial diffuseness are all equally eclipsed by this Pole who defends the existence of his nation and demands back his good right. Janiszewski speaks with agitation, passionately, but he does not declaim; he merely presents the facts with the righteous indignation which alone can furnish a true depiction of such facts, and which is doubly righteous after the shameless distortions that have been put forward in the debate so far. His speech, which in fact constitutes the centre of the debate, refutes all previous attacks on the Poles, makes good all the errors of the friends of Poland, brings the debate back to its sole practical and correct ground, and cuts the ground from under the most resonant arguments of the subsequent speakers of the Right from the very outset. “You have swallowed the Poles, but, by God, you will never digest them!” This striking summing-up of Janiszewski’s speech will endure, as will the pride with which, in rejection of all the importunate begging of the friends of Poland, he declares: “I do not come to you as a beggar; I come with my good right; I do not appeal to sympathies, only to justice.”

After Herr Janiszewski comes Herr Director Kerst from Posen. After the Pole who fights for the existence, for the social and political freedom of his people, comes the Prussian schoolmaster who immigrated to Posen and fights for his salary. After the noble, indignant passion of the oppressed, comes the barefaced impudence of the bureaucrat who lives off oppression. The partition of Poland, “which today is called a disgrace”, was in its time “a quite ordinary event”. “The right of peoples to separate according to nationalities is a brand-new right, recognised nowhere.” “In politics only the factual state of possession decides.” These are some of the sledge-hammer pronouncements on which Herr Kerst bases his argument. Then follow the crudest contradictions: “With Posen there has come to Germany a tract of land which, it is true, is predominantly Polish” – and not long afterwards: “As regards the Polish part of Posen, it has not requested annexation to Germany and, as far as I know, you, gentlemen, have no intention of taking in this part against its will.” To this he links statistical data on the population ratios – data based on the famous counts of the Netzbrüder, according to which only those who do not understand German count as Poles, and all those who mangle a bit of German count as Germans. And finally a highly artificial calculation in which he works out that, in the vote of the Posen provincial diet, the minority of 17 against 26, which voted for annexation to Germany, was actually the majority. “According to provincial law, a majority of two-thirds is indeed required for it to be able to pass a resolution. Now, it is true that 17 is not quite two-thirds of 26, but the fraction by which it falls short is so small that it can hardly be of any account in so serious a question.”!! So if the minority is two-thirds of the majority, it is, “according to provincial law”, the majority! Old Prussianism will crown Herr Kerst for this discovery. – In fact, the matter stands thus: In order to make a motion, two-thirds of the votes had to be in favour of it. Admission into the German Confederation was such a motion. Thus admission was only legally moved once two-thirds of the Assembly, two-thirds of the 43 voters, had voted in favour of it. Instead, almost two-thirds voted against it. But what use is that? 17 is indeed nearly “two-thirds of 43”! That the Poles are no such “cultivated” nation as the citizens of the “State of Intelligence” is very understandable when the State of Intelligence gives them such master-arithmeticians as teachers.

Herr Clemens of Bonn makes the correct observation that what the Prussian government was concerned with was not Germanising Posen, but Prussianising it, and compares the attempts at the Prussianisation of Posen with the similar attempts in the Rhineland.

Herr Ostendorf of Soest. The son of the red earth reads out a repertory of political platitudes and public-house gossip, indulges in possibilities, probabilities and conjectures that ramble from the hundredth to the thousandth, from Herr Jordan to the French, from the red republic to the redskins of North America, with whom he places the Poles on a par, just as the Netzbrüder do with the Yankees. A bold parallel, worthy of the red earth! Herr Kerst, Herr Senff, Herr Goeden as backwoodsmen with log cabin, rifle and spade – what incomparable comedy!

Herr Franz Schmidt of Löwenberg mounts the tribune. He speaks calmly and without ostentation, which is all the more to be appreciated as Herr Schmidt belongs to a class that otherwise loves declamation above all things, the class of German-Catholic clergymen. Herr Schmidt, whose speech is in any event the best after Janiszewski’s, because it is the most trenchant and the most expert in the whole debate, demonstrates to the committee that behind its ostensible display of erudition (the substance of which we have examined) there lies concealed the most boundless ignorance of the actual conditions before it. Herr Schmidt has lived for years in the Grand Duchy of Posen and shows the committee, even for the small district he knows more intimately, its grossest blunders. He shows how the committee has left the Assembly without enlightenment precisely on all the decisive points, how it positively calls upon the latter to decide in the blue, without any material, without any knowledge of the matter. He demands above all enlightenment on the factual state of affairs. He proves how the committee proposals contradict their own assumptions; he cites Flottwell’s memorandum and calls on him, who is also present as a deputy, to step forward if this document is spurious. Finally he denounces to the public how the Netzbrüder went to Gagern and sought to move him, by the false news of an uprising that had broken out in Posen, to bring the debate to a swift close. Gagern does indeed deny this, but Herr Kerst has loudly boasted of it. The majority has taken its revenge on Herr Schmidt for this courageous speech by taking care that it is falsified in the stenographic reports. In one place Herr Schmidt himself corrected the nonsense that had been written in three times, and yet it has remained in the printed version. Drumming against Schlöffel, open violence against Brentano, falsification against Schmidt – in truth, the gentlemen of the Right are fine critics! Herr Lichnowski closes the sitting. This friend, however, we reserve for the next article; a speaker of Herr Lichnowski’s calibre is not to be broken over one’s knee! (To be continued.)

Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Nr. 91, 1. September 1848
** Köln, 31. August. Die Polendebatte in Frankfurt. (Fortsetzung.)

Striding onto the tribune with knightly-gallant bearing and a self-satisfied smile comes the bel-homme of the Assembly, the German Bayard without fear and without reproach, the ex-prince (Article 6 of the Fundamental Rights) von Lychnowski. In the purest accents of a Prussian lieutenant and with disdainful nonchalance he delivers the few chips of ideas he has to offer the Assembly. The handsome knight constitutes a thoroughly necessary element in this debate. Anyone who has not yet been sufficiently convinced by Messrs. Goeden, Senff and Kerst of what respectable people the Germano-Poles are, can see from the knight Lychnowski what an unaesthetic phenomenon – the spruce figure notwithstanding – the Prussianised Slav is. Herr Lychnowski is the stem-kindred of the Germano-Poles; by his mere appearance on the tribune he completes the documentary record. The szlachcic from the marshlands of the Water Polacks, absorbed into the Prussian cabbage-squire, furnishes us with a living exemplar of what the benevolent Prussian government intends to make of the nobility of Posen.

Herr Lychnowski, despite all his protestations, is no German; he is a “reorganised” Pole; nor does he speak German, but Prussian. Herr Lychnowski begins by protesting his most chivalrous sympathy for the Poles, pays compliments to Herr Janiszewski, claims for the Poles “the great poetry of martyrdom”, and then suddenly changes tack: Why has this sympathy diminished? Because in all insurrections and revolutions “the Poles were in the first rank on the barricades”! That is certainly a crime which will no longer occur once the Poles are “reorganised”; we may, moreover, give Herr Lychnowski the reassuring assurance that even among the “Polish emigration”, even among the Polish nobility in exile, which according to him has sunk so low, there are people who have kept themselves wholly unstained by any contact with barricades. Now follows an amusing scene. Lychnowski: “The gentlemen of the Left, who trample yellowed parchments underfoot, have conjured up historical right in a striking manner. There is no right that can lay claim to a particular date for the Polish cause more than any other. For historical right there is no date.” (Great laughter from the Left.)
“For historical right there is no date.” (Great laughter from the Left.)
President: “Gentlemen, do let the speaker finish the sentence; do not interrupt him.”
Lychnowski: “Historical right has no date.” (Laughter from the Left.)
President: “I must ask that the speaker not be interrupted, I must ask for quiet!” (Tumult.)
Lychnowski: “There is no date for historical right (Bravo and hilarity from the Left) which could claim a greater right vis-à-vis an earlier date!”
Were we not right to say that the noble knight speaks not German but Prussian? Historical right, which has no date, finds a terrible opponent in our noble paladin: “If we go back further in history, we find (in Posen) many districts that were Silesian and German; if we go still further back, we come to the time when Leipzig and Dresden were built by Slavs, and then we come to Tacitus and God knows where the gentlemen would lead us if we entered upon this subject.”
The world must be in a bad way. The estates of the Prussian knighthood must be irretrievably mortgaged, the Jewish creditors must have become terribly pressing, the due dates of the promissory notes must be piling up, foreclosure, arrest for debt, dismissal from the service for reckless borrowing—all these terrors of pale financial distress must be threatening the Prussian knighthood with ineluctable ruin before it could come to pass that a Lychnowski should attack the same historical right for which he earned his knightly spurs at the round table of a Don Carlos! To be sure, God knows where the gentlemen bailiffs would lead the meagre knighthood if we were to enter upon the subject of historical debt law! And yet, are not the debts the best, the only exculpating quality of the Prussian paladins?
Turning to his subject, the bel homme opined that, vis-à-vis the German Poles, one should not “step forward with the nebulous image of a Poland lying in the most distant darkness (!)”; he thinks the Poles would not content themselves with Posen: “If I had the honour to be a Pole, I should think every morning and every evening of restoring the old Kingdom of Poland.” But since Herr Lychnowski does not “have the honour”, since he is merely a reorganised water-Polack, he thinks “every morning and every evening” of quite other, less patriotic things. “To be honest, I must say that some 100,000 Poles must become Germans, which, speaking frankly, would be no misfortune for them either, given present circumstances.”
On the contrary, how splendid if the Prussian government were to lay out a new nursery to grow still more of the wood from which the Lychnowskis are cut.
In the same amiable-nonchalant manner, calculated fundamentally for the ladies in the gallery but still good enough for the Assembly itself, the moustache-twirling knight chatters on for a while and then concludes:
“I have nothing more to say; decide now; take 500,000 Germans in among us, or give them away, ... but then strike out the song of our old folk bard: So far as the German tongue resounds and God in heaven sings songs. Strike out this song!”
It is certainly a pity that old Arndt, in his song, did not think of the Polish Jews and their German. But fortunately our Upper Silesian paladin is at hand. Who does not know the old obligations of the nobility towards the Jews, obligations grown venerable in the course of centuries? What the old plebeian overlooked, Knight Lychnowski remembers. As far as a Polish Jew jabbers in German,
Lends at usury, falsifies coin and weight,
so far extends the fatherland of Herr Lychnowski! (Conclusion follows.)
Neue Rheinische Zeitung. No. 93, September 3, 1848
** Cologne, September 2. The Debate on Poland in Frankfurt. Third Day. The third day of the debate shows general exhaustion. The arguments repeat themselves without improving, and if the first honoured speaker, Citizen Arnold Ruge, did not bring forth his rich treasure of new reasons, the stenographic record would be completely soporific. Citizen Ruge [knows] his merits, however, better than anyone else. He promises: “All the passion I possess and all the knowledge I command, I intend to apply.” He moves a motion that is no ordinary motion, no motion in general, but the sole correct motion, the true motion, the absolute motion: “There is nothing else to be moved or admissible. One can do something else, gentlemen, for it is given to man to deviate from the correct. In deviating from the correct, man has a free will... yet that does not mean that the correct ceases to be correct. And in our case, what I move is the sole correct thing that can be done.” (Citizen Ruge, then, on this occasion sacrifices his “free will” to the “correct”.)
Let us look more closely at the passion, the knowledge, and the sole correct thing of Citizen Ruge. “The abolition of Poland is therefore a disgraceful wrong, because a valuable development of the nation was suppressed, a nation that has earned great services for the European family of peoples and that had developed a phase of medieval existence, the chivalric order, into a brilliant form. The republic of the nobility was interrupted by despotism in carrying out its own internal (!) abolition, which would have been possible through the constitution that was initiated during the revolutionary period.”
The South French nationality was, in the Middle Ages, no more closely related to the North French than the Polish is today to the Russian. The South French, or Provençal nation, had in the Middle Ages not only a “valuable development”, it even stood at the head of European development. It was the first of all modern nations to possess a cultivated language. Its poetry served all the Romance peoples, and even the Germans and the English, as a model then unsurpassed. In the cultivation of feudal chivalry it vied with the Castilians, the North French, and the English Normans; in industry and commerce it was in no way inferior to the Italians. Not only “one phase of medieval existence” developed “into a brilliant form”; it even produced, in the depths of the Middle Ages, a reflection of ancient Hellenism. The South French nation therefore not only earned “great” but infinite “services for the European family of peoples”. Nevertheless, like Poland, it was first partitioned between North France and England, and later wholly subjugated by the North French. From the Albigensian wars down to Louis XI the North French, who were every bit as far behind their southern neighbours in culture as the Russians are behind the Poles, waged uninterrupted wars of subjugation against the South French and ended with the subjugation of the entire country. The South French “republic of the nobility” (the name is entirely correct for its period of florescence) “was interrupted by despotism (that of Louis XI) in carrying out its own internal abolition”, which would have been at least as possible through the development of the burgher class of the towns as that of the Polish republic would have been through the Constitution of 1791. For centuries the South French struggled against their oppressors. But historical development was inexorable. After three hundred years of struggle their beautiful language was reduced to a patois, and they themselves had become Frenchmen. North French despotism over South France lasted three hundred years, and only then did the North French make their oppression good again – by destroying the last remnants of South French independence. The Constituent Assembly smashed the independent provinces; the iron fist of the Convention first turned the inhabitants of southern France into Frenchmen and, as compensation for their nationality, gave them democracy. But during the three hundred years of oppression, what Citizen Ruge says of the Poles applies to them word for word: “The despotism of Russia did not liberate the Poles; the destruction of the Polish nobility and the banishment of so many noble families from Poland, all this has founded no democracy, no humane existence in Russia.”
And yet the oppression of South France by the North French has never been called “a disgraceful wrong”. How is that, Citizen Ruge? Either the oppression of South France is a disgraceful wrong, or the oppression of Poland is not a disgraceful wrong. Citizen Ruge may choose.
But wherein lies the difference between the Poles and the South French? Why was South France, until the complete destruction of its nationality, taken in tow by the North French as helpless ballast, while Poland has every prospect of standing very soon at the head of all Slav tribes?
South France became – as a result of social conditions which we cannot develop further here – the reactionary part of France. Its opposition to North France very soon became opposition to the progressive classes of the whole of France. It became the chief stronghold of feudalism and has remained to this day the strength of the counter-revolution of France.
Poland, on the other hand, became – as a result of social conditions which we have developed above (No. 81) – the revolutionary part of Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Its opposition to its oppressors was at the same time opposition to the high aristocracy in Poland itself. Even the nobility, which in part still stood on feudal ground, joined the democratic-agrarian revolution with unexampled self-sacrifice. Poland had already become the hearth of East European democracy when Germany was still groping about in the flattest constitutional ideology and the most extravagant philosophical ideology.
In that, and not in the brilliant development of the long-buried chivalric order, lies the guarantee, the inevitability, of the restoration of Poland. But Herr...

Ruge has yet a second argument for the necessity of an independent Poland in the “European family of nations”:

“The violence that has been perpetrated against Poland, this violence has scattered the Poles all over Europe, they have been flung everywhere with their anger at the wrong suffered ... the Polish spirit has been humanised and purified in France, in Germany (!?) ... the Polish emigration has become the propaganda of freedom (No. 1.) ... The Slavs have become capable of entering the great European family of nations (the ‘family’ is unavoidable!) because ... their emigration exercises a veritable apostolate of freedom (No. 2.) ... The entire Russian army (!!) is infected with the ideas of modern times by these apostles of freedom, the Poles (No. 3.) ... I respect the honourable sentiments of the Poles, which they have displayed everywhere in Europe in order to make propaganda for freedom by force (No. 4.) ... As long as history can speak, they will be honoured in it for having been the vanguard fighters (No. 5.), wherever they were such (!!!) ... The Poles are the element of freedom (No. 6.) that was thrown into Slavdom; they led the Slav Congress in Prague to freedom (No. 7.), they have been active in France, Russia and Germany. The Poles are thus an active element even in the present state of civilisation, they act well, and because they act well, because they are necessary, they are by no means dead.”

Citizen Ruge is supposed to prove that the Poles are 1) necessary and 2) not dead. He does this by saying: “because they are necessary, they are by no means dead.”

Take from the lengthy passage above, which says the same thing seven times over, the few words: Poles – element – freedom – propaganda – civilisation – apostolate, and see what remains of the whole bombast. Citizen Ruge is supposed to prove that the restoration of Poland is necessary. He proves this as follows: The Poles are not dead; on the contrary, they are very much alive, they act well, they are the apostles of freedom throughout Europe. How did they achieve this? The violence, the disgraceful wrong perpetrated against them, has scattered them all over Europe with their anger at the wrong suffered, their righteous revolutionary anger. They have “purified” this anger in exile, and this purified anger made them capable of the apostolate of freedom and put them “first of all on the barricades”. What follows from this? Take away the disgraceful wrong, the violence perpetrated, restore Poland, and the “anger” disappears; it can no longer be purified; the Poles go home and cease to be the “apostles of freedom”. If only the “anger at the wrong suffered” makes them revolutionaries, then the removal of the wrong will make them reactionaries. If the counter-pressure against oppression is the sole thing that keeps the Poles alive, then abolish the oppression, and they are dead. Citizen Ruge thus proves the exact opposite of what he wants to prove; his reasons lead to the conclusion that, in the interest of freedom and the European family of nations, Poland must not be restored.

By the way, it throws a peculiar light on the “knowledge” of Citizen Ruge that, in speaking of the Poles, he mentions only the emigration, sees only the emigration on the barricades. We are far from wishing to encroach upon the Polish emigration, which has proved its energy and courage on the battlefield and in eighteen years of conspiracy for Poland. But we cannot deny it: whoever knows the Polish emigration knows that it was by no means so apostolic for freedom and so addicted to barricades as Citizen Ruge, in good faith, repeats after ex-Prince Lychnowski. The Polish emigration has steadfastly endured, has suffered much and worked much for the restoration of Poland. But have the Poles in Poland itself done less, have they not defied greater dangers, have they not exposed themselves to the prisons of Moabit and Spielberg, to the knout and the Siberian mines, the Galician massacres and the Prussian shrapnels? But all this does not exist for Herr Ruge. He has just as little noticed how the non-emigrated Poles have absorbed the general European education far more, have recognised the needs of Poland, which they continuously inhabited, far better than almost the entire emigration, with the exception of Lelewel and Mieroslawski. Citizen Ruge attributes all the intelligence that exists in Poland, or, to use his language, that “has descended upon the Poles and entered into the Poles”, to their sojourn abroad. We demonstrated in No. 81 that the Poles did not need to seek the understanding of their country’s needs either from the French political enthusiasts, who since February have come to grief on their own phrases, nor from the German profound ideologists, who have as yet found no opportunity to come to grief; that Poland itself was the best school for learning what Poland needs. The merit of the Poles consists in having been the first to recognise and propagate agrarian democracy as the sole possible form of liberation for all Slav nations, and not, as Citizen Ruge imagines, in having “carried over to Poland and Russia general phrases, such as ‘the great idea of political freedom that ripened in France, and even (!) the philosophy that emerged in Germany (and in which Herr Ruge submerged)’”.

God preserve us from our friends – from our enemies we shall preserve ourselves – the Poles may exclaim after this speech by Citizen Ruge. But it has always been the greatest misfortune of the Poles to be defended by their non-Polish friends with the worst reasons in the world.

It speaks very much in favour of the Frankfurt Left that, with few exceptions, it was completely enchanted by Citizen Ruge’s speech on Poland – a speech in which it says: “We do not want to fall out over this, m̷y̷ g̷e̷n̷t̷l̷e̷m̷e̷n̷, whether we mean the democratic monarchy, the democratised monarchy (!) or pure democracy; by and large we want the same thing, freedom, popular freedom, the rule of the people!”

And we are supposed to be enthusiastic about a Left that is carried away when someone says that it wants “by and large the same thing” as the Right, as Herr Radowitz, Herr Lychnowski, Herr Vincke and the rest of the fat or lean knighthood? For a Left that is beside itself with rapture, that forgets everything as soon as it hears a few hollow catchwords such as “popular freedom” and “rule of the people”?

But let us leave the Left and return to Citizen Ruge.

“No greater revolution has yet passed over the globe than the revolution of 1848.”
“It is the most humane in its principles” – because these principles arose from the hushing up of the most contrary interests.
“The most humane in its decrees and proclamations” – because these are a compendium of the philanthropic effusions and sentimental phrases of fraternity from all the hollow-heads of Europe.
“The most humane in its existence” – namely, in the massacres and barbarities of Posen, in Radetzky’s murderous burnings, in the cannibalistic brutalities of the June victors in Paris, in the butcheries of Cracow and Prague, in the general rule of the soldiery, in short, in all the infamies that constitute the “existence” of this revolution today, 1 September 1848, and that have cost more blood in four months than 1793 and 1794 put together.

The “humane” Citizen Ruge!

(To be concluded.)

_Neue Rheinische Zeitung._ No. 96, 7 September 1848

** Cologne, 6 September. The Polish Debate in Frankfurt (Conclusion.)

We have followed the “humane” Citizen Ruge on the path of his historical investigations concerning the necessity of Poland. Up to now, Citizen Ruge has spoken of the bad past, of the time of despotism, he has edited the events of unreason; now he comes to the present, to the glorious year 1848, to the revolution; now he sets foot on native soil, now he edits the “reason of events”.

“How can the liberation of Poland be accomplished? It can be accomplished by treaties in which the two great civilised nations of Europe take part – which, together with Germany, liberated Germany, must of necessity form a new Triple Alliance for this purpose, because they think the same and, by and large, want the same.”

Here we have, in one bold sentence, the whole reason of events for foreign policy. Alliance between Germany, France and England, all three of which “think the same and, by and large, want the same” – a new Rütli League between the modern three Swiss, Cavaignac, Leiningen and John Russell! To be sure, France and Germany, with God’s help, have meanwhile regressed once again to the point where their governments “think the same” on general political principles as official England, that unshakable counter-revolutionary rock in the sea.

But the countries do not only “think” the same, they also “want, by and large, the same”. Germany wants Schleswig, and England does not want to leave it to her; Germany wants protective tariffs, and England wants free trade; Germany wants unity, and England wishes her fragmentation; Germany wants to be independent, and England strives to subjugate her industrially – but what does that matter? “By and large” they still want “the same”! And France – France issues tariff laws against Germany, its minister Bastide sneers at the schoolmaster Raumer, who represents Germany there; consequently it obviously wants “by and large the same” as Germany! Indeed, England and France prove in the most striking manner that they want the same as Germany by threatening it with war, England over Schleswig, France over Lombardy!

Citizen Ruge has the ideological naivety to believe that nations which share certain political notions will, for that reason alone, enter into an alliance. Citizen Ruge has only two colours on his political palette altogether: black and white, slavery and freedom. For him, the world divides into two great halves: civilised nations and barbarians, free men and bondsmen. The boundary line of freedom, which six months ago lay on the far side of the Rhine, now coincides with the Russian frontier, and this progress is called the revolution of 1848. In this grotesque shape, the present movement is mirrored in the brain of Citizen Ruge. That is the Pomeranian translation of the barricade battle-cry of February and March.

If we translate back from Pomeranian into German, it turns out that the three civilised nations, the three free peoples, are those in which the bourgeoisie rules in various forms and stages of development, whereas the “slaves and bondsmen” are the peoples living under the rule of patriarchal-feudal absolutism. By freedom, the truculent republican and democrat Arnold Ruge understands the quite ordinary “shallow” liberalism, the rule of the bourgeoisie, possibly with a few pseudo-democratic forms – the heart of the poodle! Because the bourgeoisie rules in France, England and Germany, they are therefore natural allies – thus reasons Citizen Ruge.

And when the material interests of the three countries run in diametrically opposite directions, when free trade with Germany and France is an indispensable condition of life for the English bourgeoisie, when protective tariffs against England are an indispensable condition of life for the French and German bourgeoisie; when similar relations exist in many respects, again, between Germany and France; when this Triple Alliance would in practice amount to the industrial subjugation of France and Germany—"narrow-minded egoism, shabby shopkeeper souls," the Pomeranian thinker Ruge grumbles into his blond beard.

Herr Jordan spoke in his speech of the tragic irony of world history. Citizen Ruge furnishes a striking example of it. He, just like the whole more or less ideological Left, sees his dearest favourite reveries, his highest thought-efforts, founder on the class whose representative he is. His philanthropico-cosmopolitan project founders on the shabby shopkeeper souls, and precisely he, without himself knowing or wishing it, must represent these shopkeeper souls in a more or less ideologically distorted fashion. The ideologist thinks and the shopkeeper steers. Tragic irony of world history!

Citizen Ruge now expounds how France "has said, the treaties of 1815 are indeed torn up, but it wishes to recognise the territorial status as it is at present." "This is very correct"; for what no one has hitherto looked for in Lamartine's manifesto, Citizen Ruge finds there: it is the basis of a new law of nations. This is expounded as follows:

"From this relation with France the new historical (!) right (No. 1.) must emerge. Historical right is the right of nations (! No. 2). It is in the case of which we are speaking (?), the new law of nations (! No. 3). That is the sole correct conception of historical right (! No. 4). Every other conception of historical right (! No. 5.) is absurd. There is no other law of nations (! No. 6). Historical right (No. 7) is the right (at last!) which history brings forth and time sanctions, by (who?) annulling, tearing up the previous treaties and putting new ones in their place."

In a word: historical right is—the editorial board of the reason of events! So it stands written literally in the Acts of the Apostles of German unity, in the stenographic reports of Frankfurt, page 1186, first column. And people complain that the Neue Rheinische Zeitung criticises Mr. Ruge with exclamation marks! But of course, at this dizzying whirling dance of historical right and law of nations, the honest-man Left must have been unable to believe their ears and eyes, and must have dissolved in admiration when the philosopher from Pomerania cried into their ears with apodictic certainty: "Historical right is the right which history brings forth and time sanctions," etc.

After all, "history" has always "brought forth" the precise opposite of what "time" had "sanctioned", and the sanction of "time" always consisted precisely in overturning what "history had brought forth".

Now Citizen Ruge puts forward the "solely correct and admissible" motion: "To instruct the Central Authority to initiate, jointly with England and France, a congress for the restoration of a free and independent Poland, to which all the powers concerned are to be invited by means of envoys."

What worthy, honest-man sentiments! Lord John Russell and Eugène Cavaignac are supposed to restore Poland; the English and French bourgeoisie are supposed to threaten Russia with war in order to compel the freedom of Poland, in which they are at this moment not in the least interested! In these times of general confusion and entanglement, when every reassuring piece of news that makes rates rise by an eighth per cent is again thwarted by six disturbing blows, when industry is struggling with slow bankruptcy, when trade is stagnating, when the unemployed proletariat has to be supported with exorbitant sums of money so as not to be driven into a universal, final struggle of desperation—at such a time the bourgeois of the three civilised nations are supposed to create yet another difficulty? And what a difficulty! A war with Russia, which has been England's most intimate ally since February! A war with Russia, a war which, as everyone knows, would be the downfall of the German and French bourgeoisie! And to obtain what advantages? None at all. In truth, that is more than Pomeranian naivety!

But Citizen Ruge swears that the "peaceful solution" of the Polish question is possible. Better and better! And why? Because the point now is: "What the Vienna Treaties desire must now be realised and actually carried out ... The Vienna Treaties, they desired the right of all nations against the great nation of the French. ... They desired the restoration of the German nation."

Now it becomes clear why Mr. Ruge "on the whole wants the same" as the Right. The Right also wants the implementation of the Vienna Treaties. The Vienna Treaties are the résumé of the great victory of reactionary Europe over revolutionary France. They are the classical form in which the European reaction ruled for 15 years under the Restoration period. They restore legitimacy, kingship by the grace of God, the feudal nobility, priestly rule, patriarchal legislation and administration. But since the victory was won with the help of the English, German, Italian, Spanish, and especially the French bourgeoisie, concessions had also to be made to the bourgeoisie. While princes, nobility, priests and bureaucrats now divided the fat morsels of the spoil among themselves, the bourgeoisie was fobbed off with bills of exchange on the future, which were never honoured and which nobody intended to honour. And instead of looking at the real, practical content of the Vienna Treaties, Mr. Ruge believes these empty promises are their actual content, whereas the reactionary practice was only misinterpreted into them!

Indeed, one must be of a remarkably good-natured disposition to believe, after 33 years, after the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, in the payment of these bills of exchange, to imagine that the sentimental phrases in which the Vienna sham promises are wrapped still have any meaning in the year 1848!

Citizen Ruge as Don Quixote of the Vienna Treaties!

Finally, Citizen Ruge reveals to the Assembly the profound secret: the revolutions of 1848 were solely occasioned by the fact that in 1846 the treaties of 1815 were broken in Cracow. A warning to all despots!

In short, since we last encountered him in the literary field, Citizen Ruge has not changed in a single point. They are still the same phrases he has rehearsed and repeated ever since he played the porter of German philosophy on the Hallische and Deutsche Jahrbücher; still the same confusion, the same tohu-wa-bohu of outlook, the same lack of thoughts; the same talent for presenting the most hollow-brained and contradictory ideas in pompous form; the same lack of "knowledge", and particularly: the same pretensions to the applause of the German philistine, who has never heard anything like it in his life.

With this we conclude our résumé of the Poland debate. To go into Mr. Löw from Posen and the other great minds who still follow would be asking too much. The whole debate leaves a melancholy impression. So many long speeches and so little content, so little acquaintance with the subject, so little talent! The worst debate of the former or present French Chamber or the English House of Commons contains more wit, more expertise, more real substance than this three-day conversation on one of the most interesting subjects of modern politics. Everything could have been made of it, and the National Assembly made pure empty talk of it. In point of fact, an assembly like this has never sat anywhere at any time!

The decisions are known. Three-quarters of Posen have been conquered; conquered neither by force, nor by "German industry", nor by the "plough", but by empty talk, falsified statistics and craven resolutions.

"You have swallowed the Poles, but by God you will not digest them!"