You probably already know that the Rheinische Zeitung has been 
banned, suspended, and is under sentence of death.!”° The 
termination of its life has been fixed for the end of March. During 
this period of grace before execution, the newspaper is being 
subjected to a double censorship. Our censor,° a decent fellow, is 
under the censorship of von Gerlach, Regierungspräsident here, a 
passively obedient blockhead. When ready, our newspaper has to | 
be presented to the police to be sniffed at, and if the police nose 
smells anything un-Christian or un-Prussian, the newspaper is not 
allowed to appear. 

The ban resulted from the coincidence of several special causes: 
its wide circulation; my own “Justification of the Correspondent 
from the Mosel”,‘ in which very highly placed statesmen were 
thoroughly exposed; our stubborn refusal to name the person who 
sent us the text of the law on marriage!”!; the convocation of the 
provincial estates, which we could influence by our agitation; 
finally, our criticism of the ban on the Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung,° 
and on the Deutsche Jahrbücher. - 

The ministerial rescript, which will appear in the newspapers in 
a day or so, is if possible more feeble than the previous ones. The 
following are given as motives: 

1) The lie that we had no permission, as though in Prussia, 

To Arnold Ruge, January 25, 1843 397 

where not even a dog can exist without its police number, the 
Rheinische Zeitung could have appeared even a single day without 
fulfilling the official conditions for existence. 

2) The censorship instruction of December 241” aimed at 
establishing a censorship of tendency. By tendency it meant the 
illusion, the romantic belief in possessing a freedom which one 
would not allow oneself to possess realiter.2 Whereas the rationalist 
Jesuitism which prevailed under the former government had a 
stern, rational physiognomy, this romantic Jesuitism demands 
imagination as its main requisite. The censored press should learn 
to live under the illusion of freedom, and of that magnificent 
man> who majestically permitted this illusion. But whereas the 
censorship instruction wanted censorship of tendency, now the 
ministerial rescript explains that in Frankfurt a ban, suppression, 
has been invented for a thoroughly bad tendency. It states that the 
censorship exists only in order to censor eccentricities of a good 
tendency, although the instruction said precisely the oppo- 
site—namely, that eccentricities of a good tendency are to be 
permitted. 

3) The old balderdash about a bad frame of mind, empty 
theory, hey-diddle-diddle, etc. 

Nothing has surprised me. You know what my opinion of the 
censorship instruction has been from the outset. I see here only a 
consequence; in the suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung I see a 
definite advance of political consciousness, and for that reason I 
am resigning.’ Moreover, I had begun to be stifled in that 
atmosphere. It is a bad thing to have to perform menial duties 
even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of 
with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross 
arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and 
hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given 
me back my freedom. 

As I wrote to you once before, I have fallen out with my family ‘ 
and, as long as my mother is alive, I have no right to my property. 
Moreover, I am engaged to be married and I cannot, must not, 
and will not, leave Germany without my fiancée.‘ If, therefore, the 
possibility arose that I could edit the Deutscher Bote'’* with 
Herwegh in Zurich, I should like to do so. I can do nothing more 

in Germany. Here one makes a counterfeit of oneself. If, there- 
fore, you will give me advice and information on this matter, I 
shall be very grateful. . 

I am working on several things, which here in Germany will 
find neither censor nor bookseller, nor, in general, any possible 
existence. I await an early reply from you. 

Yours, 
Marx