Moscow-Leningrad, 1930 

229 

“Sing, immortal soul, 
the redemption of fallen mankind” *— 
through Gottfried Kinkel. 

Gottfried Kinkel was born some 40 years ago. The story of his 
life has been made available to us in an autobiography, Gottfried 
Kinkel. Wahrheit ohne Dichtung. Biographisches Skizzenbuch.” Edited 
by Adolph Strodtmann (Hamburg, Hoffmann & Campe, 1850, 
octavo).* 

Gottfried is the hero of that democratic Siegwart epoch’ that 
flooded Germany with endless torrents of patriotic melancholy 
and tearful lament. He made his debut as a commonplace lyrical 
Siegwart. 

We are indebted to Strodtmann the Apostle, whose “narrative 
compilation” we follow here, both for the diary-like fragments in 
which Gottfried’s pilgrimage on this earth is presented to the 
reader, and for the glaring lack of discretion of the revelations 
they contain. 

Bonn, February-September 1834 

“Like his friend, Paul Zeller, young Gottfried studied Protestant theology and 
his industry and piety earned him the respect of his celebrated teachers (Sack, 
Nitzsch and Bleek)” (p. 5). 

From the very beginning he is “obviously immersed in weighty 
speculations” (p. 4), he is “cross and gloomy” (p. 5) as befits a 
grand homme en herbe“ “Gottfried’s gloomily flashing brown eyes” 

* F.G. Klopstock, Der Messias, Erster Gesang.— Ed. 

> Truth without Poetry. A Biographical Sketch-Book. Apparently an allusion to 
Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth).—Ed. 

“ The second volume of Strodtmann’s book on Kinkel was published in 
1851.— Ed. 

@ & budding genius.— Ed. 

“observed” some youths “in brown jackets and pale-blue over- 
coats”; he at once sensed that these youths “wished to make up 
for their inner emptiness by outer show” (p. 6). His moral 
indignation is explained by the fact that Gottfried had “defended 
Hegel and Marheineke” when these lads had called Marheineke a 
“blockhead”; later, when he goes to study in Berlin and is himself 
in the position of having to learn from Marheineke, he character- 
ises him in his diary with the following belletristic dictum (p. 61): 

I tell you what: your groping theorist 

Is like a beast led round and round and round 

By evil spirits on a barren ground 
Near to the verdant pastures he has missed.” 

Gottfried has clearly forgotten that other verse in which 
Mephistopheles makes fun of the student thirsting for knowledge: 

So, knowledge and fair reason you'll despise.” 

However, the whole moralising student scene serves merely as 
an introduction enabling the future liberator of the world to make 
the following revelation (p. 6). 

Gottfried: 

“This race will not perish, unless a war comes.... Only strong remedies can raise 
this age up from the mire!” 

“A new Flood with you as a second and improved edition of Noah!” his friend 
replied. 

The pale-blue overcoats have helped Gottfried to the point 
where he can proclaim himself the “Noah in a new Flood”. His 
friend adds the following comment that might well have served as 
the motto to the whole biography. 

“My father and I have often had occasion to smile at your passion for unclear 
ideas!” 

Throughout these confessions of a beautiful soul we find 
repeated only one “clear idea’, namely that Kinkel was a great 
man from the moment of his conception. The most trivial things 
that occur to all trivial people become momentous events; the 
petty joys and sorrows that every student of theology experiences 
in a more interesting form, the conflicts with bourgeois conditions 
to be found by the dozen in every seminary and consistory in 

* Goethe, Faust, Erster Teil, “Studierzimmer” (translation by Philip Mayne, 
Penguine Books, 1949).— Ed. 
Ibid.— Ed. 
© “Bekenntnisse einer schénen Seele” (Confessions of a Beautiful Soul) is the 
title of Book 6 of Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.—Ed. 

The Great Men of the Exile 231 

Germany become world-shaking events from which Gottfried, 
overwhelmed by Weltschmerz, fashions a perpetual comedy.* 

The family of his “friend Paul” leaves Bonn and returns to 
Wurttemberg. Gottfried stages this event in the following manner. 

Gottfried loves Paul’s sister and uses the occasion to say that he 
has “already been in love twice before’! His present love, 
however, is no ordinary love but a “fervent and authentic act of 
divine worship” (p. 13). Gottfried climbs the Drachenfels together 
with friend Paul and against this romantic backcloth he breaks into 
dithyrambs: 

“Farewell to friendship!—I shall find a brother in our Saviour;— Farewell to 
love—Faith shall be my bride;—Farewell to sisterly loyalty—I am come to the 
commune of many thousands of just souls! Away then, O my youthful heart, learn 
to be alone with your God; struggle with him until you conquer him and force him 
to give you a new name, that of holy Israel, which no one knows but he who 
receives it!—I give you greetings, you glorious rising sun, image of my awakening 
soul!” (p. 17). 

Thus the departure of his friend gives Gottfried the opportunity 
to sing an ecstatic hymn to his own soul. As if that were not 
enough, his friend must also sing a hymn. For while Gottfried 
exults ecstatically he speaks “with solemn voice and glowing 
countenance”, he “forgets the presence of his friend’’, “his gaze is 
transfigured”’,, “his voice inspired”, etc. (p. 17)—1n short, we have 
the vision of the Prophet Elijah as it appears in the Bible complete 
in every detail. 

“Smiling sorrowfully Paul looked at him with his loyal gaze and said: ‘You have 
a mightier heart in your bosom than I and will surely outdistance me—but let me be 
your friend—even when I am far away.’ Joyfully Gottfried clasped the proferred 
hand and renewed the ancient covenant” (p. 18). 

Gottfried has got what he wants from this Transfiguration on 
the Mount. Friend Paul, who has just been laughing at 
“Gottfried’s passion for unclear ideas”, humbles himself before 
the name of “holy Israel” and acknowledges Gottfried’s superiori- 
ty and future greatness. Gottfried is as pleased as Punch and 
graciously condescends to renew the ancient covenant. 

* The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript: “Thus we find that 
these confessions consistently present a double aspect—there is firstly the comedy, 
the amusing way in which Gottfried interprets the smallest trivia as signs of his 
future greatness and in anticipation of this casts himself in relief, and then there is 
the rodomontade, his mendacious manner of complacently embellishing in retrospect 
every little occurrence in his theologico-lyrical past. Having established these two 
basic features we can follow the further developments of Gottfried’s story.”— Ed. 

9* 

*k * Ok 

The scene changes. It is the birthday of Kinkel’s mother, the 
wife of Pastor Kinkel of Upper Cassel. The family festival is used 
to proclaim that “the lady, like the mother of our Lord, wae called 
Mary” (p. 20)—certain proof that Gottfried, too, was destined to 
be a saviour and redeemer. Thus in the first twenty pages the 
most insignificant events have been used to present our student of 
theology in the role of Noah, the holy Israel, Elijah, and, lastly, 
Christ. 

* *k * 

Inevitably, Gottfried, who on the whole has experienced 
nothing, constantly dwells on his inner feelings. The pietism that 
has stuck to this parson’s son and budding scholar of divinity is 
well adapted both to his innate emotional instability and_ his 
coquettish preoccupation with his own person. We learn that his 
mother and sister were both strict pietists and that Gottfried was 
very conscious of his own sinfulness. The conflict of this pious 
sense of sin with the “carefree and sociable joie de vivre” of the 
ordinary student appears in Gottfried, as befits his world-historical 
mission, in terms of a struggle between religion and poetry. The 
pint of beer that the parson’s son from Upper Cassel downs with 
the other students becomes the fateful chalice in which Faust’s 
twin spirits are locked in battle. In the description of his pietistic 
family life we see his “Mother Mary” combat as sinful “Gottfried’s 
penchant for the theatre” (p. 28), a momentous conflict designed 
to prefigure the poet of the future but which in fact merely 
highlights Gottfried’s love of the theatrical. The harpy-like pietism 
of his sister Johanna is said to be shown by an incident in which 
she’ is supposed to have boxed the ears of a five-year-old girl for 
inattention in church—sordid family gossip whose inclusion would 
be incomprehensible were it not for the revelation at the end of 
the book that this same sister Johanna put up the strongest 
opposition to Gottfried’s marriage to Frau Mockel. 

The fact that in Seelscheid Gottfried preached “a wonderful 
sermon about the wilting wheat” is recounted as an event. 

* * * 

The Zeller family and “beloved Elise” at last take their. © 
departure. We learn that Gottfried “squeezed the girl’s hard 

The Great Men of the Exile 933 

passionately” and murmured the greeting, “Elise, farewell! I must 
say no more”. This interesting story is followed by the first of 
Siegwart’s laments. 

“Destroyed!” “Silent.”” “Most agonising torment!” “Burning brow.” “Deepest 
sighs.” ““His mind was lacerated by the wildest pains,” etc. (p. 37). 

It turns the whole Elijah scene into the purest comedy, 
performed for the benefit of his “friend Paul” and himself. Paul 
again makes his appearance in order to whisper into the ear of 
Siegwart, who is sitting there alone and wretched: “This kiss is for 
my Gottfried” (p. 38). 

And Gottfried cheers up. 

“My plan to see my sweet love again, honourably and not without a name, is 
firmer than ever” (p. 38). 

Neither considerations about the name he expects to make nor 
bragging of the laurels he claims in advance are wanting even 
amid the pangs of love. Gottfried uses the intermezzo to commit 
his love to paper in extravagant and vainglorious terms, to make 
sure that the world is not deprived of even his diary-feelings. But 
the scene has not yet reached its climax. The faithful Paul has to 
point out to the world-storming maestro that if Elise were to 
remain stationary while he continued to develop, she might not 
satisfy him later on. 

“O no!” said Gottfried. ““This heavenly budding flower whose first leaves have 
scarcely opened already smells so sweetly. How much greater will be her beauty 

when ... the burning summer ray of manly vigour untolds her innermost calix!” 
(p. 40). 

Paul finds himself reduced to answering this sordid image by 
remarking that rational arguments mean nothing to poets. 

“*And all your wisdom will not protect you from the whims of life better than 
our lovable folly, Gottfried replied with a smile” (p. 40). 

What a moving picture: Narcissus smiling to himself! The 
gauche student suddenly enters as the lovable fool, Paul becomes 
Wagner and admires the great man, and the great man “smiles”, 
“indeed, he smiles a kind, gentle smile”. The climax is saved. 

* * * 

Gottfried finally manages to leave Bonn. He gives this summary 
of his educational attainments there: 

“Unfortunately I am gradually moving further away from Hegelianism; 
although my greatest wish is to be a rationalist, I am at the same time a 
supernaturalist and a mystic, if necessary I am even a pietist” (p. 45). 

This self-analysis requires no commentary. 

* * *& 

Berlin, October 1834-August 1835 

Leaving his narrow family and student environment Gottfried 
arrives in Berlin. In comparison with Bonn, Berlin is relatively 
metropolitan but of this we find no trace in Gottfried any more 
than we find evidence of his involvement in the scientific activity 
of the day. Gottfried’s diary entries confine themselves to the 
emotions he experiences together with his new compagnon d’aven- 
ture. Hugo Dinweg from Barmen, and also to the minor 
hardships of an indigent theologian: his money difficulties, shabby 
coats, employment as a reviewer, etc. His life stands in no relation 
to the public life of the city, but only to the Schlossing family, in 
which Diinweg passes for Master Wolfram? and Gottfried for Master 
Gottfried von Strasbourg (p. 67). Elise fades gradually from his heart 
and he conceives a new itch for Fraulein Maria Schlossing. 
Unfortunately he learns of Elise’s engagement to someone else 
and he sums up his Berlin feelings and aspirations as a “dark 
longing for a woman he could [call] wholly his own”. 

However, Berlin must not be abandoned without making the 
inevitable point: 

“Before he left Berlin old Weiss” (the producer) ‘took him once again into the 
theatre. A strange feeling came over the youth as the friendly old man led him into 
the great auditorium where the busts of German dramatists have been placed and 
with a gesture towards a few empty niches said meaningfully: 

“*There are still some vacant places.” 

Yes, indeed, there is still a place vacant awaiting our Platenite 
Gottfried who solemnly allows an old farceur to present him with 
the exquisite pleasure of “future immortality”. 

Bonn, Autumn 1835-Autumn 1837 

“Constantly vacillating between art, life and science, unable to reach a decision, 
active in all three without firm commitment, he intended to learn, to gain and to be 
creative in all three as much as his indecision would permit” (p. 89). 

* Wolfram von Eschenbach.— Ed. 
Comedian.— Ed. 

The Great Men of the Exile 235 

Having thus discovered himself to be an irresolute dilettante, 
Gottfried returns to Bonn. Of course, the feeling that he is a 
dilettante does not deter him from taking his licentiate examina- 
tion and from becoming a Privatdozent at the University of Bonn. 

“Neither Chamisso nor Knapp had published the poems he had sent them in 
their pocket almanacs” and this hurt him greatly” (p. 99). 

This is the public debut of the great man who in private circles 
lives on intellectual tick on the promise of his future eminence. 
From this time on he definitely becomes a dubious local celebrity 
in belletristic student circles until the moment when a grazing 
shot in Baden suddenly turns him into the hero of German 
philistinism. 

“But more and more there arose in Kinkel’s breast the yearning for a firm, true 
love, a yearning that no devotion to work could dispel” (p. 103). 

The first victim of this yearning is a certain Minna. Gottfried 
dallies with Minna and sometimes for the sake of variety he acts 
the compassionate Mahadeva who allows the maiden to worship 
him? while he meditates on the state of her health. 

“Kinkel could have loved her had he been able to deceive himself about her 
condition; but his love would have killed the wilting rose even more quickly. Minna 
was the first girl that could understand him; but she was a second Hecuba and 
would have borne him torches and not children, and through them the passion of 
the parents would have burned down their own house as Priam’s passion burned 
Troy. Yet he could not abandon her, his heart bled for her, he was indeed wretched 
not through love, but through pity.” 

The godlike hero whose love is supposed to kill, like the sight of 
Jupiter, is nothing but an ordinary self-regarding young coxcomb 
who in the course of his marriage-studies tries out the role of the 
cad for the first time. Moreover, his revolting meditations on her 
health and its possible effects on any future children are turned 
into base speculations by the fact that he prolongs the relationship 
for his own pleasure and breaks it off only when it provides him 
with the excuse for yet another melodramatic scene. 

Gottfried goes on a journey to visit an uncle whose son has just 
died; at the midnight hour in the room where the corpse is laid 
out he stages a scene from a Bellini opera with his cousin, Mlle 
Elise II. He becomes engaged to her, “in the presence of the 

* An allusion to the Deutscher Musenalmanach (ed. Adelbert von Chamisso and 
Gustav Schwab) and to Christoterpe. Ein Taschenbuch für christliche Leser (ed. Albert 
Knapp).— Ed. 

 CE. Goethe’s poem “Der Gott und die Bajadere”.— Ed. 

dead”, and on the following morning he is fortunately accepted by 
his uncle as his future son-in-law. 

“Now that he was lost to her forever, he often thought of Minna and of the 
moment when he would see her again. But he did not fear this moment as she 
could have no claims on a heart that was already pledged” (p. 117). 

The new engagement means nothing but the opportunity to 
bring about a dramatic collision in his relationship with Minna, in 
which “duty and passion” confront each other. This collision is 
produced in the most philistine and rascally way because in his 
own mind our bonhomme denies Minna’s legal claims upon his 
heart which is already “pledged”. The virtuous man is of course not 
at all disturbed by the need to compound this cowardly lie to 
himself by reversing the order of events in the matter of his 
“pledged heart”’. 

Gottfried has plunged into the interesting necessity of being 
forced to break “a poor, great heart”. 

“After a pause Gottfried went on: ‘At the same time, dear Minna, I feel I owe 
you an apology—I have perhaps sinned against you—the hand which I let you 
have yesterday with such feelings of friendship, that hand is no longer free—I am 
engaged!” (p. 123). 

Our melodramatic student takes good care not to mention that 
this engagement took place a few hours after he had given her his 
hand “with such feelings of friendship”. 

“Oh God!—Minna—can you forgive me?” (loc. cit.) 
“TY am a man and must be faithful to my duty—I must not love you! But I have 
not deceived you” (p. 124). 

After this moral duty which has been contrived after the event, 
it only remains to produce the unbelievable, a theatrical reversal of 
the whole relationship so that instead of Minna forgiving him, 
our moral priest forgives the deceived woman. With this in 
mind he conceives the possibility that Minna “might hate him 
from afar” and he follows this supposition up with this final 
moral: 

“Tl would gladly forgive you for that and if that should happen you can be 
assured of my forgiveness in advance. And now farewell, my duty calls me, I must 
leave you!’ He slowly left the arbour.... From that hour on Gottfried was unhappy” 
(p. 124). 

The actor and conceited lover is transformed into the hypocriti- 
cal priest who extricates himself from the affair with an unctuous 
blessing; Siegwart’s sham conflicts of love have led to the happy. 
result that he is able in his imagination to think himself unhappy. 

The Great Men of the Exile 237 

It finally becomes apparent that all of these arranged love 
stories were nothing but Gottfried’s coquettish flirtation with 
himself. The whole affair amounts to no more than that our 
priest, who dreams of his future immortality, has enacted Old 
Testament stories and modern lending-library phantasies after the 
manner of Spiess, Clauren and Cramer so that he may indulge his 
vanity by posing as a romantic hero. 

‘“Rummaging among his books he came across Novalis’ Ofterdingen, the book 
that had so often inspired him to write poetry a year before. While still at school he 
and some friends had founded a society by the name of Teutonia with the aim of 
increasing their understanding of German history and literature. In this society he 
had assumed the name of Heinrich von Ofterdingen.... Now the meaning of this 
name became clear to him. He saw himself as that same Heinrich in the charming 
little town at the foot of the Wartburg and a longing for the ‘blue flower’ took 
hold of him with overwhelming force. Minna could not be the glorious 
fairy-tale blossom, nor could his bride, however anxiously he probed his heart. 
Dreaming, he read on and on, the phantastic world of magic enveloped him 
and he ended by hurling himself weeping into a chair, thinking of the ‘blue 
flower’.” 

Gottfried here unveils the whole romantic lie which he had 
woven around himself; the carnival pursuit of disguising oneself as 
other people is his authentic “inner being”. Earlier on he had 
called himself Gottfried von Strasbourg; now he appears as 
Heinrich von Ofterdingen and he is searching not for the “blue 
flower” but for a woman who will acknowledge his claims to be 
Heinrich von Ofterdingen. And in the end he really did find the 
“blue flower”, a little faded and yellow, in a woman who played the 
much longed-for comedy in his interest and in her own. 

The sham Romanticism, the travesty and the caricature of 
ancient stories and romances which Gottfried re-lives to make up 
for the lack of any inner substance of his own, the whole 
emotional swindle of his vacuous encounters with Mary, Minna 
and Elise I and II have brought him to the point where he thinks 
that his experiences are on a par with those of Goethe. Just as 
Goethe after experiencing the storms of love suddenly set out for 
Italy and there wrote his [Roman] Elegies, so too Gottfried thinks 
that his day-dreams of love qualify him for an expedition to 
Rome. Goethe must have had a premonition of Gottfried: 

And as the whale has his lice 
I can have them too.’ 

? Goethe, Zahme Xenien.— Ed. 

Italy, October 1837-March 1838 

The expedition to Rome opens in Gottfried’s diary with a 
lengthy account of the journey from Bonn to Coblenz. 

This new epoch begins as the previous one had concluded, 
namely with a narrative richly embellished by allusions to the 
experiences of others. While on the steamer Gottfried recalls the 
“splendid passage in Hoffmann” where he “made Master 
Johannes Wacht produce a highly artistic work immediately after 
enduring the most overwhelming grief”.’*? As a confirmation of 
the “splendid passage” Gottfried follows up his “overwhelming 
grief” about Minna by “meditating” about a “tragedy he had long 
since intended to write” (p. 140). : 

During Kinkel’s journey from Coblenz to Rome the following 
events take place: 

“The friendly letters he frequently received from his fiancée and which he 
answered for the most part on the spot, dispelled his gloomy thoughts” (p. 144). 

“His love for the beautiful Elise II struck root deeply in the youth’s yearning 
bosom” (p. 146). 

* * OK 

In Rome we find: 

“On his arrival in Rome Kinkel had found a letter from his fiancée awaiting 
him which further intensified his love for her and caused the image of Minna to 
fade even more into the background. His heart assured him that Elise could make 
him happy and he gave himself up to this feeling with the purest passion.... Only 
now did he realise what love is” (p. 151). 

We see that Minna, whom formerly he only loved “out of pity”, 
has re-entered the emotional scene. In his relationship with Elise 
his dream is that she can make him happy, not he her. And yet in 
his “blue flower” fantasy he had already said that the fairy-tale 
blossom which had given him such a poetic itch could be neither 
Elise nor Minna. But his newly aroused feelings for these two girls 
now serve as part of the mise en scéne for a new conflict. 

“Kinkel’s poetry seemed to be slumbering in Italy” (p. 151). 
Why? 
“Because he still lacked form” (p. 152). 

We learn later that a six-month stay in Italy enabled him to 
bring the “form” back to Germany well wrapped up. As Goethe 
had written his Elegies in Rome so Kinkel too thinks up an elegy 
called The Awakening of Rome (p. 153). 

The Great Men of the Exile 239 

* * 

Kinkel’s maid brings him a letter from his fiancée. He opens it 
joyfully — 
“and sank back on his bed with a cry. Elise announced that a wealthy man, a 
Dr. D. with an extensive practice and even a riding horse (!), had asked for her 
hand in marriage. As it would probably be a long time before he, Kinkel, an indigent 
theologian, would havea permanent position she asked him to release her from the bonds 
that tied her to him”. 

A complete reminiscence of Menschenhass und Reue.’ 

Gottfried “annihilated”, “terrible petrification”, ‘dry eyed”, “thirst for re- 

venge”, “dagger”, “the bosom of his rival”, “heart-blood of his enemy”, “cold as 
ice’, “maddening pain”, etc. (pp. 156 and 157). 

In these “sorrows and joys of a poor theologian” it is the 
thought that she had “spurned” him for the sake of the “un- 
certain possession of earthly goods” (p. 157) that gives most pain 
to our unhappy student. Having been moved by the obligatory 
theatrical feelings he finally rises to the following consolation: 

“She was unworthy of you—and you still possess the pinions of genius that will 
bear you aloft high above this dark misery! And when one day your fame encircles the 
globe the false woman will find a judge in her own heart!—Who knows, perhaps 
one day in the years to come her children will seek me out to implore my aid and I 
would not wish to evade that rashly” (p. 157). 

Having, inevitably, enjoyed in advance the exquisite pleasure of 
“his future fame encircling the globe”, he thus reveals himself to 
be a common clerical philistine. He speculates that later on Elise’s 
children might perhaps come to beg alms from the great 
poet—and he would “not wish to evade that rashly”. And why? 
Because Elise “prefers a riding horse” to the “future fame” of 
which he constantly dreams, because she prefers “earthly goods” 
to the farce he intends to perform with himself in the role of 
Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Old Hegel was quite right when he 
pointed out that a noble consciousness always turns into a 
base one.” 

Bonn, Summer 1838-Summer 1843 
(Intrigue and Love)‘ 

Having furnished a caricature of Goethe in Italy, Gottfried now 
resolves on his return to enact Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe. 

2 A drama by August Kotzebue.— Ed. 
>G. W. F. Hegel, Phainomenologie des Geistes, VI. Der Geist.—Ed. 
“ Intrigue and Love—a tragedy by Schiller.— Ed. 

Though his heart is rent with Weltschmerz Gottfried feels “better 
than ever” physically (p. 167). His intention is “to establish literary 
fame for himself through his works” (p. 169), which does not 
however prevent him from acquiring a cheaper fame without work 
later on when his “works” failed to do what was expected of them. 

The “dark longing” which Gottfried always experiences when 
he pursues a “female of the species” finds expression in a 
remarkably rapid succession of promises of marriage and engage- 
ments. The promise of marriage is the classical method by which 
the strong man and the superior mind “of the future” seeks to 
conquer his beloved ones and bind them to him in reality. As soon 
as he thinks he has found a little blue flower that might help him 
to play the part of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the poet’s gentle 
and hazy sentimentality assumes the firm shape of the student’s 
dream of adding to the ideal affinity the bond of “duty”. No 
sooner are the first greetings over than offers of marriage fly in 
all directions a tort et a travers* towards every daisy and water lily in 
sight. This bourgeois hunt puts in an even more revolting light the 
feeble wheedling coquetry with which Gottfried constantly opens 
his heart to reveal “the great torments of the poet”. 

Thus after his return from Italy Gottfried naturally has to 
“promise” marriage yet again. The object of his passion on this 
occasion was directly chosen by his sister, the lady Johanna, whose 
fanatical pietism has already been immortalised by the exclama- 
tions in Gottfried’s diary. 

“Bégehold had just recently announced his engagement to Fraulein Kinkel, and 
Johanna, who interfered more obtrusively than ever in her brother’s affairs of the 
heart, now conceived the wish, for a number of reasons and family considerations 
which are better passed over in silence, that Gottfried should reciprocate and marry 
Fraulein Sophie Bogehold, her fiancé’s sister” (p. 172). It goes without saying that 
“Kinkel could not but feel drawn to a gentle girl.... And she was indeed a dear, 
innocent maiden” (p. 173). “In the most tender fashion’”—it goes without 
saying —“Kinkel asked for her hand which was joyfully promised him by her 
happy parents as soon as”—it goes without saying—‘he had obtained a secure post 
and was in a position to lead his bride home as”—it goes without saying—‘a 
professor or owner of a quiet parsonage.” 

On this occasion our passionate student set down in elegant 
verses an account of that tendency towards marriage that forms 
such a constant ingredient of his adventures. 

Nothing else can stir my passion 
So much as a small white hand. 

“ Indiscriminately.— Ed. 

The Great Men of the Exile 24] 

Everything else, eyes, lips, locks, is dismissed as a mere “trifle”. 

All these fail to stir his passion 
But her shapely, small white hand (p. 174). 

He describes the flirtation that he begins with Fraulein Sophie 
Bogehold at the command of “his more than ever obtrusive sister 
Johanna” and because of the constant stimulus of his longing for a 
“hand”, as “deep, firm and tranquil” (p. 175). Above all “it is the 
religious element that predominates in this new love” (p. 176). 

In Gottfried’s romances the religious element takes the place 
either of the novelistic or of the theatrical element. Where he 
cannot devise dramatic effects to achieve new Siegwart situations 
he applies religious feelings to adorn these banal episodes with the 
patina of higher meaning. Siegwart becomes a pious Jung-Stilling, 
who had likewise received such miraculous strength from God that 
even though three women perished beneath his manly chest he 
was still able repeatedly to “lead home” a new love. 

* * 

We come finally to the fateful catastrophe of this eventful story 
of his life, to Stilling’s meeting with Johanna Mockel, who had 
formerly borne the married name of Mathieux. Here Gottfried 
discovered a female Kinkel, his romantic alter ego. Only she was 
harder, smarter, less confused and thanks to her mature age she 
had left her youthful illusions behind her. 

What Mockel had in common with Kinkel was the fact that her 
talents too had gone unrecognised by the world. She was repulsive 
and vulgar; her first marriage had been “unhappy”. She possessed 
musical talents but not enough to make a great stir with her 
compositions or technical mastery. In Berlin her attempt to imitate 
the stale childhood antics of Bettina* had led to a fiasco. Her 
character had been soured by her experiences. Even though she 
shared with Kinkel the foppish affectation of inflating the 
ordinary events of her life so as to invest them with “greater 
solemnity”, owing to her more advanced age she nevertheless felt 
a need for love (according to Strodtmann) that was more pressing 
than her need for the poetic drivel that accompanies it. Whereas 
Kinkel was feminine in this respect, Mockel was masculine. Hence 
nothing could be more natural than for such a person to enter 
with joy into Kinkel’s comedy of the misunderstood beautiful souls 

* Bettina von Arnim.— Ed. 

and to play it to a mutually satisfying conclusion, ie. to 
acknowledge Siegwart’s fitness for the role of Heinrich von 
Ofterdingen and to allow him to discover that she was the “blue 
flower”. 

Kinkel, having been led to his third or fourth fiancée by his 
sister, is now introduced into a new labyrinth of love by Mockel. 

Gottfried now finds himself in the “social swim” (p. 190), i.e. in 
one of those little “circles” consisting of the professors or other 
“worthies” of German university towns. Only in the lives of 
Teutonic Christian students can such societies mark a new epoch. 
Mockel sings and is applauded. At table it is arranged that 
Gottfried should sit next to her and here the following scene takes 
place: 

“It must be a glorious feeling,’ Gottfried opined, ‘to fly through the joyous 
world on the pinions of genius, admired by all.—“That’s what you imagine,’ Mockel 
exclaimed. ‘I hear that you have a great gift for poetry. Perhaps people will scatter 
incense for you also ... and I shall ask you then whether you are happy, if you are 
not...—‘If I am not?’ Gottfried asked, as she paused” (p. 188). 

The bait had been put out for our clumsy lyrical student. 
Mockel then informs him that she had recently heard 
“him preaching about the yearning of Christians to return to their faith and she 
had thought about how resolutely the handsome youth must have renounced the 

world who had aroused a timid longing even in her for the harmless childhood 
slumber with which the echo of faith now lost had once surrounded her” (p. 189). 

Gottfried was “enchanted” (p. 189) by such politeness. He was 
tremendously pleased to discover that ‘““Mockel was unhappy” (loc. 
cit.). He immediately resolved “to devote his passionate en- 
thusiasm for the faith of salvation at the hands of Jesus Christ to 
bringing back this sorrowing soul too into the fold” (loc. cit.). As 
Mockel was a Catholic the friendship was formed on the imaginary 
basis of the task of recovering a soul “in the service of the 
Almighty”, a comedy in which Mockel too was willing to 
participate. 

* * * 

“In 1840 Kinkel was appointed as an assistant in the Protestant community in 
Cologne, where he went every Sunday morning to preach” (p. 193). 

This comment of the biographer may serve as an excuse for a 
brief discussion of Kinkel’s position as a theologian. “In 1840” the © 
critical movement had already mercilessly dissected the content of 
the Christian faith; with Bruno Bauer scientific [criticism] ‘had 

The Great Men of the Exile 243 

reached the point of open conflict with the state. It is at this 
juncture that Kinkel makes his debut as a preacher. But as he 
lacks both the energy of the orthodox and the understanding that 
would enable him to see theology objectively, he comes to terms 
with Christianity on the level of lyrical and declamatory sentimen- 
tality a la Krummacher. He presents Christ as a “friend and 
leader”, he seeks to do away with “ugliness” in the formal aspects 
of Christianity, and for the content he substitutes a hollow 
phraseology. The device by means of which content is replaced by 
form and ideas by phrases has produced a host of declamatory 
priests in Germany whose last offshoots had of course to lead to 
democracy. But whereas in theology at least a superficial knowledge 
is still essential here and there, in the democratic movement, 
where an orotund but vacuous rhetoric, nullité sonore,?> makes 
intellect and an insight into realities completely superfluous, an 
empty phraseology came into its own. Kinkel, whose theological 
studies had led to nothing beyond the making of sentimental 
extracts of Christianity in the manner of Clauren, was in speech 
and in his writings the epitome of this fraudulent pulpit oratory 
that is also described as “poetic prose” and which he oddly 
enough now made the basis of his “poetic mission”. His 
poetastering, moreover, is [not]” aimed at planting true laurels but 
only red rowan berries with which he beautifies the highway of 
trivia. This same feebleness of character which attempts to 
overcome conflicts not by resolving their content but by clothing 
them in a facile form is visible too in the way he lectures at the 
university. The struggle to abolish the old scholastic pedantry is 
sidestepped by means of a “free and easy” attitude which turns 
the lecturer into a student and exalts the student placing him on 
an equal footing with the lecturer. This school then produced a 
whole generation of Strodtmanns, Schurzes and suchlike who 
eventually were able to make use of their phraseology, their 
knowledge and their unexacting “lofty mission” only in the 
democratic movement. 

* * * 

The new love-affair develops into the story of Gockel, Hinkel und 
Gackeleia 

* A noisy nothingness.— Ed. 
The manuscript is damaged here.—Ed. 
© An allusion to Clemens Brentano’s fairy-tale about Gockel, Hinkel and 
Gavkeleia (Cock, Hen and Chick). A comic effect is achieved here because of the 
similarity between Gockel (Cock) and Mockel, and Hinkel (Hen) and Kinkel.— Ed. 

244 Kar] Marx and Frederick Engels 

The year 1840 was a turning point in the history of Germany. 
On the one hand, the critical application of Hegel’s philosophy to 
theology and politics had brought about a scientific revolution. On 
the other hand, from Frederick William IV’s accession to the 
throne dates the emergence of a bourgeois movement whose 
constitutional aspirations still had a wholly radical appear- 
ance—from the vague “political poetry” of the period to the new 
phenomenon of a daily press which constituted a revolutionary 
power. 

What was Gottfried doing during this period? Together with 
Mockel he founded the Maikdfer, eine Zeitschrift ftir Nicht-Philister* 
(p. 209) and the May-Bug Club. The aim of this paper was 
nothing more than 

“to provide a cheerful and enjoyable evening for a group of friends once a 
week and to give the participants the opportunity to present their works for 
criticism by a benevolent, artistically-minded audience” (pp. 209-10). 

The real purpose of the May-Bug Club was to solve the riddle 
of the blue flower. The meetings took place in Mockel’s house, 
and their object was the acclamation of Mockel as “Queen” 
(p. 210) and of Kinkel as “Minister” (p. 255) by a group of 
insignificant literary students. Here the two misunderstood beauti- 
ful souls found it possible to make up for the “injustice the harsh 
world had done them” (p. 296); they could recognise each other 
in the roles of Heinrich von Ofterdingen and the blue flower. 
Gottfried, to whom the copying of other people’s roles had become 
second nature, must have felt happy to have at last created a real 
“amateur theatre” (p. 254). The farce was itself the prelude to 
practical developments: 

“These evenings provided the opportunity to see Mockel also in the house of 
her parents” (p. 212). 

Moreover, the May-Bug Club copied also the Hainbund’ in 
Gottingen, only with the difference that the latter represented a 
stage in the development of German literature while the former 
remained on the level of an insignificant local caricature. The 
“merry May-Bugs” (p. 254), for instance, Sebastian Longard, 
Leo Hasse, C.A.Schlonbach, were, as the apologetic biographer 
admits, pale, insipid, indolent, unimportant youths (pp. 211 and _, 
298). 

——— va 

* May-Bug, a Journal for Non-Philistines.— Ed. 

The Great Men of the Exile 245 

* o£ 

Naturally, Gottfried soon began to make “comparisons” (p. 221) 
between Mockel and his fiancée, but he had “had no time 
hitherto”— much against his habit—‘‘for the customary reflections 
on weddings and matrimony” (p. 219). In a word, he stood like 
Buridan’s ass between the two bundles of hay, unable to decide 
between them. But with her greater maturity and very practical 
bent Mockel “clearly discerned the invisible bond” (p. 225); she 
resolved to give “chance or the will of God” (p. 229) a helping 
hand. 

“At a time of day when Gottfried was usually prevented by his scholarly work as 

a teacher from seeing Mockel, he one day went to visit her and as he quietly 
approached her room he heard the sound of a mournful song. Pausing to listen 
he heard this song: 

You draw nigh! And like the dawn 

There trembles on my cheeks, etc., etc., 

Many a nameless pain. 

Alas, you feel them not! 

“A long drawn-out, melancholy chord concluded her song and faded gradually 
in the breeze” (pp. 230 and 231). 

Gottfried crept away unobserved, as he imagined, and having 
arrived home again he found the situation very interesting. He 
wrote a number of despairing sonnets in which he compared 
Mockel to the Lorelei (p. 233). In order to escape from the Lorelei 
and to remain true to Fraulein Sophie Bogehold he tried to ob- 
tain a post as a teacher in Wiesbaden, but was rejected. This 
accident was compounded by a further intervention by fate which 
proved to be decisive. Not only was “the sun striving to leave 
the sign of Virgo” (p. 236), but also Gottfried and Mockel took 
a trip down the Rhine in a skiff; their skiff was overturned by 
an approaching steam-boat and Gottfried swam ashore bearing 
Mockel. 

‘‘As he drew towards the shore he felt her heart close to his and was suddenly 
overwhelmed by the feeling that only this woman would be able to make him 

happy” (p. 238). 

This time Gottfried at last experienced not an imaginary but a 
real scene from a novel, from the Wahlverwandtschaften. This 
decided the matter; he broke off his engagement to Sophie 
Bogehold. 

* Elective Affinities, a novel by J. W. Goethe.— Ed. 

246 Karl] Marx and Frederick Engels 

* Kk & 

First love, then the intrigue. In the name of the Presbytery 
Pastor Engels protested to Gottfried that the marriage of a 
divorced woman and a Catholic to a Protestant preacher was 
offensive. Gottfried replied by appealing to the eternal rights of 
man and made the following points with a good deal of unction. 

1. “It was no crime for him to have drunk coffee with the lady in 
Hirzekimpchen” (p. 249). 

2. “The matter was ambiguous as he had not announced in public either that 
he intended to marry the lady, or that he did not intend to do so” (p. 251). 

3. “As far as faith was concerned, no one can know what the future holds in 
store” (p. 250). 

“And now, may I ask you to step inside and have a cup of coffee” (p. 251). 

With this cliché Gottfried and Pastor Engels, who could not 
resist such an invitation, left the stage. In this way, quietly and yet 
forcefully, Gottfried was able to resolve the conflict with the 
existing conditions. 

* *k & 

The following extract serves to illustrate the effect of the 
May-Bug Club on Gottfried: 

“It was June 29, 1841. On this day the first anniversary of the May-Bug Club 
was to be celebrated on a grand scale” (p. 253). “A shout as of one voice arose to 
decide who should carry off the prize. Modestly Gottfried bent his knee before the 
Queen, who placed the inevitable laurel wreath on his glowing brow, while the 
setting sun cast its brightest rays over the transfigured countenance of the poet” 
(p. 285). 

The solemn dedication of the imagined poetic fame of Heinrich 
von Ofterdingen is followed by the feelings and the wishes of the 
blue flower. That evening Mockel sang a May-Bug anthem she 
had composed which ends with the following stanza summarising 
the whole trend: 

And what’s the moral of the tale? 
Fly, May-Bug, fly! 
A man who’s old will ne’er find a wife, 
So make haste, do not waste your life, 
Fly, May-Bug, fly! 

The ingenuous biographer remarks that “the invitation to 
marriage contained in the stanza was wholly free of any ulterior 
motives” (p. 255). Gottfried perceived the ulterior motives but 
“did not wish to evade rashly” the opportunity of being crowned 

The Great Men of the Exile 947 

for two further years before the whole May-Bug Club and of 
being an object of passion. So he married Mockel on May 22, 
1843, after she had become a member of the Protestant Church 
despite her lack of faith. This was done on the absurd pretext that 
“definite articles of faith are less important in the Protestant 
Church than the ethical idea” (p. 315). 

So that’s the moral of the tale: 
Trust not blue flowers, bright or pale. 

* Ke OF 

Gottfried had entered into the relationship with Mockel on the 
pretext of leading her out of her unbelief into the Protestant 
Church. Mockel now demanded Das Leben Jesu* by Strauss and 
lapsed again into her unbelief, 

“and with a heavy heart he followed her on the path of doubt into the abysses 
of negation. Together with her he toiled through the labyrinthine jungle of 
modern philosophy” (p. 308). 

He is driven into negation not by the development of 
philosophy which was already having an effect on the masses but 
by the intervention of a chance emotional relationship. 

What he brings with him out of the labyrinth of philosophy is 
revealed in his diaries: 

“I should like to see whether the mighty current flowing from Kant to 
Feuerbach will drive me out into— pantheism!!” (p. 308). 

As though this current did not go beyond pantheism, and as 
though Feuerbach were the last word in German philosophy! 

“The key-stone of my life,” the diary goes on to say, “is not historical 
knowledge, but a coherent system, and the core of theology is not ecclesiastical 
history, but dogma” (ibid.). 

As if German philosophy had not dissolved the coherent systems 
into historical knowledge and the core of dogma into ecclesiastical 
history! These confessions clearly reveal the counter-revolutionary 
democrat for whom the movement is nothing more than a means 
by which to arrive at a few incontrovertible eternal truths as 
worthless points of rest. 

However, Gottfried’s apologetic book-keeping of his whole 
development will enable the reader to judge which revolutionary 
factor lay concealed in this melodramatic, play-acting theologian. 

* D. F. Strauss, The Life of Jesus.— Ed. 

248 Karl] Marx and Frederick Engels 

Il 

This brings to a close the first act of the drama of Kinkel’s life 
and nothing worthy of mention then occurs before the outbreak 
of the February revolution. The publishing house of Cotta 
accepted his poems but without offering him a royalty and most of 
the copies remained unsold until that stray bullet in Baden gave a 
poetic nimbus to the author and created a market for his 
products. 

Incidentally, our biographer omits mention of one significant 
fact. The self-confessed goal of Kinkel’s desires was that he should 
die as an old theatre director: his ideal was a certain Eisenhut who 
together with his troupe used to roam up and down the Rhine as 
a travelling pickle-herring and who afterwards went mad. 

Alongside his Bonn lectures with their rhetoric of the pulpit, 
Gottfried also gave a number of theological and aesthetic 
performances in Cologne from time to time. When the February 
revolution broke out, he concluded them with this prophetic 
utterance: 

“The thunder of battle reverberates over to us from Paris and opens a new and 
glorious era for Germany and the whole continent of Europe. The raging storm 
will be followed by Zephyr’s blissful breeze of freedom. On this day is born the 
great, fruitful epoch of— constitutional monarchy!” 

The constitutional monarchy expressed its thanks to Kinkel for 
this compliment by appointing him associate professor. Such 
recognition could however not suffice for our grand homme en 
herbe. The constitutional monarchy showed no eagerness to cause 
his “fame to encircle the globe’. Moreover, the laurels Freiligrath 
had collected for his recent political poems prevented the crowned 
May-Bug poet from sleeping. Heinrich von Ofterdingen, there- 
fore, wheeled to the left and became first a_ constitutional 
democrat and then a republican democrat (honnéte et modéré). He 
set out to become a deputy but the May elections took him neither 
to Berlin nor to Frankfurt. Despite this initial setback he pursued 
his objective undismayed and it can truthfully be said that he did 
not spare himself. He wisely limited himself at first to his 
immediate environment. He founded the Bonner Zeitung, a modest 
local product distinguished only by the peculiar feebleness of its 
democratic rhetoric and its naive patriotic ignorance. He elevated 
the May-Bug Club to the rank of a democratic students’ club 
and from this there duly flowed a host of disciples that bore the 
Master’s renown into every village of the district of Bonn and 

The Great Men of the Exile 949 

forced Professor Kinkel upon every assembly. He himself poli- 
ticked with the grocers in their club, he extended a brotherly 
hand to the worthy manufacturers and even hawked the warm 
breath of freedom among the peasantry of Kindenich and 
Seelscheid. Above all he reserved his sympathy for the honourable 
trade of master craftsmen. He wept together with them over the 
decay of handicrafts, the terrible effects of free competition, the 
modern dominance of capital and of machines. Together with 
them he devised plans to restore the guild system and to prevent 
the competition of non-guild masters. So as to do everything of 
which he was capable he set down the results of his club 
deliberations with the petty master craftsmen in the pamphlet 
entitled Handwerk, errette Dich!* 

Lest there be any doubt as to Herr Kinkel’s position and to the 
significance of his little tract for Frankfurt and the nation, he 
dedicated it to the “thirty members of the economic committee of 
the Frankfurt National Assembly”. 

Heinrich von Ofterdingen’s researches into the “beauty” of the 
handicrafts led him immediately to the discovery that “the 
handicrafts are at present divided by a yawning chasm”’ (p. 5). 
This chasm consists in the fact that some artisans “frequent the 
clubs of the grocers and officials” (what progress!) and that others 
do not do this, and also in the fact that some artisans are educated 
and others are not. Despite this chasm the author regards the 
artisans’ associations and assemblies springing up everywhere in 
the beloved fatherland and the agitation for enhancing the 
position of the handicrafts (we recall the programmes a la 
Winkelblech' of 1848) as a gratifying symptom. In order to 
contribute his mite of good advice to this beneficent movement he 
devises his own programme of salvation. 

He begins by examining how the evil effects of free competition 
can be remedied by restricting it but without eliminating it 
altogether. The solutions he proposes are these: 

“A youth who lacks the requisite ability and maturity should be debarred by law 
from becoming a master” (p. 20). 

“No master shall be permitted to have more than one apprentice at any given 
time” (p. 29). 

“An examination must also be introduced for teaching a craft” (p. 30). 

“The master of an apprentice must unfailingly attend the examination” (p. 31). 

“On the question of maturity it should become mandatory that henceforth no 
one may become a master before completion of his twenty-fifth year” (p. 42). 

“" “Handicraft, save yourself!” — Ed. 

“As evidence of ability every candidate for the title of master should henceforth 
be required to pass an examination and moreover in public” (p. 43). 

“In this context it is of vital importance that the examination should be free” 
(p. 44). 

“All provincial masters of the same guild must likewise submit themselves” to 
these examinations (p. 55). 

Friend Gottfried, who is himself engaged in political peddling, 
desires to abolish “itinerant trading or peddling” in other, profane 
wares on the grounds of its dishonesty (p. 60). 

“A manufacturer of craft goods desires to withdraw his assets from the business 
to his own advantage and, dishonestly, to the disadvantage of his creditors. Like all 
ambivalent things, this phenomenon too is described by a foreign word: it is called 
bankruptcy. He therefore quickly takes his finished products to some neighbouring 
towns and sells them there to the highest bidder” (p. 64). These auctions—‘“in 

actual fact a sort of garbage that our dear neighbour, commerce, disposes of in the 
garden of handicraft”—must be abolished. 

(Would it not be much simpler, Friend Gottfried, to go to the 
root of the matter and abolish bankruptcy itself?) 

“It is true that fairs are in a special position” (p. 65). “In these circumstances 
the law will have to let the various towns and villages call an assembly of all the 

citizens to decide by majority vote (!) whether existing fairs should be retained or 
abolished”’ (p. 68). 

Gottfried now comes to the “vexed question” of the relationship 
between handicraft and machine industry and brings to light the 
following: 

“Let everyone sell only those goods that he himself can produce with his own hands” 
(p. 80). “‘Because machines and handicraft have gone their own ways they have 
strayed from their true paths and now both are in a sorry plight” (p. 84). 

He wishes to unite them by getting the artisans, such as the 
bookbinders of a town, to combine and maintain a machine. 

“As they use the machine only for themselves and only when they have an 
order they will be able to produce more cheaply than the merchant who owns a 
factory” (p. 85). “Capital will be broken by combination” (p. 84). (And combination 
will be broken by capital.) 

He then generalises his ideas about “the purchase of a machine 
to rule lines, and to cut paper and cardboard” (p. 85) by the 
united certificated bookbinders of Bonn and conceives the notion 
of a “machine chamber”. 

“Confederations of the various guild masters must set up _ businesses 
everywhere, similar to the factories of individual businessmen though on a smaller 

scale. These will work to order, exclusively for the benefit of local masters. They < 

will not accept commissions from other employers” (p. 86). A specific feature ct 
these machine chambers is the fact that “a commercial management” will only “be 

P he 

The Great Men of the Exile 251 

needed initially” (ibid). “Every idea as novel as this one,” Gottfried exclaims 

” “se 

“ecstatically”, “can only be put into practice when all the details have been thought 
out in a very calm matter of fact way.” He urges “each handicraft to perform this 
analysis for itself’! (pp. 87, 88). 

There follows a polemic against competition from the state in 
the shape of the labour performed by the inmates of prisons, 
reminiscences about a colony of criminals (“the creation of a 
human Siberia”, p. 102), and finally an attack on the “so-called 
handicraft companies and handicraft commissions” in the armed 
forces. The aim here is to relieve the army burden for the artisan 
by inducing the state to commission goods from the guild masters 
that it could itself produce more cheaply. 

“The problems of competition are thus disposed of” (p. 109). 

Gottfried’s second important point touches on the material aid 
which the craftsmen are to receive from the state. Gottfried 
regards the state solely from the point of view of an official and 
hence arrives at the opinion that the easiest and surest way to help 
the artisan is by the Treasury advancing money to erect trade 
halls, set up loan offices, etc. How the Treasury is to get the funds 
is the “ugly” side of the problem and, naturally enough, cannot be 
investigated here. 

Lastly, our theologian inevitably lapses into the role of moral 
preacher. He reads the artisans a moral lecture on self-help. He 
firstly mentions the “complaints about long-term borrowing and 
about discounts” (p. 136), and invites the artisan to consider the 
following moral question: “Do you always fix the same, unchang- 
ing price, my friend, for every job of work that you undertake?” 
(p. 132). On this occasion he also warns the artisan against making 
extortionate demands on “wealthy Englishmen”. “The root of the 
whole evil,” Gottfried imagines, “is the system of annual accounts” 
(p. 139). This is followed by Jeremiads about the way in which the 
artisans carry on in the taverns and their wives indulge their love 
of finery (pp. 140 ff.). 

The means by which the handicrafts can improve their position 
are “the corporation, the sickness fund and the artisans’ court of 
arbitration” (p. 146); and lastly, the workers’ educational associa- 
tions (p. 153). The following is his final statement about these 
educational associations: 

“And finally song combined with oratory will create a bridge to dramatic 
performances and the artisan theatre which must constantly be kept in view as the 
ultimate objective of these aesthetic strivings. Only when the labouring classes learn 
ence more how to move on the stage will their artistic education be complete” 
(pp. 174-75). 

Gottfried has thus succeeded in changing the artisan into a 
comedian and has arrived back at his own situation. 

But this whole flirtation with the guild aspirations of the master 
craftsmen in Bonn achieved also a practical result. In return for 
the solemn promise to table a motion to set up guilds, Gottfried’s 
election as Member for Bonn in the imposed Lower Chamber' 
was contrived. “From this moment on Gottfried felt’’ happy. 

He set off at once for Berlin and as he believed that it was the 
intention of the government to establish a permanent “corpora- 
tion” of licensed master legislators in the Lower Chamber, he 
acted as if he were to stay there for ever and decided to send for 
his wife and child. But then the Chamber was dissolved and friend 
Gottfried, bitterly disappointed, had to leave his parliamentary 
bliss and go back to Mockel. 

Soon afterwards the conflict between the Frankfurt Assembly 
and the [German] governments broke out and this led to the 
movements in South Germany and on the Rhine. The Fatherland 
called and Gottfried obeyed. Siegburg was the site of an arsenal 
for the army reserve, and next to Bonn Siegburg was the place 
where Gottfried had sown the seed of freedom most frequently. 
He joined forces with his friend Anneke, a former lieutenant, and 
summoned all his loyal followers to a march on Siegburg. They 
were to assemble at the rope ferry. More than a hundred were 
supposed to come, but when after waiting a long time Gottfried 
counted the heads of the faithful* there were barely thirty—and 
of these only three were students, to the undying shame of the 
May-Bug Club! Undaunted, Gottfried and his band crossed the 
Rhine and marched towards Siegburg. The night was dark and it 
was drizzling. Suddenly the sound of horses’ hooves could be 
heard behind our valiant heroes. They took cover at the side of 
the road, a patrol of lancers galloped by: miserable knaves had 
talked too freely and the authorities had got wind of it. The 
march was now futile and had to be abandoned. The pain that 
Gottfried felt in his breast that night can only be compared with 
the torments he experienced when both Knapp and Chamisso 
declined to print his first poetic efforts in their magazines. 

After this he could remain no longer in Bonn, but did not the 
Palatinate provide great scope for his activities? He went to 
Kaiserslautern and as he had to have a job he obtained a sinecure 
in the War Office (it is said that he was put in charge of naval 

2 A line from Schiller’s “Lied von der Glocke”.—Ed. 

The Great Men of the Exile 253 

affairs’). But he continued to earn his living by hawking around 
his ideas about freedom and the people’s paradise among the 
peasants of the region and it is said that his reception in a number 
of reactionary districts was anything but cordial. Despite these 
minor misfortunes Kinkel could be seen on every highroad, 
striding along purposefully, his travelling bag slung over his 
shoulder, and from this point on he appears in all the newspapers 
invariably accompanied by his travelling bag. 

But the uprising in the Palatinate was quickly terminated and we 
discover Kinkel again in Karlsruhe, where instead of the travelling 
bag he carries a musket, which now becomes his permanent 
emblem. This musket is said to have had a very beautiful aspect, 
i.e. a butt and stock made of mahogany and it was certainly an 
artistic, aesthetic musket; there was also an ugly aspect to it and 
this was the fact that friend Gottfried could neither load, nor see, 
nor shoot, nor march. So much so that a friend asked him why he 
was going into battle at all. Whereupon Gottfried replied: Well, 
the fact is that I can’t return to Bonn, I have to live! 

Thus Gottfried joined the ranks of the warriors in the corps of 
the chivalrous Willich. As a number of his comrades-in-arms have 
reliably reported, Gottfried served as a common partisan, sharing 
all the vicissitudes of this company with humility. He was as merry 
and friendly in bad times as in good, but he was mostly on the cart 
for the exhausted and the sick. At Rastatt,? however, this 
unsullied witness to truth and justice was to undergo the test from 
which he would emerge unblemished and as a martyr to the 
plaudits of the whole German nation. The exact details of this 
exploit have not yet been established with any accuracy. All that 1s 
known is that a troop of partisans got lost in a skirmish and a few 
shots were fired on their flank; that a bullet grazed our Gottfried’s 
head and he fell to the ground with the cry “I am dead”; that 
although he was not dead he could not accompany the others on 
the retreat and was taken to a farm house where he turned to the 
worthy Black Forest peasants with the words “Save me—I am 
Kinkel!”; finally, that he was discovered there by the Prussians, 
who dragged him off into Babylonian captivity. 

Ill 

With his capture a new stage began in Kinkel’s life, a stage that 
at the same time opened a new era in the history of German 

4 The Palatinate had no coast-line.— Ed. 

philistinism. No sooner had the May-Bug Club heard the news 
of his capture than they wrote to all the German papers that 
Kinkel, the great poet, was in danger of being summarily shot and 
that it was the duty of the German people, especially the educated 
among them, and above all the women and girls, to do everything 
to save the life of the imprisoned poet. Kinkel himself composed a 
poem* at about this time, as we are told, in which he compared 
himself to “Christ, his friend and teacher”, adding: “My blood is 
shed for you.” From this point on his emblem is the lyre. In this 
way Germany suddenly learned that Kinkel was a poet, and a 
great poet, and from this moment on the mass of German 
philistines and aestheticising drivellers joined in the farce of the 
blue flower put on by our Heinrich von Ofterdingen. 

In the meantime the Prussians brought him before a military 
tribunal. For the first time after a long interval he had an 
opportunity to try out one of those moving appeals to the tear 
ducts of his audience which—according to Mockel—had brought 
him such applause earlier on as an assistant preacher in Cologne. 
Cologne was destined soon to witness his most glorious perfor- 
mance in this sphere. He made a speech in his own defence before 
the tribunal which unfortunately, owing to the indiscretion of a 
friend, was later made available to the public through the medium 
of the Berlin Abend-Post.” In this speech Kinkel “guards” himself 

“against any identification of his actions with the dirt and filth which recently, I 
know, unfortunately tagged on to this revolution”. 

After this rabid revolutionary speech Kinkel was sentenced to 
twenty years detention in a fortress, but as an act of grace this was 
reduced to prison with hard labour. He was then removed to 
Naugard,° where he was reported to have been employed in 
spinning wool, and so just as formerly he had appeared with the 
emblem first of the travelling bag, then the musket and then the 
lyre, he now appears in association with the spinning wheel. We 
shall see him later wandering over the ocean accompanied by the 
emblem of the purse. 

In the meantime a curious event took place in Germany. It is 
well known that the German philistine is endowed by nature with 
a beautiful soul. Now he found his most cherished illusions cruelly 
shattered by the hard blows of the year 1849. Not a single hope 

? G. Kinkel, “Mein Vermiachtnis”.— Ed. 
G. Kinkel, “Vertheidigungsrede vor dem preussischen Kriegsgericht zu Rastatt 
am 4. August 1849” (Abend-Post, Nos. 78 and 79, April 5 and 6, 1850).—Ed. 
“ The Polish name is Novogard.—Ed. 

The Great Men of the Exile 255 

had become reality and even the fast-beating hearts of young men 
began to despair about the fate of the fatherland.. Every heart 
yielded to a melancholy languor and the need began to be 
universally felt for a democratic Christ, for a real or imagined 
sufferer who in his torments would bear the sins of the philistine 
world with the fortitude of a lamb and whose suffering would 
epitomise in extreme form the inert, chronic nostalgia of the 
whole of philistinism. The May-Bug Club, with Mockel at its 
head, set out to satisfy this universal need. And indeed, who better 
fitted for the task of enacting this great passion farce than our 
captive passion flower, Kinkel at the spinning wheel, able to emit 
endless floods of pathetic sentimental tears, who was in addition 
preacher, professor of fine arts, deputy, political colporteur, 
musketeer, newly discovered poet and old impresario all rolled 
into one? Kinkel was the man of the moment and as such he was 
immediately accepted by the German philistines. Every paper 
abounded in anecdotes, vignettes, poems, reminiscences of the 
captive poet, his sufferings in prison were magnified a thousand- 
fold and took on mythical stature; at least once a month his hair 
was reported to have gone grey; in every bourgeois meeting-place 
and at every tea-party he was remembered with solicitude; the 
daughters of the educated classes sighed over his poems, and old 
maids, who knew what yearning is, wept freely in various cities 
of the fatherland at the thought of his shattered manhood. All other 
profane victims of the movement, all who had been shot, who had 
fallen in battle or who had been imprisoned, disappeared into 
naught beside this one sacrificial lamb, beside this man after the 
hearts of the philistines male and female. For him alone did the 
rivers of tears flow, and indeed, he alone was able to respond to 
them in kind. In short, we have the perfect image of the democratic 
Siegwart epoch, which yielded in nothing to the literary Siegwart 
epoch of the preceding century, and Siegwart-Kinkel never felt 
more at home in any role than in this one where he appeared to 
be great not because of what he did but because of what he did 
not do. He seemed great not by dint of his strength and his 
powers of resistance but through his weakness and by feebly break- 
ing down in a situation where his only task was to survive with de- 
corum and sentiment. Mockel, however, was able and experienced 
enough to take practical advantage of the public’s soft heart and 
she immediately organised a highly efficient industry. She caused 
all of Gottfried’s published and unpublished works, which now 
suddenly became valuable and en vogue, to be printed and 
propagated among the. public; she also took the occasion to 

dispose of her own life experiences from the insect world, e.g. her 
Story of a Firefly*; she employed the May-Bug Strodtmann to 
assemble Gottfried’s most secret diary-feelings and prostitute them 
to the public for a considerable sum of money; she organised 
collections of every kind and in general she displayed undeniable 
commercial talent and great perseverance in converting the 
feelings of the educated public into hard cash. In addition she had 
the great satisfaction 

“of seeing the greatest men of Germany, such as Adolf Stahr, meeting daily in 
her little room”. 

The climax of this whole Siegwart mania was to be reached at 
the Assizes in Cologne where Gottfried gave a guest performance 
in the spring of 1850. This was the trial resulting from the 
attempted uprising in Siegburg and Kinkel was brought to 
Cologne for the occasion. As Gottfried’s diaries play such a 
prominent part in this sketch it will be appropriate if we too insert 
an excerpt from the diary of an eyewitness. 

“Kinkel’s wife visited him in gaol. She welcomed him from behind the grill with 
verses; he replied, I understand, in hexameters; whereupon they both sank to their 
knees before each other, and the prison inspector, an old sergeant-major, who was 
standing by wondered whether he was dealing with madmen or clowns. When 
asked later by the chief public prosecutor about the content of their conversation 
he declared that the couple had indeed spoken German but that he could not make 
head or tail of it. Whereupon Frau Kinkel is supposed to have retorted that a man 
who was so wholly innocent of art and literature should not be made an inspector.” 

When he faced the jury Kinkel wriggled his way out by acting 
the pure tear-jerker, the poetaster of the Siegwart period of the 
vintage of Werther’s Sufferings.” 

““Members of the Court, Gentlemen of the Jury—the blue eyes of my 
children—the green waters of the Rhine—it is no dishonour to shake the hand of 
the proletarian—the pallid lips of the prisoner—the gentle air of one’s 
home’ ” “—and similar muck: that was what the whole famous speech amounted to 
and the public, the jury, the prosecution and even the police shed their bitterest 
tears and the trial closed with a unanimous acquittal and a no less unanimous 
weeping and sobbing. Kinkel is doubtless a dear, good man but he is also a 
repulsive mixture of religious, political and literary reminiscences.” 

It was very upsetting indeed. 

“ An allusion to G. Kinkel’s Lebenslauf eines Johannisfiinkchens.—Ed. 
Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers.—Ed. 

“ G. Kinkel, ae Seuss vor dem Geschworenengerichte zu Kiln am 
2. Mai 1850”. 

The Great Men of the Exile 957 

Fortunately this period of misery was soon terminated by the 
romantic liberation of Kinkel from Spandau gaol. His escape was a 
re-enactment of the story of Richard Lionheart and Blondel,'™ 
with the difference that this time it was Blondel who was in prison 
while Lionheart played on the barrel-organ outside and _ that 
Blondel was an ordinary itinerant minstrel and Lionheart was 
basically hardly more than a chicken heart. Lionheart was in fact 
the student Schurz from the May-Bug Club, a little intriguer 
with great ambitions and limited achievements who was however 
intelligent enough to have seen through the “German Lamartine”’! 
Not long after the escape student Schurz declared in Paris that he, 
who was using Kinkel, knew very well that Kinkel was no lumen 
mundi,* whereas he, Schurz, and none other was destined to be the 
future president of the German Republic. This manikin, one of 
those students “in brown jackets and pale-blue overcoats” whom 
Gottfried had once followed with his ‘“gloomily flashing eyes”, 
succeeded in freeing Kinkel at the cost of sacrificing some poor 
devil of a warder who is now doing time elevated by the feeling of 
being a martyr for freedom—the freedom of Gottfried Kinkel. 

IV 

We next meet Kinkel again in London, and this time, thanks to 
his prison fame and the sentimentality of the German philistines, 
he has become the greatest man in Germany. Mindful of his 
sublime mission friend Gottfried was able to exploit all the 
advantages of the moment. His romantic escape gave new impetus 
to the Kinkel cult in Germany and he adroitly directed this onto a 
path that was not without beneficial material consequences. At the 
same time this metropolis provided the much venerated man with 
a new, complex arena in which to receive even greater acclaim. He 
did not hesitate: he had to become the lion of the season.” With 
this in mind he refrained for the time being from all political 
activity and withdrew into the seclusion of his home in order to 
grow a beard, without which no prophet can succeed. After that 
he visited Dickens, the English liberal newspapers, the German 
businessmen in the City and especially the aesthetic Jews in that 
place. He was all things to all men: to one a poet, to another a 
patriot in general, professor of fine arts to a third, Christ to the 

* Luminary.— Ed. 
6 Marx and Engels use the English word.— Ed. 

fourth, the great long-suffering Odysseus to the fifth. To 
everyone, however, he appeared as the gentle, artistic, benevolent 
and humanitarian Gottfried. He did not rest until Dickens had 
eulogised him in the Household Words,? until the Illustrated News? 
had published his portrait. He mobilised the few Germans in 
London who had been involved in the Kinkel mania even at a 
distance to invite him ostensibly to lecture on modern drama; 
tickets to these lectures flooded into the homes of the local 
German businessmen. No running around, no advertisement, no 
charlatanism, no importunity, no humiliation in front of this 
audience was beneath him; in return, however, he did not go 
unrewarded. Gottfried sunned himself complacently in the mirror 
of his own fame and in the gigantic mirror of the Crystal Palace '” 
of the world. And we may say that he now felt tremendously 
content. 
There was no lack of praise for his lectures (see Kosmos). 

Kosmos: “Kinkel’s Lectures” 

“While looking once:at Débler’s misty images I was surprised by the whim- 
sical question of whether it was possible to produce such chaotic creations in ‘words’, 
whether it was possible to utter misty images. It is no doubt unpleasant for 
the critic to have to confess, at the very outset, that in this case his critical au- 
tonomy will vibrate against the galvanised nerves of a stimulating reminiscence, 
as the fading sound of a dying note echoes in the strings. Nevertheless I would 
prefer to renounce any attempt at a bewigged and boring analysis of pedantic 
insensitivity than to deny that tone which the charming muse of the German 
refugee caused to resonate in my receptive imagination. This keynote of Kinkel’s 
paintings, this sounding board of his chords is the sonorous, creative, formative 
and gradually shaping ‘word’—‘modern thought’. The human ‘judgment’ of this 
thought leads truth out of the chaos of mendacious traditions, and places it, as the 
inviolable property of mankind, under the protection of spiritually active, logical 
minorities who will lead mankind from a credulous ignorance to a state of more 
sceptical science. It is the task of the science of doubt to profane the mysticism of 
pious deceit, to undermine the absolutism of a stupefied tradition; through 
scepticism, that ceaselessly labouring guillotine of philosophy, to decapitate 
accepted authority and to Jead the nations out of the misty regions of theocracy by 
means of revolution into the luscious meadows of democracy” (of nonsense). ‘““The 
sustained, unflagging search in the annals of mankind, and the understanding of 
man himself, is the great task of all revolutionaries and this had been understood 
by that proscribed poet-rebel who on three recent Monday evenings uttered his 
‘dissolving views’ © before a bourgeois audience in the course of his lectures on the 
history of the modern theatre.” 

“A Worker” }© 

* Charles Dickens, “Gottfried Kinkel; A Life in Three Pictures”, Household Words. 
No, 32, November 2, 1850.— Ed . 
Illustrated London News.— Ed. 
© The English expression is used in the original.— Ed. 

The Great Men of the Exile 959 

It is generally claimed that this worker is a very close relation of 
Kinkel’s—namely Mockel—as indeed seems likely from the use of 
such expressions as “sounding board”, “fading sound”, “chords” 
and “galvanised nerves”. 

However, even this period of hard-earned self-satisfaction was 
not to last forever. The Last Judgment on the existing world 
order, the democratic day of judgment, namely the much 
celebrated May 1852,'°’ was drawing ever closer. In order to 
confront this day all booted and spurred Gottfried Kinkel had to 
don his political lion’s skin once more: he had to make contact 
with the “emigration”. 

So we come to the London “emigration”, this hotchpotch of 
former members of the Frankfurt Parliament, the Berlin National 
Assembly, and Chamber of Deputies, of gentlemen from the 
Baden campaign, giants from the comedy of the Imperial 
Constitution, writers without a public, loudmouths from the 
democratic clubs and congresses, twelfth-rate journalists and so 
forth. 

The great men of the Germany of 1848 had been on the point 
of coming to a sticky end when the victory of the “tyrants” 
rescued them, swept them out of the country and made saints and 
martyrs of them. They were saved by the counter-revolution. The 
course of continental politics brought most of them to London, 
which thus became their European centre. It is evident that in this 
situation something had to happen, something had to be arranged 
to remind the public daily of the existence of these world 
liberators. It was necessary at all costs to preclude the impression 
that universal history might be able to proceed without the 
intervention of these mighty men. The more this refuse of 
mankind found itself hindered by its own impotence as much as 
by the prevailing situation from undertaking any real action, the 
more zealously did it indulge in spurious activity whose imagined 
deeds, imagined parties, imagined struggles and imagined interests 
had been so noisily trumpeted abroad by those involved. The less 
able these people were to bring about a new revolution in fact, the 
more they had to anticipate this eventuality in their minds, to 
share out the plum jobs in advance and enjoy the prospect of 
future power. The form taken by this self-important activity was 
that of a mutual insurance club of would-be great men and the 
reciprocal guarantee of government posts. 

°60 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 

Vv 

The first attempt to create such an “organisation” took place as 
early as the spring of 1850. A magniloquent “Draft Circular to 
German Democrats, printed in manuscript form” was hawked 
around London together with a “Covering Letter to the Leaders”’.’ 
The Circular and Covering Letter invited the readers to found a 
united democratic church. The immediate aim was to form a 
Central Bureau to deal with the affairs of German émigrés, to set 
up a joint administration for refugee problems, to start a printing 
press in London, and to unite all patriots against the common 
enemy, etc. The emigration should then become the centre of the 
internal movement, the organisation of the emigration was to be 
the beginning of a comprehensive democratic organisation, those 
outstanding personalities who were without means should as 
members of the Central Bureau be paid salaries raised by taxes 
levied on the German people. This tax proposal seemed all the 
more appropriate as “the German emigration had gone abroad 
not merely without a respectable hero but, what is even worse, 
without common assets”. The document does not conceal that the 
Hungarian, Polish and French committees already in existence 
provided the model for this “organisation” and the whole of it is 
redolent of a certain envy of the privileged position of these 
prominent allies. . 

The Circular was the joint production of Herr Rudolph 
Schramm and Herr Gustav Struve, behind whom lay concealed the 
merry figure of Herr Arnold Ruge, a corresponding member 
living in Ostend at the time. 

Herr Rudolph Schramm—a rowdy, loudmouthed and extremely 
muddleheaded littlke man whose life-motto came from Rameau’s 
Nephew: 

When at the height of his power, Herr Camphausen would 
gladly have given the forward young Crefelder an important post, 
had it been seemly thus to elevate a mere junior official. Thanks 
to bureaucratic etiquette Herr Schramm found only the career of 
a democrat still open to him. And in this profession he really did 

* R. Schramm, G. Struve, “Entwurf eines Rundschreibens an deutsche Demokra- 
ten; als Manuscript gedruckt. Begleitschreiben an die Fuhrer”.— Ed. 

> Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Neffe. Aus dem Manuscript wdbersetzt von 
J. W. Goethe.— Fd. 

The Great Men of the Exile "261 

advance at one point to the post of President of the Democratic 
Club in Berlin and with the support of some Left-wing Members 
of Parliament he later became the Deputy for Striegau* in the 
Berlin National Assembly. Here the normally so loquacious 
Schramm distinguished himself by his obstinate silence, which was 
accompanied, however, by an uninterrupted series of grunts. After 
the Constituent Assembly had been dissolved our democratic man 
of the people wrote a pamphlet in support of a constitutional 
monarchy” but he was not re-elected. Later, at the time of the 
Brentano government, he appeared momentarily in Baden and 
there in the “Club of Resolute Progress” '”? he became acquainted 
with Struve. On his arrival in London he declared his intention of 
withdrawing from all political activity, for which reason he 
forthwith published the circular referred to above. Essentially an 
unsuccessful bureaucrat, Herr Schramm imagined that his family 
relations qualified him to represent the radical bourgeoisie in exile 
and he did indeed present a fair caricature of the radical 
bourgeols. 

Gustav Struve is one of the more important figures of the 
emigration. At the very first glimpse of his leathery appearance, 
his protuberant eyes with their sly, stupid expression, the mat 
gleam on his bald pate and his half Slav, half Kalmuck features, 
one cannot doubt that one is in the presence of an unusual man. 
And this impression is confirmed by his low, guttural voice, his 
sentimental and unctuous manner of speaking and the solemn 
gravity of his deportment. To be just it must be said that faced 
with the greatly increased difficulties of distinguishing oneself 
these days, our Gustav tried at least to be different from his fellow 
citizens; part prophet, part speculator, part bunion healer—he 
centred his activities on all kinds of odd peripheral matters and 
made propaganda for the strangest assortment of causes. For 
example, being a Russian he suddenly took it into his head to 
enthuse about the cause of German freedom after he had been 
employed in a supernumerary capacity in the Russian embassy to 
the Federal Diet '’' and had written a little pamphlet in defence of 
the Diet.“ Regarding his own skull as the normal human cranium, 
he vigorously applied himself to phrenology and from then on he 
refused to trust anyone whose skull he had not yet felt and 

*“ The Polish name is Strzegom.— Ed. 
R.Schramm, Der Standpunkt der Demokratie in und xur octroyirten zweiten 
Kammer.—Ed. 
“ G.Struve, Erster Versuch auf dem Felde des deutschen Bundesrechts.—Ed. 

examined. He also gave up eating meat and preached the gospel 
of strict vegetarianism; he was, moreover, a weather-prophet, he 
inveighed against tobacco and was prominent in the interest of the 
ethics of German Catholicism!” and _ water-cures. Given his 
thoroughgoing hatred of concrete knowledge it was natural that 
he should be in favour of free universities in which the four 
faculties '’? would be replaced by the study of phrenology, 
physiognomy, chiromancy and necromancy. It was also quite in 
character for him persistently to maintain that he was a great 
writer precisely because his mode of writing was the antithesis of 
everything that could be held to be stylistically acceptable. 

In the early forties Gustav had already invented the Deutscher 
Zuschauer, a little paper that he published in Mannheim, that he 
patented and that pursued him everywhere as a fixed idea. He 
also made the discovery at around this time that Rotteck’s 
Weltgeschichte and the Rotteck-Welcker Staats-Lexikon, the two 
works that had been his Old and New Testaments, were out of 
date and in need of a new democratic edition. This revision Gustav 
undertook without delay and published an extract from it in 
advance under the title Grundztige der Staatswissenschaft. Since 1848, 
moreover, the revision had become “an undeniable necessity, for 
the late Rotteck had not experienced the events of recent years”’. 

In the meantime there broke out in Baden in quick succession 
the three “popular uprisings” '* that have been depicted by 
Gustav as the very centre of the whole modern course of world 
history.*, Driven into exile by the very first of these revolts 
(Hecker’s) and engaged in publishing his Deutscher Zuschauer once 
again, this time in Basle, he was dealt a hard blow by fate when 
the publisher in Mannheim continued to print the Deutscher 
Zuschauer there under a different editor. The battle between the 
true and the false Deutscher Zuschauer was so bitterly fought that 
neither paper survived. To compensate for this Gustav devised a 
constitution for the German Federal Republic? in which Germany 
was to be divided into 24 republics, each with a president and two 
chambers; he appended a neat map on which the whole plan could 
be clearly seen. 

In September 1848 the second insurrection began, in which our 
Gustav acted as both Caesar and Socrates. He used the time 
granted him on German soil to issue serious warnings to the Black 
Forest peasantry about the deleterious effects of smoking tobacco. 

aes Struve, Geschichte der drei Volkserhebungen in Baden.— Ed. 
> G. Struve, Die Grundrechte des deutschen Volkes.— Ed. 

The Great Men of the Exile 263 

In Lo6rrach he published his Moniteur with the title of Government 
Organ—-German Free State— Freedom, Prosperity, Education.* This 
publication contained inter alia the following decree: 

“Article' . The extra tax of 10 per cent imposed by the aforesaid on goods 
imported from Switzerland is hereby abolished; Article 2. Christian Maiiller, the 
Customs Officer, is given the task of implementing the measure.” 

He was accompanied in all his trials by his faithful Amalia, who 
subsequently published a romantic account of them.’ She was also 
active in administering the oath to captured gendarmes; it was her 
custom to fasten a red band around the arm of every one who 
swore allegiance to the German free state and to give him a kiss. 
Unfortunately Gustav and Amalia were taken prisoner and 
languished in gaol where the imperturbable Gustav at once 
resumed his republican translation of Rotteck’s Weltgeschichte until 
he was at last liberated by the outbreak of the third insurrection. 
Gustav now became a member of a real provisional government 
and the mania for provisional governments was now added to his 
other fixed ideas. As President of the War Council he hastened to 
introduce as much muddle as possible into his department and to 
recommend the “traitor” Mayerhofer for the post of Minister for 
War (vide Goegg, Rtickblick, Paris, 1851). Later he vainly aspired 
to the post of Foreign Minister and to have 60,000 florins placed 
at his disposal. Herr Brentano soon relieved our Gustav of the 
burdens of government and Gustav now headed the opposition in 
the “Club of Resolute Progress”. He delighted above all in 
opposing the very measures of Brentano which he himself had 
supported. Even though the Club was disbanded and Gustav had 
to flee to the Palatinate, this disaster had its positive side for it 
enabled him to issue one further number of the inevitable 
Deutscher Zuschauer in Neustadt an der Haardt—this compensated 
Gustav for much undeserved suffering. A further satisfaction was 
that he was successful in a by-election in some remote corner of 
the uplands and was nominated member of the Baden Constituent 
Assembly, which meant that he could now return in an official 
capacity. In this Assembly Gustav only distinguished himself by the 
following three proposals that he put forward in Freiburg: 1) On 
June 28: everyone who wants to negotiate with the enemy to be 

* Republikanisches Regierungs-Blatt. It appeared with the subtitle: Deutsche Republik! 
Wohlstand, Bildung, Fretheit für Alle!— Ed. 
Amalie Struve, Erinnerungen aus den badischen Fretheitskampfen.— Ed. 
© A.Goegg, Rückblick auf die Badische Revolution unter Hinweisung auf die 
gegenwartige Lage Teutschlands (published anonymously).— Ed. 

9°64 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 

declared a traitor. 2) On June 30: a new provisional government 
to be formed in which Struve would have a seat and a vote. 3) On 
the same day that the previous motion was defeated he proposed 
that as the defeat at Rastatt had rendered all resistance futile the 
uplands should be spared the terrors of war and that therefore all 
officials and soldiers should receive ten days’ wages and members 
of the Assembly should receive ten days’ expenses together with 
travelling costs and then they should all repair to Switzerland to 
the accompaniment of trumpets and drums. When this proposal 
too was rejected Gustav at once set out for Switzerland on his own 
and having been driven from thence by James Fazy’s stick he 
retreated to London, where he came to the fore with yet another 
discovery, namely the six scourges of mankind. These six scourges 
were: the princes, the nobles, the priests, the bureaucracy, the 
standing army, mammon and bedbugs. The spirit in which Gustav 
interpreted the late Rotteck can be gauged from the further 
discovery that mammon was the invention of Louis Philippe. 
Gustav preached the gospel of the six scourges in the Deutsche 
Londoner Zeitung,” which belonged to the ex-Duke of Brunswick. 
He was tolerably rewarded for this activity and in return he 
gratefully bowed to the ducal censorship. So much for Gustav’s 
relations with the first scourge, the princes. As for his relationship 
with the nobles, the second scourge, our moral and _ religious 
republican had visiting cards printed on which he figured as 
“Baron von Struve’. If his relations with the remaining scourges 
were less amicable this cannot be his fault. Gustav then made use 
of his leisure time in London to devise a republican calendar in 
which the saints were replaced by right-minded men and the 
names “Gustav” and “Amalia” were particularly prominent. The 
months were given German designations in imitation of those in 
the calendar of the French Republic and there were a number of 
similar beneficial and commonplace innovations. Moreover his 
favourite fixed ideas made their appearance again in London: to 
revive the Deutscher Zuschauer and the Club of Resolute Progress and 
to form a provisional government. On all these matters he found 
himself of one mind with Schramm and in this way the Circular came 
into being. 

The third member of the alliance,” the great Arnold Ruge with 
his air of a sergeant-major still waiting for civilian employment, 

* G.Struve, “Abschiedsbrief Struve’s Havre, 7. Oktober 1849”, Deutsche Londoner 
Zeitung, No. 238, October 26, 1849.— Ed. 
B Paraphrase of the last line of Schiller’s “Die Bürgschaft” .— Ed. 

The Great Men of the Exile 965 

outshines the whole of the emigration. It cannot be said that this 
noble man commends himself by his notably handsome exterior; 
Paris acquaintances were wont to sum up his Pomeranian-Slav 
features with the word “ferret-face” (figure de fouine). Arnold 
Ruge, the son of peasants of the isle of Rugen, had endured seven 
years in Prussian prisons for demagogic agitation.'” He threw 
himself wildly into Hegelian philosophy as soon as he had realised 
that once he had leafed through Hegel’s Encyclopadie he could 
dispense with the study of all other science. He also developed the 
principle (which he advanced in a short story and which he 
attempted to practise on his friends—poor Herwegh can vouch 
for the truth of this) of profiting from marriage and accordingly he 
early acquired a “material basis” in this manner. 

With the help of his Hegelian phrases and his material basis he 
merely contrived to become door-keeper to German philosophy. 
In the Hallische Jahrbticher and the Deutsche Jahrbicher it was his 
task to announce and to trumpet the names of rising luminaries 
and he showed that he was not without talent in exploiting them 
for his own literary purposes. Unfortunately, the period of 
philosophical anarchy very soon supervened, that period when 
science no longer had a universally acknowledged king, when 
Strauss, B. Bauer and Feuerbach fought among themselves and 
when the most diverse alien elements began to disrupt the 
simplicity of the classical doctrine. Our Ruge looked on helplessly; 
he no longer knew which path to take; his Hegelian categories had 
always operated in a vacuum, now they ran completely amok and 
he suddenly felt a strong desire for a mighty movement where 
people were not very particular about thought and writing. 

Ruge played the same role in the Hallische Jahrbticher as the late 
bookseller Nicolai had done in the old Berlinische Monatsschrift. 
Like the latter his ambition was to print the works of others and,in 
so doing, to derive material advantage and also to quarry literary 
sustenance for the effusions of his own brain. The only difference 
was that in rewriting his collaborators’ articles, in this literary 
digestive process with its inevitable end product, our Ruge went 
much further than did his model. Moreover, Ruge was not the 
door-keeper of German Enlightenment, he was the Nicolai of 
modern German philosophy and was able to conceal the natural 
banality of his genius behind a thick hedge of speculative jargon. 
Like Nicolai he fought valiantly against Romanticism because it had 
long since been demolished philosophically by Hegel in his 
Aesthettk and by Heine from the point of view of literature in Die 
romantische Schule. But unlike Hegel, Ruge agreed with Nicolai in 

266 Kar! Marx and Frederick Engels 

arrogating to himself the right as an anti-Romantic to set up 
a vulgar philistinism and above all his own philistinic self as an 
ideal of perfection. With this in mind and so as to defeat the 
enemy on his own ground, Ruge went in for making verses. No 
Dutchman could have achieved the dull flatness of these poems 
which Ruge hurled so challengingly into the face of Romanti- 
cism. 

And in general our Pomeranian thinker did not really feel at 
ease in Hegelian philosophy. Able as he was in detecting 
contradictions he was all the more feeble in resolving them and he 
had a very understandable horror of dialectics. The upshot was 
that the crudest possible contradictions dwelt peaceably together 
in his dogmatic brain and that his powers of understanding, 
never very agile, were nowhere more at home than in such mixed 
company. It sometimes happened that in his own way he imbibed 
simultaneously two articles by two different writers and conflated 
them into a single new product, without noticing that they had 
been written from two opposing viewpoints. Always getting stuck 
in his contradictions he sought to extricate himself by asserting in 
his arguments with theorists that his deficient reasoning was due 
to his practical sense, and on the other hand telling the practical 
people that his practical clumsiness and inconsistency was the 
height of theoretical achievement. He would end by maintaining 
that it was precisely his own entanglement in insoluble contradic- 
tions, his chaotically uncritical faith in the purport of all popular 
slogans that showed him to be a man of “principle”. 

Before we go on to concern ourselves with the further career of 
our Maurice of Saxony, as he liked to style himself in his intimate 
circle of friends, we would point to two qualities which made their 
appearance already in the Jahrbiicher. The first is his mania for 
manifestos. No sooner had anyone hatched any kind of novel 
opinion that Ruge believed to have a future than he would issue a 
manifesto. As no one reproaches him with ever having given birth 
to an original thought, such manifestos were always a suitable 
opportunity to claim this novel idea as his property in a more or 
less declamatory fashion. This would be followed by the attempt to 
form a party, a group, a “mass” which would stand behind him 
and to whom he could act as sergeant-major. We shall see later to 
what unbelievable heights of perfection Ruge had developed 
the art of fabricating manifestos, proclamations and pronuncia- 
mentos. 

The second quality is the particular diligence in which Arnold 
excels. As he does not care to study overmuch, or as he puts it “to 

The Great Men of the Exile 267 

transfer ideas from one library into another”’,” he prefers “to gain 
his knowledge fresh from life”, in other words, to note down 
conscientiously every evening all the novel or bright ideas or 
“anecdotes” that he has heard, read, or just picked up during the 
day. As opportunity arises these materials are then made to 
contribute to Ruge’s daily stint which he performs just as 
conscientiously as his other bodily needs. It is this that his 
admirers refer to when they say that he cannot hold his ink. The 
subject of his daily literary production is a matter of complete 
indifference; what is vital is that Ruge should be able to immerse 
every possible topic in that wonderful stylistic sauce that goes with 
everything, just like the English who enjoy their Soyer’s relish” or 
Worcester sauce‘ equally with fish, fowl, cutlets or anything else. 
This daily stylistic diarrhoea he likes to designate the “strikingly 
beautiful form” and he regards it as adequate grounds for passing 
himself off as an “artist” 

Contented as Ruge was to be the Swiss guard of German philos- 
ophy he still had a secret sorrow gnawing at his innermost vitals. 
He had not written a single large book and had daily to envy 
the happy Bruno Bauer who had published eighteen fat volumes 
while still a young man. To remedy this incongruity Ruge had one 
and the same essay printed three times in one and the same volume 
under different titles and then brought out the same volume in a 
number of different formats. In this way Arnold Ruge’s Collected 
Works* came into being and even today he derives much pleasure 
from counting them every morning volume by volume as they stand 
there neatly bound in his library, whereupon he exclaims joyfully: 
“And anyway. Bruno Bauer is a man without principles!” 

Even though Arnold did not manage to comprehend the 
Hegelian philosophy, he did succeed in representing one Hegelian 
category in his own person. He was the very incarnation of “the 
honest consciousness” and was strengthened in this when he made 
the pleasant discovery in the Phdnomenologie—which otherwise 
remained a sealed book to him—that the honest consciousness 
“always has pleasure in itself.“ Though it wears its integrity on its 
sleeve the honest consciousness uses it to conceal the petty malice 

A. Ruge, Unsre letzten zehn Jahre.—Ed. 

Marx and Engels use the English words ‘“‘Soyer’s relish” .— Ed. 
“ Marx and Engels say “Warwickshire sauce” .— Ed. 

aA. Ruge, Gesammelte Schriften.—Ed. 

“ G. W. F. Hegel, Phdnomenologie des Geistes. VI. Der Geist.— Ed. 

and crotchetiness of the philistine; it has the right to allow itself 
every kind of base action because it knows that its baseness springs 
from honest motives. Its very stupidity becomes a virtue because it 
is an irrefutable proof that it stands up for its principles. Despite 
every arriére pensée it is firmly convinced of its own integrity and 
the more it intends to perpetrate a deception or a mesquine* base 
act, the more open and trustworthy does it appear. Beneath the 
halo of good intentions all the petty meannesses of the philistine 
become transformed into as many virtues; sordid self-interest 
appears purified when presented as a piece of self-sacrifice; 
cowardice appears disguised as a higher form of courage; baseness 
becomes magnanimity; and the coarse manners and obtrusiveness 
of the peasant become ennobled, and indeed transfigured into the 
signs of uprightness and good humour. This is the gutter in which 
the contradictions of philosophy, democracy and __phrase- 
mongering in general all strangely merge; such a man is moreover 
richly endowed with all the vices, the mean and petty qualities, with 
the slyness and the stupidity, the avarice and the clumsiness, the 
servility and the arrogance, the untrustworthiness and_ the 
bonhomie of the emancipated serf, the peasant: philistine and 
ideologist, atheist and slogan worshipper, absolute ignoramus and 
absolute philosopher all in one—that is Arnold Ruge as Hegel 
foretold him in 1806. 

After the Deutsche Jahrbticher were suppressed Ruge transported 
his family to Paris in a carriage specially built for the purpose. 
Here, his unlucky star brought him into contact with Heine, who 
honoured him as the man who “had translated Hegel into 
Pomeranian”. Heine asked him whether Prutz was not a 
pseudonym of his, which Ruge could deny in good conscience. 
However, it was not possible to make Heine believe that our 
Arnold was not the author of Prutz’s poems. Incidentally, Heine 
discovered very soon that even though Ruge had no talent he 
knew very well how to give the appearance of being a man of 
character. Thus it came about that friend Arnold gave Heine the 
idea for his Atta Troll. If Ruge did not immortalise his sojourn in 
Paris by writing a great work he nevertheless deserves our thanks 
for the one Heine produced for him. In gratitude the poet wrote 
for him this well-known epitaph: 

Atta Troll, reforming bear, 
Pure and pious; a passionate husband, 

: Petty.— Ed. 

The Great Men of the Exile 269 

By the Zeitgeist led astray 

A backwoods sansculotte, 
Dances badly but ideals 

Dwell within his shaggy breast 
Often stinking very strongly — 
Talent none, but Character!* 

In Paris our Arnold experienced the misfortune of becoming 
involved with the Communists. He published articles by Marx and 
Engels in the Deutsch-Franzésische Jahrbiicher” that contained views 
running directly counter to those he had himself announced in the 
Preface, an accident to which the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung‘ 
drew his attention but which he bore with philosophical resigna- 
tion. 

To overcome an innate social awkwardness our Ruge_ has 
collected a small number of curious anecdotes that could be used 
on any occasion. He calls these anecdotes yarns. His preoccupation 
with these yarns, sustained over many years, finally, led to the 
transformation of all events, situations and circumstances into a 
series of pleasant or unpleasant, good or bad, important or trivial, 
interesting or boring yarns. The Paris bustle, the many new 
impressions, socialism, politics, the Palais-Royal,'” the cheapness of 
the oysters—all these things wrought so powerfully on the mind 
of this unfortunate man that his head began to spin permanently 
and irremediably and Paris for him became an_ unlimited 
storehouse of yarns. He himself hit upon the idea of using wood 
shavings to make coats for the proletariat and in general he had a 
foible for industrial yarns for which he could never find any 
shareholders. 

When the politically better known Germans were expelled from 
France,'”” Ruge contrived to avoid this fale by presenting himself 
to Minister Duchatel as a savant sérieux.* He evidently had in mind 
the ‘“‘scholar” in Paul de Kock’s Amant de la lune, who established 
himself as a savant by means of an original way of making corks 
pop into the air.° 

* Heinrich Heine, Atta Troll, Caput XX1V.— Ed. 
> The reference is to Marx’s articles “On the Jewish Question” and “Contribution 
to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction”, and to Engels’ articles 
“Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” and “The Condition of England. Past 
and Present by Thomas Carlyle”(see present edition, Vol. 3).— Ed. 
© “Frankreich. Die ersten Proben der deutsch-franzésischen Jahrbiicher” (anon.), 
Allgemeine Zeitung (Augsburg), No. 70, March 10, 1844.— Fd. 

4 A true scholar.— Ed. 
© This refers to Saucissard, a character in Paul de Kock’s novel.— Fd. 

Shortly afterwards Arnold went to Switzerland where he met 
K. Heinzen, a former Dutch non-commissioned officer, Cologne 
writer and Prussian tax sub-inspector. These two were soon bound 
together by bonds of the most intimate friendship. Heinzen 
learnt philosophy from Ruge, Ruge learnt politics from Heinzen. 
From this time on we detect in Ruge a growing necessity to appear 
as a philosopher par excellence only among the coarser elements of 
the German movement, a fate that led him down and down until 
at last he was accepted as a philosopher only by “Friends of Light” 
ministers (Dulon), German-Catholic parsons (Ronge) and Fanny 
Lewald. At the same time, however, anarchy was growing apace in 
German philosophy. Stirner’s Unique, [Stein’s] Socialism and Com- 
munism,* etc., all these recent intruders, caused Ruge’s head to spin 
quite intolerably; a great leap had to be ventured. So Ruge escaped 
into humanism, the catch-phrase with which all confusionists in 
Germany, from Reuchlin to Herder, have covered up their 
embarrassment. This catch-phrase seemed all the more appropriate 
as Feuerbach had only recently “rediscovered man” and Arnold 
fastened on to it with such desperation that he has not let go of it to 
this day. But while still in Switzerland Arnold made yet another, 
incomparably greater discovery. This was that “the ego by appearing 
frequently before the public asserts itself as a character”.” From this 
point on a new field of activity opened for Arnold. He now elevated 
the most shameless meddling and importunity into a principle. Ruge 
had to take part in everything and to poke his nose into everything. 
No hen could lay an egg without Ruge “editing the rationale” of this 
“event’”.'”? Contact had to be maintained at all costs with some 
obscure local paper where there was a chance of making frequent 
appearances. He no longer wrote a single newspaper article without 
signing his name and, where possible, mentioning himself. The 
principle of the frequent appearance had to be extended to every 
article; an article had first to appear in letter form in the European 
papers and (after Heinzen’s emigration to New York) in the 
American papers also; then it was printed as a pamphlet and finally 
reprinted in the collected works. 

Thus equipped, our Ruge could return to Leipzig to obtain 
definitive recognition of his character. But once arrived all was not a 
bed of roses. His old friend Wigand, the bookseller, had very 

“M. Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum. L. Stein, Der Socialismus und 
Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs.— Ed. 
A. Ruge, Unsre letzten zehn Jahre.— Ed. 

The Great Men of the Exile 271 

successfully replaced him in the role of Nicolai and as no other post 
was vacant Ruge fell into gloomy reflections on the transitoriness of 
all yarns. This was his situation when the German revolution broke 
out. 

It brought sudden relief to our Arnold too. The mighty movement 
in which even the clumsiest could easily swim with the current had 
finally got underway and Ruge went at once to Berlin where he 
intended to fish in troubled waters. As a revolution had just broken 
out he felt that it would be appropriate for him to come forward with 
proposals for reform. So he founded a paper with that name. The 
pre-revolutionary Réforme of Paris had been the most untalented, 
ignorant and boring paper in France. The Berlin Reform demon- 
strated that it was possible to surpass its French model and that one 
could unhesitatingly offer the German public such an incredible 
journal even in the “metropolis of intelligence”. On the assumption 
that Ruge’s clumsy language was the best guarantee for the 
profound content lying behind it Arnold was elected to the 
Frankfurt Parliament as Member for Breslau.* Here he saw his 
chance as editor of the democratic Left wing to come forward with 
an absurd manifesto.” Apart from that he distinguished himself only 
by his passion for issuing manifestos for European peoples’ congresses, 
and hastened to add his voice to the general wish that Prussia should 
be integrated into Germany. Later, on his return to Berlin, he 
demanded that Germany should be integrated into Prussia and 
Frankfurt into Berlin, and when he finally decided to become a peer 
of Saxony he demanded that Germany and Prussia should both be 
integrated into Dresden. 

His parliamentary activity brought him no laurels other than the 
fact that his own party despaired at his clumsy ineptitude. At the 
same time his Reform was going downhill, a situation that could only 
be remedied, as he thought, by his personal presence in Berlin. As an 
“honest consciousness” he naturally discovered a strictly political 
pretext for his resignation and in fact he demanded that the whole of 
the Left should leave with him. Naturally, they refused and Ruge 
went to Berlin alone. Once there, he discovered that modern 
conflicts can best be resolved by the “‘ Dessau method”, as he termed 
the small state, a model of constitutional democracy. Then during 
the siege of Vienna he again drew up a manifesto in which General 

* The Polish name is Wroclaw.— Ed. 
A. Ruge, “Motivirtes Manifest der radical-demokratischen Partei in der 
constituirenden Nationalversammlung zu Frankfurt am Main”, Die Reform, No. 66, 
June 7, 1848.— Ed. 

Wrangel was exhorted to march against Windischgratz and to free 
Vienna.* He even obtained the approval of the Democratic Congress 
for this curious document under the pretext that it had already been 
set up with the signature and printed.'” Finally, when Berlin itself 
was in a state of siege, Herr Ruge went to Manteuffel and made 
proposals concerning the Reform, which were however rejected. 
Manteuffel told him that he wished all opposition papers were like 
the Reform; the Neue Preussische Zeitung was much more danger- 
ous—an utterance which the naive Ruge, with triumphant pride, 
hastened to report through the length and breadth of Germany. 
Arnold became an enthusiastic advocate of passive resistance,'*° which 
he himself put into practice by leaving his paper, editors and 
everything in the lurch and running away. Active flight is evidently 
the most resolute form of passive resistance. The counter-revolution 
had supervened and Ruge fled before it all the way from Berlin to 
London without stopping. 

At the time of the May uprising in Dresden Arnold placed himself 
at the head of the movement in Leipzig together with his friend Otto 
Wigand and the city council. He and his companions issued a 
vigorous manifesto to the citizens of Dresden urging them to fight 
bravely—in Leipzig, it went on, Ruge, Wigand and the city fathers 
were watching, and whoever did not desert himself would not be 
deserted by Heaven. Scarcely had the manifesto been published 
when our brave Arnold took to his heels and fled to Karlsruhe. 

In Karlsruhe he felt unsafe even though the Baden troops were 
standing on the Neckar and hostilities were a long way from 
breaking out. He asked Brentano to send him to Paris as