Karl Marx
Freiligrath against Kinkel
Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser.
No. 10, 7 March 1852

Freiligrath against Kinkel.

Liverpool, end of February.
The latest American steamship has brought over various issues of a German newspaper recently appearing in New York, the *Revolution*, one of which contains a poem by Freiligrath against Kinkel, or rather against the German loan promoted by Kinkel in the United States. The verses are more than personal invective; in them faction confronts faction, and we therefore hold them to be significant enough for judging the splits and factional formations among the emigrants to communicate them to your readers below. Many of the latter will be surprised that it is precisely the extreme revolutionary party which most sharply and decisively disavows measures such as those now favoured by Kinkel, and how this very party passes over the events of the last months with humorous equanimity. Perhaps it thinks like Guizot, who is said to have remarked shortly after 2 December: “Le coup d’état, c’est le triomphe complet et définitif du socialisme!” and then it is indeed understandable why it laughs up its sleeve with apparent helplessness, while everywhere else in the democratic camp there is weeping and wailing.

The poem will, incidentally, be generally understandable despite a host of local (London and New York) allusions. Perhaps the only thing to note is that Kinkel, who at first appeared in the northern states as an abolitionist, but then (according to the latest reports) in the southern states renounced all association with the opponents of slavery, held Negro meetings for his loan in Detroit and elsewhere also.

Should Freiligrath carry out the plan indicated in this first letter, and should his later letters to the editor of the *Revolution* (if I am not mistaken, Joseph Weydemeyer was formerly co-publisher of the late *Neue deutsche Zeitung*, which blessedly passed away in Frankfurt am Main) also be of more general interest for the homeland, I shall, with your permission, continue from time to time to communicate them to you, in full or in excerpt. The spectacle is certainly a peculiar one: a German poet, forced to be far from his native land, yet faithfully seeking to capture its shifting phenomena in the mirror of his verse, in order to present them—not to the homeland or to the country that has granted him asylum, no, but to the new Germany beyond the ocean, to his countrymen from the mouth of the Hudson to the blockhouses of far-off Michigan—in motley succession. That he will proceed not merely negating and striking out, but not infrequently also with joyful recognition, seems to me to be vouched for by the nature of this poet, so far as I know it from his poems and from hearsay.