Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne. V

Karl Marx
Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne

Contents.

I. Preliminaries.
II. The Dietz Archive.
III. The Cherval Conspiracy.
IV. The Original Minute Book.
V. The Accompanying Letter of the Red Catechism.
VI. The Willich-Schapper Faction.
VII. The Verdict.

I. Preliminaries.

Nothjung was arrested in Leipzig on 10 May 1851, shortly afterwards Bürgers, Röser, Daniels, Becker, etc. On 4 October 1852 the prisoners appeared before the Cologne assizes on the charge of “high treasonable conspiracy” against the Prussian state. The detention on remand — in solitary confinement — had thus lasted a year and a half.

Upon the arrest of Nothjung and Bürgers, the printed “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, the “Statutes of the Communist League” (a communist propaganda society), two addresses of the central authority of this league, and finally some letters and printed documents were found. After the arrest of Nothjung had already been known for eight days, house searches and arrests took place in Cologne. If, therefore, anything had still been to be found, it was now certainly removed. In fact, the catch was limited to a few irrelevant letters. A year and a half later, when the prisoners finally appeared before the jury, the bona fide material of the prosecution had not been increased by a single document. Nevertheless, all the authorities of the Prussian state, as the public prosecutor’s office (represented by von Seckendorf and Saedt) assured, had developed the most strenuous and multifarious activity. What, then, had they been busy with? Nous verrons!

The unusual duration of the detention on remand was explained in the most ingenious manner. First it was said that the Saxon government did not want to extradite Bürgers and Nothjung to Prussia. The court in Cologne vainly appealed to the ministry in Berlin, the ministry in Berlin vainly to the authorities in Saxony. However, the Saxon state let itself be softened. Bürgers and Nothjung were extradited. By October 1851 the matter had finally progressed so far that the files lay before the prosecuting chamber of the Cologne court of appeal. The prosecuting chamber decided “that no objective facts existed to support the charge, and that the investigation must therefore begin anew”. Meanwhile, the zeal of the courts had been kindled by a disciplinary law just issued, which enabled the Prussian government to remove any judicial official it found distasteful. This time, therefore, the trial was stayed because no facts existed. In the following assize term it had to be suspended because there were too many facts. The pile of files, it was said, was now so enormous that the prosecutor could not work his way through it. He worked his way through it by degrees, the indictment was served on the prisoners, and the opening of the proceedings was announced for 28 July 1852. In the meantime, however, the great government mainspring of the trial, Police Director Schultz, fell ill. The accused had to sit out a further three months on Schultz’s health. Fortunately Schultz died, the public grew impatient, and the government had to draw the curtain.

Throughout this entire period, the police directorate in Cologne, the police headquarters in Berlin, and the ministries of justice and the interior had continually intervened in the course of the investigation, in the same way that later their worthy representative Stieber intervened as a witness in the public court proceedings in Cologne. The government succeeded in assembling a jury such as has never been heard of in the annals of the Rhine Province. Alongside members of the high bourgeoisie (Herstadt, Leiden, Joest), the municipal patriciate (von Bianca, vom Rath), landed squires (Häbling von Lanzenauer, Baron von Fürstenberg, etc.), two Prussian government councillors, including a royal chamberlain (von Münch-Bellinghausen), and finally a Prussian professor (Krausler). In this jury all the elements of the classes ruling in Germany were thus represented, and only they were represented.

Before this jury, it seems, the Prussian government could have taken the direct path and conducted a simple political tendency trial. The documents recognised as genuine by Bürgers, Nothjung, etc., and drafted by them themselves, proved no conspiracy, they proved no act whatsoever that is provided for by the Code pénal, but they irrefutably proved the hostility of the accused to the existing government and the existing society. What the intelligence of the legislator omitted, the conscience of the jury could supply. Was it not a ruse on the part of the accused to so arrange their hostility to the existing society that it did not infringe any paragraph of the code? Does a disease cease to be contagious because it is missing from the nomenclature of the medical police ordinance? Had the Prussian government confined itself to proving from the actually available material the harmful character of the accused, and had the jury contented itself with rendering them harmless by a verdict of “guilty”: who could have attacked government and jury? No one but the feeble-minded enthusiast, who credits a Prussian government and the classes ruling in Prussia with enough strength to grant free play even to their enemies, as long as they remain on the terrain of discussion and propaganda.

Nevertheless, the Prussian government had cut itself off from this broad highway of political trials. By the unusual protraction of the trial, by the direct interventions of the ministries in the course of the investigation, by the mysterious references to unimagined horrors, by boasts of a conspiracy enmeshing Europe, by the outrageously brutal treatment of the prisoners, the trial had been inflated into a procès monstre, the attention of the European press directed to it, and the suspicious curiosity of the public strained to the utmost. The Prussian government had driven itself into a position where the prosecution, for propriety’s sake, had to produce evidence, and the jury, for propriety’s sake, had to demand evidence. The jury itself stood in turn before another jury, the jury of public opinion.

To make amends for the first blunder, the government had to commit a second. The police, who during the investigation had functioned as examining magistrate, had to appear during the hearings as a witness. Alongside the normal prosecutor the government had to place an abnormal one, alongside the procurator’s office the police, alongside a Saedt-Seckendorf a Stieber with his Wermuth, his Vogel Greif and his Goldheimchen. The intervention of a third state power in court had become unavoidable, in order continuously to supply the juridical prosecution with facts, after whose shadow it was vainly hunting, through the wonder-workings of the police. The court understood this position so well that president, judges and procurator’s office, with the most laudable resignation, ceded their role alternately to Police Councillor and witness Stieber and constantly disappeared behind Stieber. Before we now proceed to illuminate these police revelations, on which the “objective facts” that the prosecuting chamber was unable to find rest, one further preliminary remark.

From the papers seized upon the accused, as from their own statements, it emerged that a German communist society had existed, whose central authority originally sat in London. On 15 September 1850 this central authority split. The majority — the indictment designates it as the “Marx party” — transferred the seat of the central authority to Cologne. The minority — later expelled from the League by the Cologne people — established itself as an independent central authority in London and founded here and on the Continent a separate league. The indictment calls this minority and its following the “Willich-Schapper party”.

Saedt-Seckendorf assert that purely personal disagreements had occasioned the split of the London central authority. Long before Saedt-Seckendorf, the “knightly Willich” had already blabbed the most infamous rumours about the reasons for the split in the London emigration, and had found willing sewers in the German and American press through Arnold Ruge, that fifth wheel on the state coach of European central democracy, and similar riff-raff. The democracy grasped how easily it could gain the victory over the communists if it improvised the “knightly Willich” as the representative of the communists. The “knightly Willich” grasped, for his part, that the Marx party could not disclose the reasons for the split without betraying a secret society in Germany, and without abandoning especially the Cologne central authority to the paternal care of the Prussian police. These circumstances no longer exist, and we therefore quote some passages from the last minutes of the London central authority, dated 15 September 1850.

In the motivation of his motion for separation, Marx says, among other things, literally: “In place of the critical outlook, the minority substitutes a dogmatic one, in place of the materialist one an idealist one. Instead of the actual conditions, it makes mere will the mainspring of the revolution. While we tell the workers: You have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and international struggles, not only to change the conditions, but to change yourselves and to make yourselves fit for political rule, you, on the contrary, say: We must come to power right away, or we might as well go to sleep. While we point the German workers in particular to the undeveloped form of the German proletariat, you most coarsely flatter the national feeling and the craft prejudices of the German artisans: which is certainly more popular. Just as the democrats make the word people into a sacred being, so you do with the word proletariat. Like the democrats, you substitute the phrase of revolution for revolutionary development,” etc., etc.

Herr Schapper said in his reply literally: “I have expressed the view attacked here because I am, generally speaking, enthusiastic about this matter. The question is whether we ourselves do the beheading at the outset, or whether we are beheaded. (Schapper even promised to be beheaded within a year, i.e., by 15 September 1851.) In France the workers will get their turn, and with that we in Germany. Were that not the case, I would indeed go to sleep, and then I could have a different material position. If we get our turn, we can take such measures as to secure the rule of the proletariat. I am fanatic about this view, but the central authority wanted the opposite,” etc., etc.

One sees: it was not personal reasons that the central authority

Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne. II. The Dietz Archive.

split. However, it would be equally wrong to speak of a difference of principle. The Schapper-Willich party has never laid claim to the honour of possessing ideas of its own. What belongs to it is the peculiar misunderstanding of other people’s ideas, which it fixes as articles of faith and imagines it has appropriated as a phrase. It would be no less incorrect to designate the Willich-Schapper party as the “party of action”, unless one understands by action an idleness concealed beneath tavern bluster, fabricated conspiracies, and empty sham associations.

II. The Dietz Archive.

The “Manifesto of the Communist Party” found in the possession of the accused, printed before the February Revolution and on sale in the bookshops for years, could not, by its form and purpose, be the programme of a “plot”. The seized addresses of the Central Authority dealt exclusively with the relation of the Communists to the future government of democracy, hence not with the government of Frederick William IV. The statutes, finally, were the statutes of a secret propaganda society, but the Code pénal contains no penalties against secret societies. As the ultimate tendency of this propaganda, the destruction of existing society is proclaimed; but the Prussian state has already perished once and can perish ten times more and perish definitively, without existing society losing a single hair. The Communists can help to accelerate the dissolution process of bourgeois society, and yet leave the dissolution of the Prussian state to bourgeois society. Anyone whose direct aim was to overthrow the Prussian state and who, for this purpose, taught the destruction of society as the means, would resemble that crazy engineer who wanted to blow up the earth in order to remove a dunghill.

But if the ultimate aim of the League is the overthrow of society, its means is necessarily political revolution, and it implies the overthrow of the Prussian state just as an earthquake implies the overthrow of a henhouse? But the accused set out from the blasphemous view that the present Prussian government would fall even without them.

They therefore founded no league to overthrow the present Prussian government, they rendered themselves guilty of no “high treasonable plot”.

Were the early Christians ever accused of aiming to overthrow the first best Roman sub-prefect in a remote corner? The Prussian state philosophers from Leibniz to Hegel worked at the deposition of God, and if I depose God, I also depose the king by the grace of God. Were they prosecuted for an attempt on the House of Hohenzollern?

Thus one could twist and turn the matter as one wished: the corpus delicti found vanished like a spectre before the daylight of publicity. The indictment of the prosecuting senate remained that “no objective facts of the case” were present, and the Marx party was malicious enough not to supply a single iota toward the lacking facts during the one and a half years the investigation lasted.

This unsatisfactory state of affairs had to be remedied. The Willich-Schapper party, in connection with the police, remedied it. Let us see how Herr Stieber, the midwife of this party, introduced her into the Cologne trial. (See Stieber’s testimony at the session of 18 October 1852.)

While Stieber was in London in the spring of 1851, ostensibly to protect visitors to the Industrial Exhibition from Stiebers and thieves, the police headquarters sent him the copy of the papers found on Nothjung. “In particular,” Stieber swears, “my attention was drawn to the archive of the conspiracy, which, according to the papers found on Nothjung, must be lying in London with a certain Oswald Dietz and must contain the entire correspondence of the League members.”

The archive of the conspiracy? The entire correspondence of the League members? But Dietz was the secretary of the Willich-Schapper Central Authority. If, therefore, the archive of a conspiracy was with him, it was the archive of the Willich-Schapper conspiracy. If there was a League correspondence at Dietz’s, it could only be the correspondence of the separate league hostile to the Cologne accused. However, from the inspection of the documents found on Nothjung, even more follows: namely, that nothing in them pointed to Oswald Dietz as the keeper of the archive. How should Nothjung in Leipzig know what was unknown even to the Marx party in London!

Stieber could not say directly: Now pay attention, gentlemen of the jury! I have made unheard-of discoveries in London. Unfortunately, they relate to a conspiracy with which the Cologne accused have nothing to do and on which the Cologne jury has no authority to pass judgment, but which provided the pretext for lodging the accused in solitary confinement for a year and a half. Stieber could not speak like that. Nothjung’s intervention was indispensable in order to bring the revelations made in London and the Stiebered documents into a sham connection with the Cologne trial.

Stieber now swears that a man offered to buy the archive from Oswald Dietz for ready money. The fact is simply this: a certain Reuter, a Prussian mouchard, who never belonged to any communist society, lived in the same house as Dietz, broke open his desk while he was absent, and stole his papers. That Herr Stieber paid him for this theft is credible, but it would hardly have protected Stieber from a journey to Van Diemen’s Land if the manoeuvre had become known during his presence in London.

On 5 August 1851, Stieber received in Berlin “in a stout parcel wrapped in waxed linen” from London the Dietz archive, namely a pile of documents consisting of “sixty separate pieces”. So swears Stieber, and at the same time swears that this parcel, which he received on 5 August 1851, contained, among other things, letters from the leading circle of Berlin dated 20 August 1851. If one were now to assert that Stieber commits perjury when he affirms having received letters of 20 August 1851 on 5 August 1851, he would rightly answer that a Royal Prussian Councillor has the same right as the Evangelist Matthew — namely, to perform chronological miracles.

En passant! From the enumeration of the documents purloined from the Willich-Schapper party and from the dates of these documents, it follows that this party, although warned by Reuter’s burglary, still continually found ways of having documents stolen and conveyed to the Prussian police.

When Stieber found himself in possession of the treasure wrapped in stout waxed linen, he felt infinitely well. “The whole web,” he swears, “lay clearly revealed before my eyes.” And what did the treasure contain with regard to the Marx party and the Cologne accused? According to Stieber’s own testimony, nothing, absolutely nothing, except “an original declaration by several members of the Central Authority, who evidently form the core of the Marx party, dated London, 17 September 1850, concerning their resignation from the Communist Society, following the well-known split of 15 September 1850”. So Stieber himself says; but even in this harmless statement he cannot simply state the fact. He is compelled to raise it to a higher power in order to give it police importance. For that original declaration contains nothing but a notice, consisting of three lines, by the majority members of the former Central Authority and their friends, that they are resigning from the public workers’ society of Great Windmill Street, not from “the Communist Society”. Stieber could have spared his correspondent the waxed linen and his authorities the postage. He need only have Stiebered through various German newspapers from September 1850, and he would have found printed, black on white, a declaration by the “core of the Marx party”, in which, together with their resignation from the émigré committee, they also announce their resignation from the workers’ society of Great Windmill Street.

The immediate result of Stieber’s investigations was therefore the unheard-of discovery that the core of the Marx party had resigned from the public society of Great Windmill Street on 17 September 1850. “The whole web of the Cologne plot,” he swears, “lay clearly revealed before his eyes.” But the public did not trust its eyes.

III. The Cherval Plot.

Stieber, however, knew how to make capital out of the stolen treasure. The papers which reached him on 5 August 1851 led to the discovery of the so-called “German-French plot in Paris”. For they contained 6 reports by the emissary Adolph Majer, sent by Willich-Schapper, dated Paris, and 5 reports from the leading circle of Paris to the Willich-Schapper Central Authority. (Stieber’s testimony at the session of 18 October 1852.) Stieber undertakes a diplomatic pleasure trip to Paris and there makes the personal acquaintance of the great Carlier, who had just furnished proof in the notorious affair of the gold-bar lottery that he was indeed a great enemy of the Communists, but an even greater friend of other people’s private property.

“Accordingly, I departed for Paris in September 1851. In the then Prefect of Police, Carlier, I found the most willing support... by means of French police agents, the threads revealed in the London letters were quickly and surely picked up; they succeeded in ascertaining the dwellings of the individual chiefs of the conspiracy and in observing all their movements, in particular their meetings and correspondence. Very grave things were discovered there... I had to yield to the demands of Prefect Carlier: action was taken on the night of 4 to 5 September.” (Stieber’s testimony of 18 October.)

In September, Stieber departs from Berlin. Let us assume the 1st of September. At best, he arrived in Paris on the evening of 2 September. Action is taken on the night of the 4th. That leaves 36 hours for the consultation with Carlier and the taking of the necessary measures. In these 36 hours, not only are the dwellings of the individual chiefs “ascertained”; all their movements, all their meetings, all their correspondence are “observed”, naturally only after their “dwellings have been ascertained”. Stieber’s arrival not only brings about a miraculous “speed and assurance on the part of the French police agents”, it also makes the conspiring chiefs “willing” to engage in so many movements, meetings, and correspondences in 24 hours that action can already be taken against them the next evening.

But it is not enough that on 3 September the dwellings of the individual chiefs are ascertained, all their movements, meetings and correspondence observed: “French police agents,” swears Stieber, “find an opportunity of attending the sessions of the conspirators and of listening to their decisions upon the procedure to be followed at the next revolution.” — The police agents have thus hardly observed the meetings when, through the observation, they find an opportunity of attending them; and they have hardly attended a session when it turns into several sessions; and they have hardly been a couple of sessions when decisions are already reached on the procedure at the next revolution, and all on the same day. On the same day that Stieber gets to know Carlier, Carlier’s police personnel learn the dwellings of the individual chiefs, the individual chiefs learn Carlier’s police personnel, invite them that very day into their sessions, for their benefit hold a whole series of sessions that very day, and cannot part from them without first passing some decisions about the procedure at the next revolution.

However ready Carlier may have been — and no one will doubt his readiness, three months before the coup d’état, to discover a communist conspiracy — Stieber demands more of him than he could perform. Stieber demands police miracles; he not only demands them, he believes in them; he not only believes in them, he swears to them.

“At the commencement of the enterprise, that is, on taking action, I first personally arrested, together with a French commissioner, the dangerous Cherval, the chief head of the French communists. He resisted violently, and a stubborn struggle with him ensued.” Thus Stieber’s testimony of 18 October.

“Cherval committed an outrage upon me in Paris, in my own dwelling, into which he had crept during the night, and in the course of the struggle thereby occasioned my wife, who came to my aid, was wounded.” Thus Stieber’s other testimony of 27 October.

In the night of the 4th to the 5th, Stieber takes action against Cherval and a fist-fight ensues, in which Cherval resists. In the night of the 3rd to the 4th, Cherval takes action against Stieber, and a fist-fight ensues, in which Stieber resists. But on the 3rd, the *entente cordiale* between conspirators and police agents was just at its height, whereby so much was accomplished in one day. Now not only is Stieber supposed to have fallen upon the conspirators on the 3rd, but the conspirators are also supposed to have got behind Stieber on the 3rd. While Carlier’s police agents are discovering the dwellings of the conspirators, the conspirators are discovering Stieber’s dwelling. While he plays an “observing” role towards them, they play an active role towards him. While he dreams of their plot against the republic, they are busy with an outrage upon his person.

Stieber continues in his testimony of 18 October: “During this struggle (in which Stieber was on the offensive) I noticed that Cherval was endeavouring to thrust a paper into his mouth and swallow it. I succeeded with difficulty in saving one half of the paper, the other half was already consumed.”

Thus the paper was in Cherval’s mouth, between his teeth, for only one half was saved, the other was already consumed. Stieber and his helper, a police commissioner or whoever else, could only save the other half by thrusting their hands into the throat of the “dangerous Cherval.” The nearest way for Cherval to defend himself against such an attack was by biting, and indeed the Paris papers reported that Cherval had bitten Mrs Stieber; but in this scene it was not Stieber’s wife who was present, but the police commissioner. On the other hand, Stieber declares that in the outrage which Cherval committed in his own dwelling, Mrs Stieber, who came to his aid, was wounded. If one puts together Stieber’s testimonies and the reports of the Paris journals, it seems that Cherval bit Mrs Stieber in the night of the 3rd to the 4th in order to save the papers which Mr Stieber tore from between his teeth in the night of the 4th to the 5th. Stieber will reply that Paris is a city of miracles, and that Larochefoucauld has already declared that in France everything is possible.

Let us set aside for a moment the belief in miracles. It then appears that the first miracles arose because Stieber compresses a series of actions, widely separated in time, into a single day, the 3rd of September — and the last miracles because he distributes various facts that occurred on one evening and in one place over two different nights and two different places. We shall contrast his *Thousand and One Nights* narrative with the actual facts. But first, one more curious fact, although no miracle. Stieber tore away one half of the paper swallowed by Cherval. What did the saved half contain? The whole thing that Stieber was looking for: “This paper,” he swears, “contained a most important instruction for the emissary Gipperich in Strasbourg, with his full address.” Now to the facts.

On 5 August 1851, as we know from Stieber, he received the Dietz archive packed in strong oilcloth. On 8 or 9 August 1851, a certain Schmidt turned up in Paris. Schmidt seems to be the inevitable name for Prussian police agents travelling incognito. Stieber travelled in 1845–46 as Schmidt in the Silesian mountains; his London agent Fleury travelled in 1851 as Schmidt to Paris. There he seeks out the individual chiefs of the Willich-Schapper conspiracy, and first finds Cherval. He gives out that he has escaped from Cologne and has rescued the League treasury of 500 thalers from there. He legitimates himself with mandates from Dresden and various other places, speaks of the reorganisation of the League, of the unification of the various parties, since the splits were based on purely personal differences — the police preached unity and union even then — and promised to employ the 500 thalers to make the League flourish again. Gradually Schmidt gets to know the individual chiefs of the Schapper-Willich League communities in Paris. He learns not only their addresses, he visits them, he spies out their correspondence, he observes their movements, he forces his way into their sessions, he spurs them on as an *agent provocateur*. Cherval in particular boasts all the more, the more admiringly Schmidt praises him as the great unknown of the League, as the “chief head” who had hitherto ignored his own importance — a thing that has happened to many a great man. One evening, as Schmidt goes with Cherval to the League session, Cherval reads out his famous letter to Gipperich before sending it off. In this way Schmidt learned of Gipperich’s existence. “As soon as Gipperich has returned to Strasbourg,” remarked Schmidt, “we will send him straight away a draft for the 500 thalers that are deposited at Strasbourg. Here you have the address of the man who keeps the money; give me in return Gipperich’s address, so I can send it to the man to whom he will present himself, as a means of legitimating himself.” In this way Schmidt obtained Gipperich’s address. That same evening, when Cherval sent off the letter to Gipperich, Gipperich was arrested a quarter of an hour later by means of the electric telegraph; a house search was made, and the famous letter was intercepted. Gipperich was arrested before Cherval.

A short time afterwards, Schmidt informed Cherval that a Prussian police fellow by the name of Stieber had arrived in Paris. He had not only discovered his dwelling, but had also heard from the garçon of an opposite café that Stieber had negotiated to have him, Schmidt, arrested. Cherval was the man to give the miserable Prussian policeman a memento. “He’ll be thrown into the Seine,” replied Cherval. The two agreed to force their way into Stieber’s dwelling the next day, to verify his presence under some pretext and to take note of his person. The next evening our two heroes actually undertook the expedition. On the way, Schmidt thought it would be better if Cherval entered the house while he himself remained outside as a sentry. “You,” he went on, “ask the porter for Stieber, and tell Stieber, if he lets you in, that you wanted to speak to Herr Sperling and inquire of him whether he had brought the expected draft from Cologne. By the by, one more thing: your white hat attracts attention, it is too democratic. Here, put on my black one.” The hats were exchanged, Schmidt posted himself as sentinel, Cherval rang the bell and found himself in Stieber’s dwelling. The porter did not think that Stieber was at home, and Cherval was about to withdraw when a woman’s voice called down the stairs: “Yes, Stieber is at home.” Cherval follows the voice, whose traces lead to a green-spectacled subject who reveals himself as Stieber. Cherval presents the agreed formula with the draft and Sperling. “That won’t do at all,” Stieber promptly interjects, “you come into the house, ask for me, are shown upstairs, then withdraw again, etc. That is highly suspicious to me.” Cherval answers rudely, Stieber pulls the bell, several fellows appear instantly, surround Cherval; Stieber grabs into his coat pocket, where a letter is peeping out. This was, to be sure, no instruction from Cherval to Gipperich, but a letter from Gipperich to Cherval. Cherval tries to eat the letter, Stieber lunges into his mouth, Cherval bites and kicks and strikes — Mr Stieber wants to save one half, Mrs Stieber wants to save the other half, and for her zealous service she is wounded. The noise caused by this scene calls the various tenants out of their apartments. Meanwhile, however, one of Stieber’s fellows has thrown a gold watch over the banisters, and while Cherval shouts “Mouchard!” Stieber and company shout “au voleur!” The porter brings the gold watch, and the cry of “au voleur!” becomes general. Cherval is arrested and finds at the door, not his friend Schmidt, but rather 4–5 soldiers who receive him.

In the face of the actual facts, all the miracles sworn to by Stieber vanish. His agent Fleury has operated for over three weeks; he has not only discovered the threads of the conspiracy, he has helped to weave them. Stieber need only come from Berlin and can cry: veni, vidi, vici! He can make Carlier a present of a ready-made conspiracy; Carlier requires only the “readiness” to take action. Mrs Stieber does not need to be bitten by Cherval on the 3rd because Mr Stieber grabs into Cherval’s mouth on the 4th. Gipperich’s address and the important instruction do not need to emerge, like Jonah from the belly of the whale, wholly from the throat of the “dangerous Cherval” after they have been half eaten. The only thing that remains miraculous is the wondrous faith of the jurors, in whose presence Stieber dares seriously to dish up his pack of lies. Full-blooded bearers of the limited subject’s understanding!

“Cherval,” swears Stieber (session of 18 October), “after I had laid before him, to his utmost astonishment, all his original reports which he had sent to London, and after he saw that I knew everything, made an open confession to me in prison.”

What Stieber first presented to Cherval were by no means his original reports to London: Stieber only had these sent later from Berlin, together with other documents from the Dietz archive. What he first put before him was a circular signed by Oswald Dietz, which Cherval had only just received, and some of the most recent letters from Willich. How did Stieber come into possession of them? While Cherval was biting and hitting Stieber and his better half, the worthy Schmidt-Fleury rushed to Madame Cherval, an Englishwoman – Fleury, a German-London merchant, naturally speaks English – and told her that her husband had been arrested, that the danger was great, and that she should hand over Cherval’s papers so that he would not be compromised still further; Cherval had instructed him to deliver them to a third person. As proof that he was a genuine messenger, he showed her the white hat which he had taken from Cherval because it looked too democratic. Fleury received the letters from Madame Cherval and Stieber received them from Fleury.

In any event, Stieber stood on a more favourable operational basis than previously in London. He could steal Dietz’s papers, but he could make Cherval’s statements. He therefore has his Cherval (session of 18 October) “express himself about the connections with Germany” to the effect that “he had stayed for a considerable time in the Rhineland and had been, notably, in Cologne in 1848, where he became acquainted with Marx and was admitted by him into the League, which he then zealously propagated in Paris on the basis of the elements already to be found there.”

In 1846 Cherval was admitted into the League in London by Schapper and on Schapper’s proposal, while Marx was in Brussels and was not yet even a member of the League. Cherval could not, therefore, have been admitted into the same League by Marx in Cologne in 1848.

After the outbreak of the March Revolution, Cherval travelled for a few weeks to the Prussian Rhine Province, but returned from there to London, where he stayed continuously from the end of spring 1848 to the end of summer 1850. He cannot, therefore, at the same time “have zealously propagated the League in Paris”, or else Stieber, who works chronological miracles, is also capable of working spatial ones and even of communicating to third persons the quality of ubiquity.

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Karl Marx

It was only after his expulsion from Paris, in September 1849, after he had joined the workers’ society in Great Windmill Street, London, that Marx, along with a hundred other workers, got to know Cherval superficially. He cannot, therefore, have made his acquaintance in Cologne in 1848.

Cherval at first told Stieber the truth on all these points. Stieber sought to force him into false statements. Did he achieve his purpose? Only Stieber’s own statement speaks for it, hence a minus. For Stieber, everything naturally depended on bringing Cherval into an invented connection with Marx, in order to place the Cologne accused in an artificial connection with the Paris conspiracy.

As soon as Stieber finds himself compelled to go into detail on the connections and correspondence of Cherval and associates with Germany, he takes care not even to mention Cologne, but speaks with self-satisfied diffuseness about Heck in Brunswick, Laube in Berlin, Reininger in Mainz, Tietz in Hamburg, etc., in short, the Willich-Schapper party. “This party,” says Stieber, “had the archive of the League in its hands.” Through a mix-up, it passed from its hands into his. In this archive he found not a single line that Cherval had addressed to Marx before the split of the London Central Authority, before

10

15

15 September 1850, either to London or personally.

Through Schmidt-Fleury he tricked Madame Cherval out of her husband’s papers. Again he found not a single line that Cherval had received from Marx. To remedy this defect, he dictates to Cherval: “That he had fallen out with Marx because the latter, although the Central Authority was in Cologne, had still demanded that the correspondence be conducted with him.” If Stieber finds no correspondence from Marx with Cherval before 15 September 1850, this is because Cherval broke off all correspondence with Marx after 15 September 1850. Pends-toi, Figaro, tu n’aurais pas trouvé cela!

The records that the Prussian government dragged together against the accused during the eighteen-month investigation, partly through Stieber himself, refuted any connection of the accused with the Paris commune and the Franco-German conspiracy.

The Address of the London Central Authority of June 1850 proved that the commune in Paris was dissolved before the split of the Central Authority. Six letters contained in the Dietz archive prove that after the transfer of the Central Authority to Cologne the communes in Paris were re-established by the emissary of the Willich-Schapper party, A. Majer. The letters of the directing circle of Paris, contained in the same archive, prove that it stood in hostile opposition to the Cologne Central Authority. The

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French acte d’accusation finally proved that everything incriminated against Cherval and associates only took place in the year 1851. Saedt (session of 9 November) therefore sees himself reduced, despite Stieber’s revelations, to the thin conjecture that it might, after all, be possible that the Marx party was at some time involved in some conspiracy or other in Paris in some way or other, but that nothing further is known of this time and this conspiracy than precisely that Saedt, on official instructions, considers it possible. Judge for yourself the obtuseness of the German press, which fables about Saedt’s acumen!

From afar the Prussian police sought to present Marx to the public, and through Marx the Cologne accused, as involved in the Franco-German conspiracy. During the proceedings of the Cherval trial the police spy Beckmann sent the following notice, dated Paris, 25 February 1852, to the Kölnische Zeitung: “Several of the accused are fugitives, among them a certain A. Majer, who is represented as an agent of Marx and company.” The Kölnische Zeitung thereupon published a declaration by Marx stating that “A. Majer is one of the most intimate friends of Herr Schapper and the former Prussian lieutenant Willich”, but stood entirely aloof from Marx himself. Now, in his statement of 18 October 1852, Stieber himself declares: “The members of the Central Authority expelled in London on 15 September 1850 by the Marx party sent A. Majer to France, etc.”, and even communicates the correspondence of A. Majer with Schapper-Willich.

A member of the Marx party, Konrad Schramm, was arrested on the occasion of the round-up of aliens in Paris in the month of September, together with 50–60 other guests present, in a café, and held for almost two months on the charge of being a participant in the conspiracy directed by the ringleader Cherval. On 16 October, in the depot of the police prefecture, he received a visit from a German, who addressed him as follows: “I am a Prussian government official. You are aware that in all parts of Germany, particularly in Cologne, numerous arrests have been made in consequence of the discovery of a communist society. The mention of a name in a letter is sufficient to occasion the arrest of the person concerned. The government is somewhat embarrassed by the number of those arrested, about whom it does not know whether they have anything to do with the matter or not. We know that you are not involved in the Franco-German conspiracy, but that, on the other hand, you are closely acquainted with Marx and Engels, and are no doubt informed of all the affairs of the German Communist League. You would oblige us greatly if you could give us the requisite information on that point and specify more closely the persons who

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are guilty or innocent. By this you may contribute to the liberation of a great number of people. If you wish, we can take down your declaration in an official record. You have nothing to fear from such a declaration,” etc. Schramm, of course, showed this gentle Prussian government official the door, protested against such visits to the French ministry, and was expelled from France at the end of October.

That Schramm belonged to the Marx party the Prussian police knew from the declaration of withdrawal found at Dietz’s. That the Marx party was not connected with the Cherval conspiracy, they themselves conceded to Schramm. If a connection between the Marx party and the Cherval conspiracy were to be proved, it could not be done in Cologne, but only in Paris, where a member of this party was imprisoned at the same time as Cherval. But the Prussian government feared nothing more than a confrontation between Cherval and Schramm, which would necessarily frustrate in advance all the success it promised itself from the Paris trial against the Cologne accused. In Schramm’s release, the French examining magistrate passed judgment that the Cologne trial stood in no connection with the Paris conspiracy.

Stieber makes a last attempt: “With regard to the above-mentioned chief of the French communists, Cherval, efforts were long made in vain to ascertain who this Cherval really was. At length a confidential utterance, which Marx himself made to a police agent, has revealed that he was a person who escaped from prison in Aachen, where he was serving a sentence for forgery of bills of exchange, in 1845, and whom Marx admitted into the League in 1848 during the disturbances of that time, whence he went to Paris as an emissary.”

Just as little as Marx could have informed the spiritus familiaris, Stieber’s police agent, that he had admitted Cherval into the League in Cologne in 1848 – into which Schapper had already admitted him in London in 1846 – or that he had let him live in London and at the same time peddle propaganda in Paris, just as little could he have communicated to Stieber’s alter ego, the police agent as such, before Stieber’s statement, the information that Cherval had been in prison in Aachen in 1845 and had forged bills of exchange, a fact he only learnt through Stieber’s statement. Such hysteron proteron are permitted only to a Stieber. The ancient world bequeaths its dying gladiator, the Prussian state bequeaths its perjuring Stieber.

Thus, for long, long, efforts had been made in vain to ascertain who Cherval really was! On the evening of 2 September Stieber arrived in Paris. On the evening of the 4th Cherval was arrested, on the evening of the 5th he was led from his cell into a dimly lit hall. Stieber was there, but alongside

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Beside Stieber there was also a French police official, an Alsatian who speaks broken German but understands it perfectly, possesses a police memory, and did not find the presumptuously servile Berlin police councillor particularly pleasant. In the presence, then, of this French official, the following conversation took place. Stieber, in German: “Listen, Monsieur Cherval, with the French name and the Irish passport we know perfectly well what it means. We know you; you are a Rhenish Prussian, your name is K..., and it is entirely up to you to free yourself from the consequences, namely by making a completely open confession to us,” etc., etc. Cherval denies it. Stieber: “Such-and-such persons, who forged bills of exchange and escaped from Prussian gaols, were extradited to Prussia by the French authorities, and I therefore tell you once again: think it over; what is involved here is twelve years’ cellular confinement.” The French police official: “We shall give the man time; he is to reflect in his cell.” Cherval was led back to his cell.

Stieber naturally could not come straight to the point; he could not admit to the public that he was trying to extort false statements from Cherval with the spectre of extradition and twelve years’ cellular confinement.

Stieber, however, had still not ascertained | who Cherval really was. He still calls him Cherval before the jury, and not K. What is more, he does not even know where Cherval is actually staying. At the session of 23 October he still has him sitting in Paris. At the session of 27 October, pressed by the question from advocate Schneider II: “Whether

the oft-mentioned Cherval is not at present staying in London?”
Stieber replies: “He could give no information on that, and could only pass on the rumour that Cherval had escaped from Paris.”

The Prussian government succumbed to its usual fate of being duped. The French government had allowed it to pull the chestnuts of the Franco-German plot out of the fire; it was not allowed to eat them. Cherval had known how to win the goodwill of the French government; it allowed him to escape to London, together with Gipperich, a few days after the conclusion of the Paris assize proceedings. The Prussian government believed it had acquired a tool for the Cologne trial in Cherval; it had merely recruited one more agent for the French government.

One day before Cherval’s feigned flight he was visited by a Prussian faquin in a black tail-coat, cuffs, a black scrubby moustache, close-cropped thin greyish hair—in short, a

thoroughly dapper fellow—who was introduced to him as Police Lieutenant Greif, and who later also presented himself as Greiff. Greiff had obtained access to him

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by means of an entry card that he had received directly from the minister of police, circumventing the prefect of police. It tickled the minister of police to take in the dear Prussians. Greiff: “I am a Prussian official,
sent here | to enter into negotiations with you.
You will never get out of here except through us. I am making you a
proposition. In a petition to the French government, whose consent has been promised in advance, demand to be extradited to Prussia, for we need you there as a witness for Cologne. After you have done your duty and the affair is over, we shall set you free on parole.”

Cherval: “I shall get out without you.” Greiff, with finality:
“That is impossible.” Greiff also summoned Gipperich downstairs and
made him the proposition of going to Hanover as a Communist League emissary at five taler a day. Likewise without success. The next day Cherval and Gipperich had fled. The French authorities smirked; the disaster dispatch went to Berlin—and still on
23 October Stieber swears that Cherval is sitting in Paris, and still on
27 October he can give no information and knows only by rumour that Cherval has escaped from Paris. Meanwhile, Police Lieutenant Greiff had visited Cherval three times in London during the Cologne proceedings, among other things to obtain the address of Nette in Paris, from whom it was believed a witness statement against the Cologne accused could be bought.
The coup failed.

Stieber had reasons for keeping his connection with Cherval in the dark.
K. therefore still remained always Cherval, the Prussian always an Irishman, and Stieber to this day does not know where Cherval actually is staying and “who this Cherval really is”.

In Cherval’s correspondence with Gipperich, | the trifolium
Seckendorf-Saedt-Stieber at last possessed what it desired:

Schinderhannes, Karlo Moor
I took as my model.

Cherval’s letter to Gipperich, so that it might be deeply inculcated into the sluggish brain-matter of the 300 most heavily taxed persons whom the jury represents, had the honour of being read aloud three times. Every connoisseur immediately recognised behind this harmless gipsy pathos the buffoon who tries to make himself and others believe he is someone fearsome.
Cherval and his associates had further shared the general expectations of democracy of the miraculous effects of 2 May 1852 and had resolved to join in the revolution on 2 May. Schmidt-Fleury had helped to give this fixed idea the form of a plan. Thus Cherval and

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company fell into the juridical category of the plot. In this way the proof was furnished on their persons that the plot which the Cologne defendants had not perpetrated against the Prussian government had nevertheless, in any case, been perpetrated by the Cherval party against France.

Through Schmidt-Fleury the Prussian government had sought to fabricate a sham connection between the Paris plot and the Cologne defendants, which it had confirmed by Stieber on oath. Stieber-Greiff-Fleury, this trinity, plays the main role in the Cherval plot; we shall find them again at work later.

Let us sum up:

A is a republican, B also calls himself a republican. A and B are enemies. B, on police orders, builds an infernal machine. A is taken to court for it. | If B built the infernal machine and not A, the blame lies in the fact that A was the enemy of B. In order to convict A, B is called as a witness against him. That was the humour of the Cherval plot.

It will be understood that this logic fell flat before the public. Stieber’s “factual” revelations dissolved into foul-smelling vapour; the complaint of the prosecuting chamber that “no objective factual evidence exists” remained the final word. New police miracles had become necessary.

IV. The Original Minute Book.

At the session of 23 October the president remarks: “Police Councillor Stieber has informed him that he still has new and important depositions to make,” and for this purpose calls the said witness again. Stieber leaps forward and introduces the mise en scène.

Until now Stieber had described the activity of the Willich-Schapper party, or, more briefly, of the Cherval party, its activity before and after the arrest of the Cologne defendants. With regard to the defendants themselves he had described nothing, neither before nor after. The Cherval plot took place after the defendants’ arrest, and Stieber now declares: “In my previous examination I described the formation of the Communist League and the activity of its members only up to the arrest of the present defendants.” He thus admits that the Cherval plot had nothing to do with the | “formation of the Communist League and the activity of its members”. He admits the nothingness of his previous statement. Indeed, he is so blasé about his statement of 18 October that he considers it superfluous any longer to identify Cherval with the Marx party. “First of all,” he says, “the Willich faction still exists, of which only Cherval in Paris, etc., have so far been seized.” Aha! The chief, Cherval, is thus a leader of the Willich faction.

But Stieber now has the most important communications to make, not only the very latest, but also the most important. The very latest and most important! These most important communications would lose weight if the unimportance of the previous communications were not stressed. Up to now I have really communicated nothing, says Stieber, but now it comes. Pay attention! Up to now I have reported on the party hostile to the defendants, the Cherval party, which does not really belong here. I shall now report on the Marx party, the only one at issue in this trial. Stieber could not put it so plainly. He therefore says: “Up to now I have described the Communist League before the arrest of the defendants; I shall now describe the Communist League after the arrest of the defendants.” With singular virtuosity he knows how to make even a merely rhetorical phrase perjurious.

After the arrest of the Cologne defendants Marx formed a new central authority. “This is apparent from the statement of a police official whom the late Police Director Schultz was able to introduce unrecognised into the London League and into the immediate vicinity of Marx.” | This new central authority kept a minute book, and this “original minute book” is now in Stieber’s possession. Horrible machinations in the Rhenish provinces, in Cologne, even in the courtroom itself—all this is proved by the original minute book. It contains the proof of the ongoing correspondence of the defendants with Marx through the prison walls.

In a word: the Dietz archive was the Old Testament; but the original minute book is the New Testament. The Old Testament was packed in stout wax-cloth, but the New Testament is bound in uncannily red morocco. The red morocco is certainly a demonstratio ad oculos; but the world today is more unbelieving than in Thomas’s day: it does not even believe what it sees. Who still believes in Testaments, old or new, since the Mormon religion was invented?

“It could of course be objected to me,” notes the Mormon Stieber, “it could of course be objected that all this is merely tales of despicable police agents, but,” Stieber swears, “but I have complete proofs of the truthfulness and reliability of the communications made by them.”

Mark well! Proofs of truthfulness and proofs of reliability, and what is more, complete proofs. Complete proofs! And what are these proofs?

Stieber had long known “that a secret correspondence between Marx

...and the accused who was in the house of detention existed, but I could get no trace of this correspondence. Then, last Sunday, an extraordinary courier from London arrived here at my place with the news that they had at last succeeded in discovering the secret address under which this correspondence had been conducted; it was the address of the merchant D. Kothes on the Altmarkt of this town. The same courier brought me the original minute book kept by the London Central Authority, which they had managed to obtain from a member of the League for money.” Stieber now gets in touch with Police Director Geiger and the postal administration. “The necessary precautionary measures are taken, and after only two days the evening post from London brought a letter addressed to Kothes. The same was seized at the request of the Chief Public Prosecutor, and in it was found an instruction for Attorney Schneider II, seven pages long, written in Marx’s hand. The same contains a direction as to how the defence is to be conducted... On the reverse side of the letter was a large Latin B. A copy of the letter was retained, a piece of the original that was easy to detach, as well as the original envelope. It was then sealed in an envelope, and thus a foreign police officer received it with the order to proceed to Kothes, to present himself as an emissary of Marx,” etc. Stieber then goes on to relate the revolting police and lackey comedy, how the foreign police officer played the emissary of Marx, etc. Kothes is arrested on 17 October and after 24 hours declares that the B on the inner address signifies Bermbach. On 19 October Bermbach is arrested and his house searched. On 21 October Kothes and Bermbach are again set at liberty.

Stieber made this deposition on Saturday 23 October. “Last Sunday”, that is Sunday 17 October, the extraordinary courier with the address of Kothes and with the original minute book, two days after the courier, the letter to Kothes arrived, that is, on 19 October. But already on 17 October Kothes was arrested because of the letter that the foreign police officer delivered to him on 17 October. The letter to Kothes therefore arrived two days earlier than the courier with the address Kothes, or: Kothes was arrested on 17 October for a letter he received only on 19 October. Chronological wonder!

Later, harried by the lawyers, Stieber declares that the courier with the address of Kothes and the original minute book arrived on 10 October. Why on 10 October? Because 10 October also falls on a Sunday and on 23 October it was likewise a “last Sunday”, because in this way the original statement about last Sunday is adhered to and the perjury concealed on this side. But then the letter again did not arrive two days later, but a whole week later than the courier. The perjury now falls on the letter, instead of on the courier. Stieber’s oaths are like the Lutheran peasant. If you help him onto the horse on one side, he falls off on the other.

In the session of 3 November, finally, Police Lieutenant Goldheim from Berlin declares that Police Lieutenant Greiff from London handed the minute book over to Stieber in his presence and that of Police Director Wermuth on 11 October, that is, on a Monday. Goldheim thus declares Stieber guilty of double perjury.

Marx posted the letter to Kothes, as the original envelope with the London postmark proves, on Thursday 14 October. The letter therefore must have arrived Friday evening, 15 October. A courier who, two days before the arrival of this letter, delivered the address of Kothes and the original minute book, must therefore have arrived on Wednesday 13 October. He could have arrived neither on 17 October nor on the 10th nor on the 11th.

Greiff as courier indeed brought Stieber his original minute book from London. What was the matter with this book, Stieber knew just as well as his crony Greiff. He therefore hesitated to submit it to the court, for this time the issue was not about statements behind the prison bars of Mazas. Then Marx’s letter came. Now Stieber was helped.

Kothes is a mere address, for the writing itself is not directed to Kothes, but to the Latin B that is found on the reverse side of the enclosed sealed writing. Kothes is therefore in fact only an address. Let us now assume that he is a secret address. Let us further assume that he is the secret address under which Marx corresponds with the Cologne accused. Let us finally assume that our London agents sent, by the same courier, simultaneously the original minute book and this secret address, but the letter arrived two days later than the courier, address, and minute book. We thus kill two birds with one stone. First, we prove the secret correspondence of the Cologne accused with Marx, second, we prove the authenticity of the original minute book. The authenticity of the original minute book is proved by the correctness of the address, the correctness of the address is proved by the letter. The reliability and truthfulness of our agents is proved by address and letter, the authenticity of the original minute book is proved by the reliability and truthfulness of our agents. Quod erat demonstrandum. Then the amusing comedy with the foreign police officer; then mysterious arrests: public,

jury and the accused themselves will be thunderstruck.

But why did Stieber not have his extraordinary courier arrive on 13 October, which was so easy to do? Because otherwise he was not “extraordinary”, because chronology, as we have seen, is his weak side, and the common calendar is beneath the dignity of a Prussian police councillor. Besides, he retains the original envelope; who, then, was to trace the thing?

In his statement, however, Stieber compromised himself from the outset by concealing a fact. If his agents knew the address of Kothes, they also knew the man hidden by the mysterious B on the reverse of the inner letter. Stieber was so little initiated into the mysteries of the great Latin B that, on 17 October, he had Becker searched in prison, in order to find Marx’s letter upon him. Only through Kothes’s statement did he learn that B signified Bermbach.

But how had Marx’s letter got into the hands of the Prussian government? Very simple. The Prussian government regularly opens the letters entrusted to its post, and did so during the Cologne trial with particular perseverance. Aachen and Frankfurt a.M. can tell a tale about that. It is pure chance what slips through and what is caught.

With the original courier, the original minute book also fell. Stieber, of course, did not yet suspect this at the session of 23 October, when he triumphantly revealed the contents of the new testament, the red book. The next result of his statements was the renewed arrest of Bermbach, who was attending the court proceedings as a witness.

Why was Bermbach arrested again?

Because of the papers found upon him? No. For after the house search he was again set at liberty. His arrest took place twenty-four hours after that of Kothes. If, therefore, he had possessed compromising documents, they were safely gone. Why, then, the arrest of the witness Bermbach, while the witnesses Hentze, Hätzel, Steingens, whose cognisance of or participation in the League was established, sat quietly on the witness bench?

Bermbach had received a letter from Marx, which contained a mere critique of the indictment, and nothing more. Stieber admitted the fact – for the letter lay before the jury. He only expressed the fact in his police-hyperbolical manner as follows: “Marx himself exercises from London a continuous influence on the present trial.” And the jury asked themselves, like Guizot’s voters: Est-ce que vous vous sentez corrompus? Why, then, Bermbach’s arrest? The Prussian government sought from the beginning of the investigation to cut off the means of defence from the accused in a principled, systematic manner. The lawyers, as they declare in open court, were, in direct contradiction to the law, forbidden to have dealings with the accused even after the serving of the indictment. Since 5 August 1851 Stieber had, by his own admission, been in possession of the Dietz archive. The Dietz archive was not annexed to the indictment. Only on 18 October 1852, in the midst of open court, is it produced, produced only so far as seems good to Stieber. Jury, accused, public are to be surprised, taken by surprise, the lawyers are to stand weaponless before the police surprises. And now especially since the presentation of the original minute book! The Prussian government trembled at revelations. Bermbach, however, had received defence material from Marx; it was to be foreseen that he would receive clarification about the minute book. Through his arrest a new crime was proclaimed, the correspondence with Marx, and prison penalty set upon this crime. This was meant to deter every Prussian citizen from serving as addressee. A bon entendeur demi-mot. Bermbach was locked up in order to lock out the defence material. And Bermbach sits for five weeks. Had he been released immediately after the close of the proceedings, the Prussian courts would openly have proclaimed their will-less slavish subjugation to the Prussian police. Bermbach sat ad majorem gloriam of the Prussian judges.

Stieber swears that “Marx, after the arrest of the Cologne accused, put together again the ruins of his party in London and formed a new central authority with about 18 persons”, etc.

These ruins had never fallen apart, but were so put together that they had formed a private society continuously since September 1850. Stieber makes them vanish by a decree of power, in order to call them back to life again, after the arrest of the Cologne accused, by another decree of power, and indeed as a new central authority.

On Monday 25 October the Kölnische Zeitung arrived in London with the report of Stieber’s statement of 23 October.

The Marx party had neither formed a new central authority nor kept minutes of its meetings. It guessed at once the main fabricator of the new testament – Wilhelm Hirsch of Hamburg.

Hirsch presented himself at the beginning of December 1851 to the Marx society as a communist refugee. Letters from Hamburg simultaneously denounced him as a spy. It was decided, however, to tolerate him for the time being in the society, to keep him under surveillance, and to obtain proof of his guilt or innocence. At the meeting of 15 January 1852 a letter

read out from Cologne, in which a friend of Marx mentioned the renewed protraction of the trial and the difficulty, even for relatives, of gaining access to the prisoners. On this occasion Frau Dr. Daniels is mentioned. It was noticeable that since this session Hirsch had been seen neither in the “immediate vicinity” nor anywhere in sight. On 2 March 1852 Marx received notification from Cologne that Frau Dr. Daniels’ house had been searched, following a police denunciation according to which a letter from Frau Dr. Daniels to Marx had been read out in the London Communist Society, Marx had been commissioned to reply to Frau Dr. Daniels, Marx was engaged in reorganising the League in Germany, etc., etc. — This denunciation constitutes verbatim the first page of the original minute-book. Marx replied by return of post that, since Frau Dr. Daniels had never written to him, he could not have read out any letter from her. The whole denunciation was the invention of one Hirsch, a dissolute young man who would not scruple, for ready cash, to palm off on the Prussian police as many lies as they desired.

Since 15 January Hirsch had disappeared from the gatherings; he was now definitively expelled from the society. At the same time it was decided to change the meeting place and the day of meeting. Hitherto they had met at J. W. Masters, Markethouse, Farringdon Street, City, on Thursdays. Now the day of meeting was moved to Wednesday and the meeting place to the Rose and Crown Tavern, Crown Street, Soho. Hirsch, whom “the police director Schultz had been able to bring unrecognised into the vicinity of Marx”, despite this “vicinity” still did not know the meeting place or the day of meeting eight months later. Before as after February, he persisted in fabricating his “original minutes” on a Thursday and dating them from a Thursday. One should look up the Kölnische Zeitung, and one finds: minute of 15 January — Thursday; ditto 29 January — Thursday; ditto 4 March — Thursday; ditto 13 May — Thursday; ditto 20 May — Thursday; ditto 22 July — Thursday; ditto 23 September — Thursday; ditto 30 September — Thursday.

The landlord of the Rose and Crown Tavern made a declaration before the magistrate of Marlborough Street that Dr. Marx’s society had been meeting at his house every Wednesday since March 1852. Liebknecht and Rings, appointed by Hirsch as secretaries of his original minute-book, had their signatures authenticated by the same magistrate. Finally, the minutes which Hirsch had kept at Stechan’s workers’ society were obtained, so that his handwriting could be compared with that of the original minute-book.

Thus the spuriousness of the original minute-book was proved, without it being necessary to enter into a critique of a content that dissolves in its own contradictions.

The difficulty lay in sending the documents to the defence counsel. The Prussian post was now only an advance guard, stationed from the borders of the Prussian state all the way to Cologne to cut off the supply of weapons to the defenders. Recourse had to be taken to roundabout routes, and the first documents, dispatched on 25 October, could only arrive in Cologne on 30 October.

The defence counsel were therefore initially dependent on the means of defence which were sparsely accessible in Cologne itself. Stieber received his first blow from a quarter from which he had not expected it. Justizrat Müller, the father of Frau Dr. Daniels, a citizen respected as a jurist and known for his conservative leanings, declared in the Kölnische Zeitung of 25 October that his daughter had never corresponded with Marx, and that Stieber’s original minute-book was a “mystification”. The letter sent to Cologne on 3 March 1852, in which Marx described W. Hirsch as a mouchard and fabricator of false police notes, was accidentally found and made available to the defence. In the declaration of withdrawal of Marx’s party from the Great Windmill Street society, which was available in the Dietz archive, the genuine handwriting of W. Liebknecht was found. Finally, Advocate Schneider II obtained from the secretary of the Cologne poor-law administration, Birnbaum, genuine letters of W. Liebknecht, and from the private clerk Schmitz, genuine letters of Rings. In the court registry the advocates compared the minute-book partly with Liebknecht’s handwriting in the declaration of withdrawal, partly with the letters of Rings and Liebknecht.

Stieber, already disquieted by the declaration of Justizrat Müller, got wind of these ominous handwriting investigations. To forestall the impending blow, he again leaps forward in the session of 27 October and declares: “It had struck him as suspicious that the signature of Liebknecht appearing in the book had seemed (sic!) to differ considerably from another already contained in the files. He had therefore made further inquiries and had heard that the signatory of the minutes in question was called H. Liebknecht, whereas the name in the files was preceded by a W.” To the question of Advocate Schneider II, “Who had told him that an H. Liebknecht also exists?”, Stieber refuses to answer. Schneider II questions him further for information about the persons of Rings and Ulmer, who figure alongside Liebknecht as secretaries underneath the minute-book. Stieber senses a new trap; he ignores the question three times and tries to hide his embarrassment, to regain his composure, by repeating three times, without the slightest occasion, how he came to be in possession of the minute-book. At last he stammers the words: Rings and Ulmer were probably not real names, but mere “League names”. The constant citation in the minute-book of Frau Dr. Daniels as a correspondent of Marx, Stieber explains by saying that one should perhaps read Frau Dr. Daniels and understand it to mean the notary candidate Bermbach. Advocate von Hontheim interpellates him regarding Hirsch. “This Hirsch too,” swears Stieber, “he does not know; but that he is not, as rumour has it, a Prussian agent, is shown by the fact that on the Prussian side he has been looked for.” At a hint from him, Goldheim buzzes forth: “He had been sent to Hamburg in October 1851 to lay hands on Hirsch.” We shall see how the same Goldheim is sent to London the very next day to lay hands on the same Hirsch. Thus the same Stieber who claims to have bought the Dietz archive and the original minute-book from refugees for ready cash, the same Stieber now claims that Hirsch cannot be a Prussian agent because he is a refugee. Depending on what suits his purpose, being a refugee suffices to guarantee from Stieber either absolute venality or absolute incorruptibility. And is not Fleury, whom Stieber himself denounced as a police agent in the session of 3 November, is not this Fleury also a political refugee?

After breaches had thus been shot into his original minute-book from all sides, Stieber sums up on 27 October with classic impudence: “His conviction of the authenticity of the minute-book stands firmer than ever.”

In the session of 29 October, the expert compares the letters of Liebknecht and Rings submitted by Birnbaum and Schmitz with the minute-book and declares the signatures in the minute-book to be false.

In his prosecution speech, Senior Public Prosecutor Seckendorf declares: “The statements contained in the minute-book tally with facts established elsewhere. Only the public prosecution service is completely unable to prove the authenticity of the book.” The book is authentic, but the proofs of authenticity are lacking. New Testament! Seckendorf goes on: “But the defence has itself proved that the book contains at least a great deal of truth, inasmuch as it gave us information about the activity of the Rings named in it, of whom no one had previously known.” If no one had previously known about the activity of Rings, the minute-book provided no information about it. The assertions about the activity of Rings could therefore not confirm the content of the minute-book, and in relation to its form they proved that the signature of a member of Marx’s party was in truth false, forged. They therefore proved, according to Seckendorf, “that the minute-book does indeed contain a great deal of truth” — namely a true forgery.

The Senior Public Prosecutor’s Office (Saedt-Seckendorf) and the Post Office Directorate, together with Stieber, had broken open the letter to Kothes. They therefore knew the date of its arrival. They thus knew that Stieber perjured himself when he had the courier arrive on the 17th and later on 10 October, but the letter only on the 19th, then on the 12th. They were his accomplices.

In the session of 27 October, Stieber vainly sought to maintain his composure. Each day he feared the arrival of the incriminating documents from London. Stieber felt unwell, and the Prussian state incarnate in him felt unwell with him. The exposure before the public had reached a dangerous height. Police Lieutenant Goldheim was therefore sent to London on 28 October to save the Fatherland. What did Goldheim do in London? He attempted, with the help of Greiff and Fleury, to induce Hirsch to come to Cologne and swear under the name H. Liebknecht to the authenticity of the minute-book. A formal state pension was offered to Hirsch; but Hirsch possessed his police instinct just as well as Goldheim. Hirsch knew that he was neither a public prosecutor, nor a police lieutenant, nor a police councillor, and therefore not privileged to commit perjury. Hirsch had an inkling that they would drop him as soon as things went wrong. Hirsch did not want to be made the buck, least of all the scapegoat. Hirsch flatly refused. The Christian-German government of Prussia retains the fame of having sought to buy a false witness in a criminal trial in which the heads of its own accused fellow countrymen were at stake.

Goldheim therefore returned to Cologne with his mission unaccomplished.

In the session of 3 November, after the conclusion of the prosecution speech, before the opening of the defence, between the door and the hinge, Stieber once more interjects. “He,” swears Stieber, “has now caused further investigations to be made concerning the minute-book. He had sent Police Lieutenant Goldheim from Cologne to London and had given him the commission to undertake those investigations. Goldheim had departed on 28 October, arrived on 2 November; here is Goldheim.” At a sign from his master, Goldheim buzzes forth and whirres: “On arriving in London, he had first turned to Police Lieutenant Greiff. The latter had conducted him to the police agent Fleury in the district of Kensington, as being the agent who had given the book to Greiff. Fleury had admitted this to him, the witness Goldheim, and maintained that he really had the book from a

member of the Marx party, by the name of H. Liebknecht, had received.
Fleury had expressly acknowledged the receipt issued by H. Liebknecht for the money obtained for the book. Witness had not been able to get hold of Liebknecht himself in London, since the latter, according to Fleury’s assertion, had shied away from appearing in public. He, the witness, had become convinced in London that the content of the book, apart from a few errors, is quite genuine. He had had this confirmed in particular by reliable agents who had attended Marx’s sessions; but the book is no original minute-book, but merely a notebook on the events in Marx’s sessions. As for the origin of the book, which is admittedly not yet fully clarified, there are only two possibilities. Either it really derives, as the agent firmly asserts, from Liebknecht, who, in order not to expose his betrayal, avoided providing his handwriting; or the agent Fleury obtained the notes for the book from two other friends of Marx, the refugees Dronke and Imandt, and, in order to give his commodity a higher value, cast these notes into the form of an original minute-book. It had namely been officially established by Police Lieutenant Greiff that Dronke and Imandt had associated frequently with Fleury.” … The witness Goldheim assures, “that he convinced himself in London that everything that had earlier been stated about the secret sessions at Marx’s, about the connections between London and Cologne, about the secret correspondence, etc., corresponded fully to the truth.” As proof of how well the Prussian agents are still informed in London today, witness Goldheim adduces, “that on 27 October a wholly secret session took place at Marx’s, in which the measures were deliberated that were to be taken against the minute-book and in particular against Police Counsellor Stieber, who was very disagreeable to the London party. The relevant decisions and documents were sent quite secretly to Counsel Schneider II. Among the papers sent to Schneider II there was, in particular, a private letter that Stieber himself had written to Marx in Cologne in 1848, and which Marx had kept very secret because he hoped thereby to compromise the witness Stieber.”
Witness Stieber leaps forward and declares that he had written to Marx at the time on account of an “infamous slander”, threatened him with legal action, etc.
“No one except Marx and him could know this, and this is certainly the best proof of the credibility of the communications received from London.”

So according to Goldheim, the original minute-book, apart from the false passages, is “quite genuine”. What has convinced him of its authenticity is particularly the circumstance that the original minute-book is no original minute-book, but merely a “notebook”. And Stieber? Stieber does not fall out of the clouds; rather, a stone falls from his heart. Before the close of the session, when the last word of the prosecution has barely died away and the first word of the defence has not yet sounded, Stieber, through his Goldheim, hastily has the original minute-book transformed into a notebook. When two policemen accuse each other of lying, is that not the best proof that both devote themselves to the truth? Stieber has covered his retreat through Goldheim.

Goldheim swears: “upon arriving in London, he first approached Police Lieutenant Greiff. The latter conducted him to the police agent Fleury in the district of Kensington.”
Who now will not swear that poor Goldheim rushed and drove himself weary with Police Lieutenant Greiff before he arrived in the remote district of Kensington, at Fleury’s? But Police Lieutenant Greiff lives in the house of the police agent Fleury, indeed on the upper floor of Fleury’s house, so that in reality not Greiff conducted Goldheim to Fleury, but Fleury conducted Goldheim to Greiff.

“The police agent Fleury in the district of Kensington!!” What precision! Can you still doubt the truthfulness of the Prussian government, which denounces its own mouchards, by name and residence, by skin and hair? If the minute-book is false, just hold on to the “police agent Fleury in Kensington”. Oh yes! To the private secretary Pierre in the 13th arrondissement. If one wishes to specify an individual, one gives not only his family name, but also his forename. Not Fleury, but Charles Fleury. One designates the individual by the business he publicly conducts, not by the trade he secretly carries on. Hence merchant Charles Fleury, not police agent Fleury. And if one wishes to give his address, one does not merely indicate a London district which is itself a town, but the district, street and house number. Hence not police agent Fleury in Kensington, but merchant Charles Fleury, 17 Viktoria Road, Kensington.

But “Police Lieutenant Greiff”, that at least is spoken bluntly. But when Police Lieutenant Greiff attaches himself in London to the embassy and from the lieutenant turns into an attaché, that is an attachment which is none of the courts’ business. The heart’s impulse is destiny’s voice.

Thus Police Lieutenant Goldheim assures that the police agent Fleury assures that he received the book from a person who really assures that he is H. Liebknecht, and to whom Fleury even issued a receipt. Only, Goldheim could not “get hold” of H. Liebknecht in London. Goldheim could therefore have stayed calmly in Cologne, for Police Counsellor Stieber’s assurance does not become fatter because it appears only as an assurance of Police Lieutenant Goldheim, which Police Lieutenant Greiff assures, who in his turn is assured by Police Agent Fleury, who does him the favour of assuring his assurance.

Undeterred by his hardly encouraging London experiences, Goldheim, with that peculiar capacity for conviction which must replace the capacity for discernment, has become “fully” convinced that “everything” that Stieber has sworn about the Marx party, its connections with Cologne, etc., “fully corresponds to the truth”. And now, after his subordinate Goldheim has issued him a testimonium paupertatis, is Police Counsellor Stieber still not covered? One result Stieber has achieved by his manner of swearing: he has turned the Prussian hierarchy upside down. You don’t believe the police counsellor? Good. He has compromised himself. Then you will surely believe the police lieutenant. You don’t believe the police lieutenant? Even better. Then you have no choice but at least to believe the police agent, alias mouchardus vulgaris. Such heretical confusion of concepts is wrought by the swearing Stieber.

After Goldheim has so far furnished proof that in London he has established the non-existence of the original minute-book, and as regards the existence of H. Liebknecht only that he cannot be “got hold” of in London—after he has, however, thereby convinced himself that “all” Stieber’s statements about the Marx party “fully correspond to the truth”, he must finally, beyond these negative arguments, according to which Seckendorf indeed harbours “much truth”, also furnish positive proof of “how well the Prussian agents are still informed in London today”. As a sample he adduces that on 27 October “a wholly secret session took place at Marx’s”. In this wholly secret session “the measures against the original minute-book and against Police Counsellor Stieber, who is very disagreeable to the Marx party, were deliberated. The relevant decrees and decisions were sent quite secretly to Counsel Schneider II.”

Although the Prussian agents were present at these sessions, the route taken by these letters remained so “quite secret” to them that the post, despite all its efforts, could not intercept them. Listen to the little cricket chirping mournfully on the ageing walls: “The relevant letters and documents were sent quite secretly to Counsel Schneider II.” Quite secret for the secret agents of Goldheim.

The imaginary decisions concerning the minute-book cannot have been taken on 27 October at the wholly secret session at Marx’s, since Marx had already sent the main proofs of the spuriousness of the minute-book on 25 October—not, it is true, to Schneider II, but to Herr von Hontheim.

That documents were sent to Cologne at all was something the Prussian police was told not only by their guilty conscience. On 29 October Goldheim arrived in London. On 30 October Goldheim found in the Morning Advertiser, the Spectator, the Examiner, the Leader, the People’s Paper a declaration, signed: Engels, Freiligrath, Marx and Wolff, in which they referred the English public to the revelations which the defence would bring concerning the forgery, perjury, falsification of documents, in short, concerning the Prussian police infamies. So “quite secret” was the dispatch of the documents kept that the Marx party informed the English public of it publicly, though admittedly not until 30 October, after Goldheim had arrived in London and the documents had arrived in Cologne.

However, documents were also sent to Cologne on 27 October. How did the all-knowing Prussian police learn this?

The Prussian police did not act quite secretly, like the Marx party. On the contrary, it had quite publicly posted two of its mouchards for weeks in front of Marx’s house, who observed him from the street du soir jusqu’au matin et du matin jusqu’au soir, and followed him every step. Now, on 27 October, Marx had the quite secret documents, which contained the genuine handwriting of Liebknecht and Rings and the statement of the landlord of the Crown Tavern about the day of the meeting—these quite secret documents he had had officially certified at the quite public police court in Marlborough Street in the presence of the reporters of the English daily press. The Prussian guardian angels followed him from his residence to Marlborough Street and from Marlborough Street back to his residence, and from his residence again to the post office. They only disappeared when Marx made a quite secret trip to the police inspector of the district to obtain a warrant of arrest against his two “followers”.

Besides, the Prussian government had yet another route. Marx namely sent the documents certified on 27 October and dated 27 October directly through the post to Cologne, in order to secure the quite secretly dispatched duplicate of the same from the clutches of the Prussian eagle. The post office and police in Cologne thus knew that documents dated 27 October had been sent by Marx, and Goldheim did not need to travel to London to discover the secret.

Goldheim feels that he must finally indicate “in particular” something that was decided at the “wholly secret session of 27 October” to be sent to Schneider II, and he names the letter addressed by Stieber to Marx in 1848. Unfortunately, however, Marx sent this letter not on the 27th but on the 25th of October, and not to Counsel Schneider II but to Herr von Hontheim. But how did the police know that Marx still had Stieber’s letter at all and would send it to the defence? But let Stieber leap forward again.

Stieber hopes to prevent Schneider II from reading out the letter that is very “embarrassing” to him by forestalling him. When Goldheim says that Schneider II possesses my letter, and that through “criminal | connection with Marx”, Stieber calculates — thus Schneider II will suppress the letter, in order to prove that Goldheim’s agents are misinformed and that he himself is not in criminal connection with Marx. Stieber therefore jumps in, gives the content of the letter falsely, and closes with the astonishing exclamation: “No human being, apart from him and Marx, could know this, and that is certainly the best proof of the credibility of the communications that have come from London.”

Stieber has a peculiar method of keeping secrets that are unpleasant to him hidden. When he does not speak, the whole world must be silent. Apart from him and a certain elderly lady, therefore, “no human being can know” that he once lived near Weimar as an homme entretenu. But if Stieber had every reason that no one except Marx should know, Marx had every reason to let everyone except Stieber know of the letter. Now one knows the best proof of the communications that have come from London. What might Stieber’s worst proof look like?

But Stieber commits another deliberate perjury when he says: “No human being, apart from me and Marx, could know this.” He knew that it was not Marx, but another editor of the Rheinische Zeitung who had replied to his letter. That was, at any rate, “a human being apart from him and Marx”. So that yet more people may know of it, we reproduce the letter as a note.*) I

*) “In No. 177 of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung there is a report from Frankfurt am Main dated 21 December which contains the vile lie that I went to Frankfurt as a police spy in order, under the guise of democratic sentiments, to track down the murderers of Prince Lychnowsky and General Auerswald. I was indeed in Frankfurt on the 21st, stayed there only a single day, and as you will see from the enclosed certificate, had only to settle a private matter of the local Frau v. Schwezler; I returned to Berlin long ago, where I resumed my activity as defence counsel long since. I refer you also to the official correction already issued in this matter in No. 338 of the Frankfurter Ober-Postamtszeitung of 21 December and No. 248 of the Nationalzeitung of this city. I believe I may expect from your love of truth that you will immediately insert the enclosed correction in your paper and, in accordance with your statutory obligation, will give me the name of the sender of the mendacious report, for I can by no means leave such a slander unchallenged...

[Mr Stieber now has permission to have the reply of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung printed.]”

Now how did Stieber know that on 27 October his letter had been sent by Marx to Schneider II? But it was not sent on the 27th, but on 25 October, and not to Schneider II, but to von Hontheim. So Stieber knew only that the letter still existed, |62; and he suspected that Marx would communicate it to some defence counsel or other. Where did this suspicion come from? When the Kölnische Zeitung brought Stieber’s testimony of 18 October about Cherval etc. to London, Marx wrote to the Kölnische Zeitung, to the Berliner Nationalzeitung and to the Frankfurter Journal a declaration dated 21 October, at the end of which Stieber is threatened with his still surviving letter. In order to keep the letter “completely secret”, Marx himself announced it in the newspapers. It founders on the cowardice of the German daily press, but the Prussian post was now informed, and with the Prussian post — Stieber. j

What then did Goldheim chirp home from London?

That Hirsch is not swearing falsely, that H. Liebknecht has no “tangible” existence, that the original minute-book is no original minute-book, that the all-knowing London agents know everything that the Marx party has published in the London press. To save the honour of the Prussian agents, Goldheim puts into their mouths the meagre information gleaned by letter-opening and letter-suppression.

In the session of 4 November, after Schneider II has demolished Stieber and his minute-book, proved him guilty of forgery and perjury, Stieber jumps up for the last time and gives vent to his moral indignation. Even, he exclaims with indignant soul, even Mr Wermuth, Police Director Wermuth, they dare to accuse of perjury. Stieber, therefore, has returned once more to the orthodox graduated scale, to the ascending line. Earlier he had moved in the heterodox, descending line. If they would not believe him, the police councillor, then at least his police lieutenant; if not the agent Fleury, then at least the sub-agent Hirsch. Now the reverse: He, the police councillor, could perhaps swear falsely, but Wermuth, a police director! Unbelievable! In his ill-humour he praises Wermuth with increasing bitterness, pours out pure Wermuth for the public, Wermuth as man, Wermuth as advocate, Wermuth as father of a family, Wermuth as police director, Wermuth for ever!

Even now, in open session, Stieber still seeks to keep the accused incommunicado and to erect a barrier between the defence and the material for the defence. He accuses Schneider II of “criminal connection” with Marx; in his person, Schneider commits an attack on the highest Prussian authorities. Even the Assize President Goebel, a Goebel himself, feels crushed under the weight of Stieber. He cannot help, though in a timidly servile manner, letting a few strokes of the birch fall on Stieber’s neck. But Stieber for his part is right. It is not his individual, it is the public prosecutor’s office, the court, the post, the government, the police headquarters in Berlin, it is the ministries, it is the Prussian legation in London, in short it is the Prussian state that stands in the pillory with him, the original minute-book in its hand.

Let us return once more with Goldheim to London.

Just as Stieber still does not know where Cherval is staying and who Cherval actually is, so according to Goldheim’s testimony (session of 3 November) the way in which the minute-book originated is still not entirely clarified. In order to clarify it, Goldheim offers two hypotheses.

“For the still not entirely clarified way in which the book originated,” he says, “there are only two paths. Either it really comes, as the agent firmly assures, from Liebknecht, who, in order not to make his betrayal clear, avoided giving his handwriting.”

W. Liebknecht notoriously belongs to the Marx party. But the signature Liebknecht in the minute-book just as notoriously does not

belong to W. Liebknecht. Stieber therefore swears at the session of | 27 October that the owner of this signature is also not that W. Liebknecht, but another Liebknecht, an H. Liebknecht. He had learned of the existence of this double, without being able to indicate the source of his knowledge. Goldheim swears: “Fleury asserted that he really received the book from a member of the Marx party by the name of A. Liebknecht.” Goldheim further swears: “he was unable to lay hands on this H. Liebknecht in London.” What sign of existence has thus far, then, the H. Liebknecht discovered by Stieber given to the world in general, and to Police Lieutenant Goldheim in particular? No sign of existence except his handwriting in the original minute-book; but now Goldheim declares: “Liebknecht avoided giving his handwriting.”

H. Liebknecht existed previously only as handwriting. Now nothing remains of H. Liebknecht, not even his handwriting, not even the dot on the i. But how Goldheim knows that the H. Liebknecht, whose existence he knows only from the handwriting of the minute-book, writes a handwriting different from that of the minute-book: that remains Goldheim’s secret. If Stieber has his miracles, why should not Goldheim have his miracles?

Goldheim forgets that his superior Stieber swore to the existence of H. Liebknecht, that he himself even swore to it just now. In the same breath in which he swears to A. Liebknecht, he remembers that H. Liebknecht was actually only a stopgap invented by Stieber, only an emergency lie, and necessity knows no law. He remembers that there is only one genuine Liebknecht, W. Liebknecht, but that, | if W. Liebknecht is genuine, the minute-book signature is false. He may not admit that Fleury’s sub-agent Hirsch fabricated the false signature together with the false minute-book. He therefore makes the hypothesis: “Liebknecht avoided giving his handwriting.” Let us also, for once, make a hypothesis: Goldheim once forged banknotes. He is brought before the court and it is proved that the signature figuring on the note is not that of the bank director. Do not take it amiss, gentlemen, do not take it amiss. The banknote is genuine. It comes from the bank director himself. If his name is executed not in his own handwriting but in a false one, what does that matter? “He avoided giving his handwriting.”

Enthüllungen über den Kommunistenprozeß zu Köln – IV. Das Original-Protokollbuch

“Or,” continues Goldheim, if the hypothesis concerning Liebknecht is wrong: “or the agent Fleury received the notes for the book from two other friends of Marx, the refugees Dronke and Imandt,

and that he gave these notes, in order to give his commodity all the higher value, the form of an original minute book. It had namely been officially established by Police Lieutenant Greiff that Dronke and Imandt had frequently associated with Fleury.”

Or? How so or? If a book like the Original Minute Book is signed by three people, by Liebknecht, Rings and Ulmer, no one will conclude: “it originates from Liebknecht, or from Dronke and Imandt,” but: “it originates from Liebknecht, — or from Rings and from Ulmer.” Should the unfortunate Goldheim, who has once ventured upon a disjunctive judgment — Either, Or — should he now say once again: “Rings and Ulmer have avoided providing their handwriting”?

Even Goldheim considers a new turn inevitable. If the Original Minute Book does not originate from Liebknecht, as the agent Fleury asserts, then Fleury himself made it, but he received the notes for it from Dronke and Imandt, of whom Police Lieutenant Greiff has officially established that they frequently associated with Fleury.

“To give his commodity all the higher value,” says Goldheim, “Fleury brought the notes into the form of an original minute book.” He not only commits a fraud, he forges signatures, all “to give his commodity all the higher value”. A man as conscientious as this Prussian agent, who out of greed fabricates false minutes, false signatures, is certainly incapable of fabricating false notes. Thus concludes Goldheim.

Dronke and Imandt came to London only in April 1852, after they had been expelled by the Swiss authorities. One third of the Original Minute Book, however, consists of the minutes of the months of January, February and March 1852. Thus Fleury certainly made one third of the Original Minute Book without Dronke and Imandt, although Goldheim swears: “either Liebknecht made the minute book — or Fleury made it, but from the notes of Dronke and Imandt.” Goldheim swears it, and Goldheim is not Brutus, it is true, but he is Goldheim.

But thus there remains the possibility that Dronke and Imandt supplied the notes to Fleury since April, for, swears Goldheim: “it had been officially established by Police Lieutenant Greiff that Dronke and Imandt had frequently associated with Fleury.”

Let us come to this association.

Fleury was, as already remarked above, not known in London as a Prussian police agent, but as a City merchant, and indeed as a democratic merchant. A native of Altenburg, he had come to London as a political refugee, later married an Englishwoman from a respected and well-to-do family, and lived seemingly in retirement with his wife and his father-in-law, an old industrial Quaker. On 8 or 9 October Imandt entered into “frequent association” with Fleury, namely into the association of giving lessons. According to the amended deposition of Stieber, however, the Original Minute Book arrived in Cologne on the 10th, according to Goldheim’s final deposition on 11 October. Thus when Imandt, hitherto completely unknown to him, gave him his first French lesson, Fleury had not only already had the Original Minute Book bound in red morocco, he had already handed it over to the extraordinary courier who carried it to Cologne. So much did Fleury compose his minute book from the notes of Imandt. As for Dronke, however, Fleury saw him only once, accidentally at Imandt’s, and indeed only on 30 October, after the Original Minute Book had long since fallen back into its original nothingness.

Thus the Christian-Germanic government did not content itself with breaking open desks, stealing other people’s papers, obtaining false statements by stealth, instigating sham plots, forging false documents, swearing false oaths, attempting bribery to procure false testimony — all in order to obtain a conviction of the Cologne defendants. It seeks to cast a defamatory suspicion upon the London friends of the accused, in order to conceal its Hirsch, of whom Stieber swore that he did not know him, and Goldheim that he was not a spy.

On Friday, 5 November, the *Kölnische Zeitung* brought the report on the assizes session of 3 November with Goldheim’s deposition to London. Enquiries about Greiff were immediately made and it was learned that very day that he lived with Fleury. At the same time Dronke and Imandt went to Fleury with the *Kölnische Zeitung*. They have him read Goldheim’s deposition. He turns pale, seeks to compose himself, plays the astonished man and declares himself fully prepared to give testimony against Goldheim before an English magistrate. First, however, he must still speak to his lawyer. A rendezvous for the afternoon of the following day, Saturday 6 November, is fixed. Fleury promises to bring his officially attested deposition to this rendezvous. Naturally he did not appear. Imandt and Dronke therefore went to his residence on Saturday evening and found there the following note intended for Imandt:

“Through the assistance of the lawyer everything is settled, further steps are reserved until the person is identified. The lawyer has let the matter go off still today. — Business made my presence in the City necessary. Will you visit me tomorrow, I am at home the whole afternoon until 5 o’clock. — Fi.”

On the other side of the note is the postscript: “I have just come home, had to go out with Mr Werner and my wife, of which you can convince yourself tomorrow, write to me at what time you wish to come.”

Imandt left the following reply: “I am extremely surprised not to find you at home now, since you also failed to present yourself this afternoon at the agreed rendezvous. I must confess to you that through these circumstances my judgment of you is already fixed. If you have an interest in teaching me otherwise, you will come to me, and tomorrow morning early; for I cannot vouch for it that your character as a Prussian police spy will not be discussed in the English papers. Imandt.”

Fleury also did not appear on Sunday morning. Dronke and Imandt therefore went to him again in the evening, in order to obtain his declaration under the pretence that their confidence had only been shaken at the first moment. Amidst all kinds of hesitations and indecisions the declaration was produced. Fleury especially wavered when it was pointed out to him that he must sign not only his surname but also his first name. The declaration reads literally as follows:

“To the Editors of the *Kölnische Zeitung*.

The undersigned declares that he has known Mr Imandt for about 1 month, during which time the latter gave him lessons in French, that he saw Mr Dronke for the first time on Saturday, 30 October of this year,

That neither of the two has made any communications to him which stand in connection with the minute book figuring in the Cologne trial,

That he knows no person bearing the name Liebknecht, nor has he been in any connection with such a person.

London, 8 November 1852.
Kensington. Charles Fleury.”

Dronke and Imandt were naturally convinced that Fleury would send the order to the *Kölnische Zeitung* not to accept any declaration bearing his signature. They therefore sent his declaration not to the *Kölnische Zeitung* but to Attorney Schneider II, who, however, received it at too advanced a stage of the trial to be able to make use of it.

Fleury is not, it is true, the Fleur de Marie of the prostitutes of the police, but a flower he is, and blossoms he will bear, even if only fleurs-de-lys.

The story of the minute book had not played itself out.

On Saturday, 6 November, W. Hirsch of Hamburg declared by affidavit before the magistrate at Bow Street, London, that he himself, under the direction of Greiff and Fleury, had fabricated the Original Minute Book figuring in the Cologne communist trial.

Thus first original minute book of the Marx party, — then notebook of the spy Fleury, — finally fabricate of the Prussian police, simple police fabricate, police fabricate sans phrase.

On the same day that Hirsch betrayed the secret of the Original Minute Book to the English magistrate at Bow Street, another representative of the Prussian state was busy at Kensington in Fleury’s house, this time not packing stolen, or fabricated, or any documents at all, but rather his own belongings in strong oilskin. This was none other than Vogel Greiff, of Paris memory, the extraordinary courier to Cologne, the chief of the Prussian police agents in London, the official conductor of the mystification, the police lieutenant attached to the Prussian legation. — Greiff had received orders from the Prussian government to leave London immediately. No time was to be lost.

As at the close of spectacle operas the scenery situated in the background, hitherto hidden by coulisses, rising amphitheatrically, suddenly gleams in Bengal fire and, in dazzling outlines, strikes all eyes, so at the close of this Prussian police tragicomedy the hidden amphitheatrical workshop in which the Original Minute Book was forged. On the lowest step one saw the unfortunate mouchard Hirsch, working for piece wages; on the second step the bourgeoisly placed spy and agent provocateur Fleury, City merchant Fleury; on the third step the diplomatic Police Lieutenant Greiff, and on the highest the Prussian legation itself, to which he is attached. For 6–8 months Hirsch fabricated regularly, week by week, his Original Minute Book in the study and under the eyes of Fleury. But one storey above Fleury lived the Prussian Police Lieutenant Greiff, who supervised and inspired him. But Greiff himself spent a part of the day regularly at the hotel of the Prussian legation, where he was in his turn supervised and inspired. The Prussian legation hotel was thus the actual hothouse where the Original Minute Book grew great. Greiff therefore had to disappear. The discredit that awaited him in London fell back upon the Prussian legation. Greiff therefore had to disappear. He disappeared on 6 November 1852.

The Original Minute Book could no longer be maintained, not even as a notebook. Prosecutor Saedt buried it in his reply to the defence speeches of the attorneys.

Thus one had again arrived back at the point from which the indicting chamber of the Court of Appeal set out when it ordered a new investigation because “no objective corpus delicti was present”.

V. The Accompanying Letter to the Red Catechism.

At the session of 27 October, Police Inspector Junkermann of Krefeld testifies: “he seized a parcel containing copies of the Red Catechism, which was addressed to the waiter of a Krefeld inn and bore the Düsseldorf postmark. Accompanying it was a covering letter without a signature. The sender has not been traced.”

“The covering letter appears”, as the Public Prosecutor remarks, “to be in Marx’s handwriting.”

At the session of 28 October, the expert witness Renard sees in the covering letter Marx’s handwriting. The covering letter reads:

“Citizens! Since you enjoy our full confidence, we hereby hand over to you 50 copies of the Red, which you are to slip under the house doors of recognised revolutionary citizens, preferably workers, on Saturday, 5 June, at 11 o’clock in the evening. We count with certainty on your civic virtue and accordingly expect execution of this instruction. The revolution is nearer than many believe. Long live the revolution!
Berlin, May 1852.
Greetings and fraternity!
The Revolutionary Committee.”

Witness Junkermann further declares: “that the parcels in question were sent to the witness Chianella.”

During the pre-trial detention of the Cologne defendants, Berlin’s Police President Hinkeldey directs the manoeuvre as supreme general. The laurels of Maupas won’t let him sleep. In the proceedings themselves, two police directors figure — one living and one dead — a police councillor — but the one was a Stieber — two police lieutenants, of whom one is constantly travelling from London to Cologne, the other constantly from Cologne to London, myriads of police agents and sub-agents, named, anonymous, heteronymous, pseudonymous, tailed and tailless. Finally, still one police inspector.

As soon as the *Kölnische Zeitung* with the witness interrogations of 27 and 28 October arrived in London, Marx went to the magistrate in Marlborough Street, there copied out the text of the covering letter given in the *Kölner Zeitung*, had this copy certified and at the same time the following declaration given in lieu of oath:

1) that he did not write the covering letter in question;
2) that he first became aware of its existence from the *Kölner Zeitung*;
3) that he had never seen the so-called Red Catechism;
4) that he had never in any way contributed to its dissemination.

In passing, it may be noted that such a declaration made before a magistrate (declaration), if false, entails in England all the consequences of perjury.

The above document was sent to Schneider II, but at the same time appeared printed in the London “Morning Advertiser”, because in the course of the trial it had become clear that the Prussian post coupled the observation of postal secrecy with the peculiar notion that it was bound to keep the letters entrusted to it secret from the addressees. The Public Prosecutor’s Office opposed the production of the document, even if only for comparison. The Public Prosecutor’s Office knew that a single glance from the original covering letter to the officially certified copy by Marx could not conceal the fraud, the deliberate imitation of his handwriting, even from the keen eye of these jurors. In the interest of the morality of the Prussian state, it therefore protested against any comparison.

Schneider II remarked, “that the addressee Chianella, who had readily given the police information about the presumed senders and had directly offered himself to them as a spy, had not remotely thought of Marx.”

Anyone who had ever read a line of Marx could not possibly foist the authorship of this melodramatic covering letter upon him. The summer midnight-dream hour of 5 June, the obtrusively graphic operation of slipping “Red” under the house doors of the revolutionary philistines — that might perhaps point to Kinkel’s disposition, just as the “civic virtue” and the “certainty” with which military “execution” of the given “instruction” is counted on points to Willich’s imagination. But how should Kinkel-Willich have come to set down their revolutionary recipes in Marx’s handwriting?

If a hypothesis may be permitted as to “the manner of origin, not yet fully clarified”, of this covering letter existing in imitated handwriting: the police found in Krefeld the 50 Red together with the high-flown and agreeable covering letter. They had — in Cologne or Berlin, qu’importe? — the text set in Marx’s hand. To what end? “In order to give their commodity an all the higher value.”

The Public Prosecutor’s Office itself, however, did not venture to recur to the covering letter in its Catilinarian speech. It let it drop. Thus it did not contribute to establishing the missing “objective facts of the case”.

Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne. VI. The Willich-Schapper Faction.

VI. The Willich-Schapper Faction.

Since the defeat of the revolution of 1848–49 the proletarian party on the Continent lost what it had exceptionally possessed during that brief epoch: press, freedom of speech, and right of association, i.e. the legal means of party organisation. The bourgeois-liberal, like the petty-bourgeois-democratic party, found in the social position of the classes which they represent the conditions, in spite of the reaction, to hold together in one or another form and to assert their common interests more or less. After 1849, as before 1848, only one path lay open to the proletarian party — the path of secret association. Since 1849, therefore, a whole series of secret proletarian associations arose on the Continent, discovered by the police, condemned by the courts, broken through by the prisons, and constantly re-formed again by the circumstances.

One part of these secret societies aimed directly at the overthrow of the existing state power. This was justified in France, where the proletariat had been defeated by the bourgeoisie and the attack on the existing government directly coincided with the attack on the bourgeoisie. Another part of the secret societies aimed at the party formation of the proletariat, without troubling about the existing governments. This was necessary in countries like Germany, where bourgeoisie and proletariat were jointly subjected to their semi-feudal governments, where, therefore, a victorious attack on the existing governments, instead of breaking the power of the bourgeoisie or at least the so-called middle classes, would first have to help them to dominance. No doubt that here, too, the members of the proletarian party would again take part in a revolution against the status quo, but it was not their task to prepare this revolution, to agitate for it, to conspire, to plot. They could leave this preparation to the general conditions and to the directly involved classes. They had to leave it to them, if they did not want to renounce their own party position and the historical tasks which emerge of themselves from the general conditions of existence of the proletariat. For them, the present governments were only ephemeral phenomena, and the status quo only a brief halting point, to be worn down, a matter to be left to a petty, narrow-minded democracy.

The “Communist League” was therefore no conspiratorial society, but a society which secretly carried out the organisation of the proletarian party, because the German proletariat, *igne et aqua*, is publicly interdicted from writing, speech, and association. When such a society conspires, it does so only in the sense that steam and electricity conspire against the status quo.

It goes without saying that such a secret society, which aimed at forming not the government party but the opposition party of the future, could offer little attraction for individuals who, on the one hand, spread out their personal insignificance under the theatrical cloak of conspiracies, on the other hand, satisfy their narrow ambition on the day of the next revolution, but above all wish to seem important at the moment, take part in the spoils of demagogy, and be welcomed by the democratic mountebanks.

A faction therefore separated off from the Communist League, or a faction was separated off, as you will, which demanded, if not real conspiracies, at least the appearance of conspiracy and therefore direct alliance with the democratic heroes of the day. — The Willich-Schapper faction, it being characteristic of it that Willich figures with and alongside Kinkel as entrepreneur of the German-American revolutionary loan business.

The relation of this party to the majority of the Communist League, to which the Cologne defendants belonged, has just been indicated. Bürgers and Röser developed it concisely and exhaustively in the Cologne assize proceedings.

We pause before the conclusion of our account in order to cast a backward glance at the conduct of the Willich-Schapper faction during the Cologne trial.

As already remarked above, the data of the documents filched from the faction by Stieber prove that their documents, even after Reuter’s theft, still managed to find their way to the police. To this very hour the faction owes the explanation of this phenomenon.

Schapper knew best Cherval’s past. He knew that Cherval had been admitted into the League by him in 1846, and not by Marx in 1848, etc., etc. He confirms Stieber’s lies by his silence.

The faction knew that Haacke, who belonged to it, wrote the threatening letter to the witness Haupt; it allows the suspicion to rest on the party of the accused. —

Moses Heß, belonging to the faction, the author of the “Red Catechism”, this unfortunate parody of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Moses Heß, who not only writes his writings himself but also distributes them himself, knew exactly to whom he had let batches of his “Red”. He knew that Marx had not diminished his wealth of “Red” by so much as a single copy. Moses calmly allows the suspicion to lie upon the accused as if their party had peddled his “Red” with melodramatic covering letters in the Rhine Province.

As by its silence, the faction makes common cause with the Prussian police by its speaking. Wherever it appears during the proceedings, it appears not on the bench of the accused, but as “King’s witness”.

Hentze, Willich’s friend and benefactor, confessing to knowledge of the League, spends some weeks with Willich in London and then travels to Cologne in order to make the false statement against Becker, against whom much fewer indications exist than against himself, that Becker had been a League member in 1848.

Hätzel, as the Dietz Archive shows, belonging to the faction, supported by it with money, already once placed before the assizes in Berlin for participation in the League, appears as a witness against the accused. He gives false evidence, bringing the exceptional arming of the Berlin proletariat during the revolutionary period into a fictitious connection with the League statutes.

Steingens, convicted by his own letters (see the session of 18 October) of having been the chief agent of the faction in Brussels, appears in Cologne not as an accused but as a witness.

Not long before the Cologne assize proceedings, Willich and Kinkel sent a journeyman tailor as an emissary to Germany. Kinkel does not belong to the faction, but Willich was co-regent of the German-American revolutionary loan.

Kinkel, already at that time threatened by the danger that later materialised, of seeing himself and Willich removed from the administration of the loan funds by the London guarantors and the funds themselves, despite his and Willich’s indignant protest, sent back to America: Kinkel precisely at that time needed sham missions to and sham correspondence with Germany, partly to show that any sphere of revolutionary activity for him and the American dollars existed there at all, partly to find a pretext for the enormous correspondence, postage, etc. costs which he and friend Willich knew how to charge. (See the lithographed circular of Count O. Reichenbach.) Kinkel knew himself to have no connection whatever, whether with the bourgeois Liberals or with the petty-bourgeois Democrats in Germany. He therefore mistook X for U, the emissary of the faction for the emissary of the German-American Revolutionary League. This emissary had no other task than to work among the workers against the party of the Cologne accused. One must admit the moment was well chosen, still before the gates closed to provide a new pretext for a fresh investigation. The Prussian police were fully informed about the person, the day of departure, and the route of the emissary. Whence? we shall see. In the secret meetings which he held in Magdeburg, their spies were present and reported on the debate. The friends of the Cologne defendants in Germany and London trembled.

We have related above that Hirsch, on 6 November, confessed before the magistrate at Bow Street that he had fabricated the original minute book under the direction of Greiff and Fleury; Willich induced him to take this step, Willich and the innkeeper Schärtner accompanied him to the magistrate. Hirsch’s confession was made out in three different copies and these were sent by post to Cologne under different addresses.

It was of the utmost importance to arrest Hirsch immediately as he left the threshold of the court. On the basis of the officially authenticated statement in his possession, the trial lost in Cologne could be won again in London. If not for the accused, then at least against the Prussian government.

Willich, on the contrary, did everything to make such a step impossible. He observed the deepest silence not only towards the directly involved Marx party, but also towards his own party, even towards Schapper. Only Schärtner was initiated into his secret. Schärtner declares that he and Willich accompanied Hirsch to the ship. For Hirsch, in accordance with Willich’s intention, was to give testimony against himself in Cologne.

Willich informs Hirsch of the route which the documents will take, Hirsch the Prussian legation, the Prussian legation the post. The documents do not arrive at their destination, they disappear.

Eight to ten days later the vanished Hirsch reappears in London.

Willich, on interpellation, admits that he had been in communication again since the beginning of August 1852 with Hirsch, who had already been expelled from the Great Windmill Society in 1851 on his motion as a spy. Hirsch had namely revealed Fleury to him as a Prussian spy, and then had communicated to him, for his information, all letters arriving at Fleury’s and sent by him. He, Willich, had made use of this means to keep the Prussian police under surveillance.

Willich had notoriously been for about a year the most intimate friend of Fleury, from whom he received assistance. But if Willich knew from August 1852 that Fleury was a Prussian spy, and was at the same time informed of his doings, how is it that he did not know the original minute book?

That he only intervenes after the Prussian government itself has betrayed Fleury as a spy? that he intervenes in a manner which, at best, gets his ally Hirsch out of England and the officially authenticated evidence of Fleury’s guilt out of the hands of the Marx party?

That he continued to receive assistance from Fleury, who boasts of a receipt for £15 given by him?

That he continues to operate with Fleury in the German-American revolutionary loan?

That he tells Fleury the place and meeting day of his own secret society, so that Prussian agents in the adjoining room take down the debates in minutes?

That he informs Fleury of the route of the above-mentioned emissary, the journeyman tailor, and even receives money for this mission journey from him?

That he finally tells Fleury that he has instructed Hentze, who lives with him, as to how he should testify against Becker at the assizes? *)

One must admit—que tout cela n’est pas bien clair.

VII. The Verdict.

As the police mysteries cleared up, public opinion declared in favour of the accused. When the fraud of the original minute book was exposed, an acquittal was generally expected. The “Kölnische Zeitung” saw itself impelled to make a genuflection before public opinion and a turn against the government. Small notices favourable to the accused and casting suspicion on Stieber suddenly strayed into columns which had formerly been open only to police insinuations. The Prussian government itself gave up the game as lost. Its correspondents in The Times and Morning Chronicle suddenly began to prepare the public opinion of other countries for an unfavourable outcome. However pernicious and monstrous the doctrines of the accused, however abominable the documents found among them might be, there were no factual proofs of a plot, a conviction was therefore hardly probable. So head-shakingly resigned wrote the Berlin correspondent of The Times, the servile echo of the fears circulating in the highest circles of the Spree city. All the more boisterous was the jubilation of the Byzantine court and its eunuchs when the electric telegraph flashed the “Guilty” of the Cologne jury to Berlin.

With the exposure of the minute book the trial had entered a new stage. The jury were no longer free to find the accused guilty or not guilty; they now had to find the accused guilty, or the government. To acquit the accused was to condemn the government.

In his rejoinder to the defence speeches of the advocates, Procurator Saedt let the original minute book drop. He did not wish to make use of a document that had “such a blemish” on it; he himself considered it “inauthentic”; it was a “wretched book”; it had caused much useless loss of time; it contributed nothing to the matter itself; Stieber had allowed himself to be mystified out of laudable zeal for duty, etc., etc.

But the prosecution itself had asserted in its indictment that the book contained “much truth”. Far from declaring it inauthentic, it had only regretted not being able to “prove” its authenticity. With the authenticity of the original minute book sworn to by Stieber fell the authenticity of the testimony of Cherval in Paris, sworn to by Stieber, to which Saedt returns once more in his rejoinder; fell everything factual that the “most strenuous activity of all the authorities” of the Prussian state had ferreted out during a year and a half. The assize proceedings announced for 28 July had been suspended for three months. Why? Because of the illness of Police Director Schultz. And who was Schultz? The original discoverer of the original minute book. Let us go back further. In February and March house searches had been carried out at the home of Frau Dr Daniels. On what ground? On the ground of the first pages of the original minute book which Fleury had sent to Schultz, which Schultz had forwarded to the Cologne police directorate, which the Cologne police directorate had passed on to the investigating magistrate, which had led the investigating magistrate to the flat of Frau Dr Daniels.

Despite the Cherval plot, the prosecution senate in October 1851 had still not found the lacking corpus delicti, and therefore, by order of the ministry, ordered a fresh investigation. Who conducted this investigation? Police Director Schultz. Schultz, therefore, was to find the corpus delicti. What did Schultz find? The original minute book. All the new material he produced was limited to the loose sheets of the minute book which Stieber later had completed and bound together.

Twelve months’ confinement in a cell for the accused, in order to give the original minute book the necessary time for birth and growth. Trifles, cries Saedt, and sees already therein the proof of guilt, that defence counsel and accused need eight days to clean an Augean stable which it took all the authorities of the Prussian state eighteen months to fill and the accused eighteen months to sit.

The original minute book was no incidental point; it was the nodal point in which all the threads of government activity converged—legation and police, ministry and magistracy, prosecution and post office directorate, London, Berlin, and Cologne. The original minute book was so much a matter of the case that it was invented in order to create a case in the first place.

Couriers, dispatches, postal interceptions, arrests, perjuries to uphold the original minute book; forgeries to create it; bribery attempts to justify it. The unveiled mystery of the original minute book was the unveiled mystery of the monster trial.

Originally, the miracle-working intervention of the police had been necessary to disguise the purely tendentious character of the trial. The forthcoming revelations, Saedt opened the proceedings, will prove to you, gentlemen of the jury, that the trial is no tendentious trial. Now he stresses the tendentious character in order to make the police revelations be forgotten. After the eighteen-month preliminary investigation, the jury needed an objective corpus delicti in order to justify themselves before public opinion. After the five-week police comedy, they need “pure tendency” in order to rescue themselves from the factual filth.

*) On the relationship of Willich to Becker:

“Willich writes me the funniest letters; I do not reply, but he cannot be prevented from expounding his new revolution plans to me. He has decided me to revolutionise the Cologne garrison!! We recently held our sides with laughter. With his stupidities he will yet get X people into trouble, for a single letter could secure the salary of a hundred demagogue judges for three years. If I had the Cologne revolution ready, he would not be disinclined to take over the direction of the further operations. Altogether too friendly!”

(From a letter from Becker to Marx of 27 January 1851.)

Saedt therefore does not confine himself to the material which led the indictment chamber to the judgment: “no objective facts of the case were present”. He goes further. He seeks to demonstrate that the law against conspiracy requires no facts of the case at all, but is a pure law of tendency, that the category of conspiracy is therefore only a pretext to burn political heretics in legal form. His attempt promised greater success through the application of the new Prussian penal code, promulgated after the arrest of the accused. Under the pretext that this code contained mitigating provisions, the servile court was able to permit its retroactive application.

But if the trial was a pure tendency trial, what was the point of the eighteen-month preliminary investigation?

419

Karl Marx

From Tendency.

Since, then, tendency is at issue, are we to discuss tendency in principle with a Saedt-Stieber-Seckendorf, with a Göbel, with a Prussian government, with the 300 highest-taxed persons of the administrative district of Cologne, with the royal chamberlain von Münch-Bellinghausen, with Baron von Fürstenberg? Pas si bête.

Saedt admits (session of 9 November): “that when, a few months ago, the task was assigned to him, namely by the Herr Chief Public Prosecutor, to represent the public prosecutor’s office with him in this matter, and when as a result he began to read through the files, he first hit upon the idea of occupying himself somewhat more closely with communism and socialism. He felt himself all the more compelled to communicate to the jurors the result of his investigations, as he believed he might proceed from the supposition that perhaps many among them, like himself, had as yet occupied themselves little with it.”

Saedt thus buys the well-known compendium by Stein.

“And what he learned today, he wants to teach tomorrow.”

But the public prosecutor’s office had a peculiar misfortune. It sought the objective facts of the case Marx, and it found the objective facts of the case Cherval. It seeks the communism that the accused propagated, and it finds the communism that they have combated.

In the compendium Stein there are indeed all sorts of varieties of communism, only not the variety that Saedt is looking for. Stein has not yet registered German, critical communism. To be sure, Saedt now has in his hands the “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, which the accused acknowledge as the manifesto of their party. In this manifesto there is, in turn, a chapter containing the critique of the whole of previous socialist and communist literature, hence of the whole wisdom registered by Stein. From this section the difference between the communist tendency of the accused and all earlier tendencies of communism must emerge, hence the specific content and the specific tendency of the doctrine against which Saedt is prosecuting. No Stein helped him over this stumbling block. Here one had to understand, if only in order to accuse. How does Saedt, abandoned by Stein, now help himself? He asserts: “the Manifesto consists of three sections. The first section contains a historical development of the social position of the various burghers (!) from the standpoint of communism (Very fine!) ... The second section develops the position of the communists towards the proletarians ... Finally, in the last section, the position of the communists in the different countries is discussed ...” (Session of 6 October.)

420

Now the Manifesto indeed consists of four sections and not of three, but what I don’t know doesn’t make me hot. Saedt therefore maintains that it consists of three sections and not of four. The section that does not exist for him is the same “accursed” section that contains the critique of the communism recorded by Stein, hence the specific tendency of the accused communism. Poor Saedt! First he lacks the facts of the case, now he lacks the tendency.

But grey, dear friend, is all theory. “The so-called social question,” remarks Saedt, “and its solution has in recent times occupied those who are called and those who are not called.” Saedt belongs in any case to the called, for Chief Public Prosecutor Seckendorf “called” him officially three months ago to the study of socialism and communism.

The Saedts of all times and all places have always agreed in declaring Galileo “uncalled” for the investigation of the celestial movement, but the inquisitor who hereticated him “called”. E pur si muove!

In the accused, the revolutionary proletariat stood weaponless before the ruling classes who were passing judgment as a jury; the accused were therefore convicted because they stood before this jury. What was able to shake the bourgeois conscience of the jurors for a moment, as it had shaken public opinion, was the exposed government intrigue, the corruption of the Prussian government, which had unrolled before their eyes. But, the jurors said to themselves, but if the Prussian government has risked such infamous and at the same time such foolhardy means against the accused, if it has, so to speak, staked its European reputation against them, then the accused, small party as much as you like, must be damned dangerous, and in any case their doctrine must be a power. The government has violated all the laws of the criminal code in order to protect us from the criminal monster. Let us, for our part, violate our little point d’honneur to save the honour of the government. Let us be grateful. Let us convict.

Rhenish nobility and Rhenish bourgeoisie joined with their “Guilty” in the cry that the French bourgeoisie let out after 2 December: “only theft can still save property, only perjury religion, only bastardry the family, only disorder order!”

The whole state edifice in France has prostituted itself. And yet no institution has prostituted itself so deeply as French courts and juries. Let us surpass the French jurors and judges, cried the jury and court in Cologne. In the Cherval trial, immediately after the coup d’état, the Paris jury had acquitted Nette, against whom there was more evidence than against any one of the accused. Let us surpass the jury of the coup d’état of 2 December. Let us retroactively convict Nette in Röser, Bürgers etc.

Thus was the superstition in the jury, which still flourished in Rhenish Prussia, broken forever. It was understood that the jury is a tribunal of the privileged classes, set up to fill the gaps in the law with the breadth of the bourgeois conscience.

Jena! ... That is the last word for a government that needs such means to exist and for a society that needs such a government for protection. That is the last word of the Cologne Communist Trial ...

Jena! |

422

Friedrich Engels
Register of the Documents Sent by Marx and Engels
to the Defence Attorneys during the Cologne Communist Trial of 1852

| 1) Gebrüder Braubach — Schneider (Original) 27 October Business-Friend
2) J. A. Boecker — Schneider (Copy) 27 October Michael Shawcross & Co
3) J. D. Herstatt — Honth[eim] — to Marx — Fisher Brothers
4) J. H. Stein — Esser I — to Marx — Business-Friend.
5) Leonh[ard] Sadée — Schneider II — to Marx — Smith (Wilson) Dryer & Co.
6) Düsseldorf house — Schn[eider] II — from London 25 October (M[ar]x on Cherval, theoretical clarification.)
7) Ebner — v. Honth[eim] — London 26 October (triplicate of Marx’s first letter to Schn[eider]) — letters from Becker and Daniels to M[ar]x, new Hirsch handwriting samples — Cherval’s declaration in the People’s Paper — original letter from Stieber to Marx.
8) G. Jung — Schn[eider] II. London 27 ? October 1) the legalised handwriting and affidavit. 2) quadruplicate of the first letter to Schn[eider] together with Hirsch samples. 3) extract from Becker’s letter to M[ar]x concerning Willich. 4) Three letters from Bermbach to M[ar]x. 5) Copy of Stieber’s letter. 6) Instruction to Schn[eider] together with notification of the dispatch of No. 9, and No. 10.
9) Schneider II, registered — duplicate of the affidavits. 28 October.
10) W[etter] in Düsseldorf — Schn[eider] II — registration slip for No. 9. 28 October. No. 3, 4 or 5: one used for Schn[eider] II, clarification concerning Reuter, Stieb[er], Dietz. 29 October
11) xxxx from B & Co — from Honth[eim] — extract from Marx’s first letter to Schn[eider]. — notification of the non-arrival of Schn[eider]’s letter.
12) G. Blank & Sohn
13) Hasselmann Schults & Co. I

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