Karl Marx 
Public Feeling in Berlin 

New-York Daily Tribune. 
Nr.5932, 28.April 1860 

Public Feeling in Berlin. 

From Our Own Correspondent. 
Berlin, April 10, 1860. 

If an intelligent foreigner who had visited Berlin but two months ago and 
then left it were now to return to the "metropolis of intelligence," the 
thorough change in the physiognomy, tone and temper, "meiner lieben 
Berliner" (of my beloved Berliners), could not fail to strike his mental eye. 
Still, some months ago small talk obtained in all the ranks of the metropolitan 
society. People congratulated each other, in subdued accents, on the night- 
mare of a decennial reaction having at last ceased to crush their brains—that 
the worst was over. This silly theme was sounded to all keys, with the 
unavoidable afterthought that the change had been brought about not by any 
vigorous and healthy effort on the part of the Prussian subjects, but rather 
by the sickly affection of the Prussian king's head; that the change was 
therefore the work of nature, not the deed of man. This uncomfortable 
afterthought falsified even the first joys of the new era triumphantly an- 
nounced by the dully-deadly pens of the Berlin daily press. Such was the 
pusülanimity prevailing that, not to frighten the Prince Regent out of his 
new-fangled liberalism, all the candidates in the general election to the 
Second Chamber were put to this simple test: Did they profess confidence 
in the Hohenzollern Cabinet installed by the Prince Regent? Were their 
names in no way obnoxious to the mild liberalism of the new Government? 
Instead of men to take up the grievances of the country, there were wanted 
bottle-holders with ready-cut votes for the Cabinet. That the new Cabinet 
actually did not touch the bureaucratic and police shackles forged by its 
predecessors, while its very professions of faith were characterized by weak 

Public Feeling in Berlin 

duplicity, shy reserve, and equivocal reticence—these facts were hood- 
winked; and it was furthermore proclaimed a patriotic duty to hoodwink 
them. All the opposition papers, whether styling themselves Constitutional 
or Democratic, turned downright Ministerial. After the peace of Villafranca, 
when Herr von Schleinitz, the Prussian Minister of Foreign Affairs, pub- 
lished a sort of Blue Book on the Italian war—when his dispatches, true 
patterns of weak-minded verbosity, showed him up the worthy successor 
of the men who, in the last century, had concluded the peace of Basle, and 
in this century, had prepared the catastrophe of Jena—when we saw him 
humbly receiving lessons of constitutionalism on the part of Little Johnny, 
the British Jack-of-all-Trades, crouching in the dust before Prince Gorcha- 
koff, exchanging billets-doux with the Man of December, superciliously 
frowning upon his Austrian colleague, to be finally kicked by all his cor- 
respondents—even then the Prussian press and our Berlin Liberals worked 
themselves into real fits of enthusiasm with respect to the superhuman 
wisdom evinced by the Prussian Government, which, not content with doing 
nothing itself, had contrived to preclude Germany from all action. Soon after 
there took place at Breslau a meeting between the Russian Czar and Gor- 
chakoff on the one side, and the Prince Regent with his Ministerial satellites 
on the other. A new deed of enfeoffment of Prussia to her Muscovite neigh- 
bor was duly signed—the first, but necessary result this of the peace of 
Villafranca. Even in 1844 such an event would have aroused a storm of 
opposition throughout the country. Now it was extolled as an earnest of 
far-seeing statecraft. The nihilism of the Prince Regent's Foreign Policy 
coupled with the continuance of the old reactionary system of mingled 
feudalism and bureaucratism, which was forsaken in name only, seemed to 
our friends, the Berlin Liberals, and the Prussian press of all colors, save 
the special organs of the old Camarilla, sufficient reasons to claim the 
imperial crown of little Germany (that is to say, Germany minus German 
Austria), for the representative of the Prussian dynasty. Itis difficult to find 
in the records of history a similar piece of judicial blindness, but we re- 
member that after the battle of Austerlitz, Prussia also crowed for some days 
on her own dunghill, quasire bene gesta. After the termination of the Italian 
war, it was a spectacle as pitiful as it was disgusting to hear the Prussian press, 
with the Berhn papers at its head, instead of venturing upon the faintest 
criticism of the stupid diplomacy of her native rulers; instead of boldly 
challenging the "liberal" Ministry to bridge at last, in internal affairs, the 
broad chasm between the nominal and the real; instead of denouncing the 
silent but obstinate encroachments on civil liberty dared upon by the host 
of Manteuffel's officials, still snugly ensconced in their old strongholds; 
instead of all that, to hear them sing panegyrics on the splendor of renovated 

Karl Marx 

Prussia; to see them dart their pointless shafts at humbled Austria; to see 
them stretch their unnerved hands at the German Imperial crown, and, to 
the utter astonishment of all Europe, demean themselves like maniacs in a 
fool's paradise. Altogether, it seemed as if the great international dramanow 
enacted on the European stage, did only concern our Berlin friends as 
spectators who, from the gallery or pit, have to applaud or hoot, but not to 
act. 

All this has been changed now as by a magician's wand. Berlin is at this 
moment, with the exception perhaps of Palermo and Vienna, the most revolu- 
tionary town in Europe. The fermentation pervades all ranks, and seems 
more intense than in the days of March, 1848. How has this phenomenon 
been brought about, and so suddenly, too? By a combination of events at 
the top of which range Louis Bonaparte's last exploits on the one hand, and 
the new army reforms proposed by the liberal Government on the other. 
Then, of course, the state of confidence and of willful self-delusion could 
not last forever. The incidents, furthermore, by which the Ministry has been 
forced to dismiss Stieber, the Police Director, the low criminal, who, together 
with his master, the late Hinkeldey, had swayed supreme power in Prussia 
ever since 1852; and last not least, the publication of Humboldt's cor- 
respondence with Varnhagen von Ense have done the rest. The fool's para- 
dise has vanished before the breath from beyond the grave. 

IF 

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