Friedrich Engels to Friedrich Graeber
Bremen, 9 December 1839 – 5 February 1840

[I] The 9 Dec.

Dearest — your letter has just arrived; it is astonishing how long one has to wait for you people. From Berlin nothing at all has been heard since your and Heuser’s letter from Elberfeld. One would be driven to become the Devil himself, were his existence proved. But you have arrived after all and that is good.

Following your example, I put off theology till the end, to crown the pyramid of my letter worthily. I am very much occupied with literary works; having received an assurance from Gutzkow that my contributions are welcome, I have sent him an essay on K. Beck, then I am composing many verses, which however are in great need of polish, and writing various prose pieces to practise my style. I wrote “A Bremen Love Story” the day before yesterday, “The Jews in Bremen” yesterday; tomorrow I intend to write “The Young Literature in Bremen”, “The Youngest” (namely office apprentice), or some other thing of that sort. In a fortnight one can easily scribble together five sheets when in a good mood, then polish the style, intersperse verses here and there for a change, and bring it out as “Bremen Evenings”. My prospective publisher came to see me yesterday; I read him “Odysseus Redivivus”, which delighted him extremely; he wants the first novel out of my factory, and yesterday insisted absolutely on having a little volume of poems. But unfortunately there are not enough ready — and the Censorship! Who would let the Odysseus through? Incidentally, I do not let the censorship deter me from writing freely; let it cross out afterwards as much as it likes, I shall commit no infanticide upon my own thoughts. Such censorship cuts are always unpleasant, but also honourable; an author who reaches thirty years or writes three books without censorship cuts is worth nothing, the scarred warriors are the best. One must be able to see from a book that it comes from a struggle with the censor. Incidentally, the Hamburg censorship is liberal; in my last telegraphic essay on the German popular books, there are several very bitter sarcasms about the Federal Diet and the Prussian censorship, but not a letter has been crossed out.

11 Dec. — O Fritz! I have not been as lazy as I am at this moment for years. Ha, a light dawns upon me: I know what’s wrong — I must visit the tertium locum. 12 Dec. What oxen — I wanted to say good people — the people of Bremen are! In the present weather all the streets are terribly slippery, and they have strewn sand in front of the Ratskeller so that the drunks do not fall.

This fellow alongside suffers from Weltschmerz;
he visited H. Heine in Paris and was infected by him;
then he went to Theodor Mundt and learned certain
phrases indispensable for Weltschmerzing. Since that
time he has become visibly thinner, and will write a
book that Weltschmerz is the only sure remedy
against corpulence. —

20 January. I did not want to write to you before my staying or leaving was decided. Now at last I can tell you that I am staying here for the time being. 21. I confess I have no great desire to continue the theological dispute. One misunderstands each other, and in replying one has long since forgotten one’s ipsissima verba, on which the matter turns, and so one arrives at nothing. A thorough discussion of things would require far more space, and it often happens to me that I can no longer subscribe to things I said in an earlier letter in the next one, because they belonged all too much to the category of representation, from which I have in the meantime freed myself. I have now, through Strauss, come on to the strict path of Hegelianism. I shall of course not become such an inveterate Hegelian as Hinrichs, etc., but I must already assimilate considerable things from this colossal system. The Hegelian idea of God has already become my own, and I am thus joining the ranks of the “modern pantheists”, as Leo and Hengstenberg say, well knowing that the very word pantheism stirs up such colossal aversion among non-thinking parsons.

Today at noon I greatly enjoyed a long sermon by the Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung against Märklin’s pietism. The good Kirchen-Zeitung finds it not only most strange that it is counted among the pietists, but it also discovers still other curious things. Modern pantheism, i.e. Hegel, leaving aside the fact that it is already found among the Chinese and the Parsees, is fully developed in the sect of the Libertines attacked by Calvin. This discovery is really altogether too original. But the execution is even more original. It is already very difficult to recognise Hegel in what the Kirchen-Zeitung gives out as his view, and this in turn has a resemblance, dragged in by the hair, to a very vaguely expressed statement of Calvin’s about the Libertines. The proof was enormously amusing. The Bremer Kirchenbote knows how to express this still better, and says that Hegel denies the truth of history! It is enormous what nonsense sometimes comes out when people labour to present a philosophy, which stands in their way and which they can no longer circumvent, as unchristian. People who know Hegel only by name, and have read of Leo’s Hegelingen only the notes, want to overthrow a system which, cast in one piece, needs no brackets to hold it up. — A conspicuous unlucky star hovers over this letter. God knows, whenever I just sit down to it, the Devil breaks loose. I keep getting office work.

These are two marionettes who, against my will, are so stiff. Otherwise they would be humans.

Have you read Strauss’s Charakteristiken und Kritiken? See that you get it; the essays in it are all excellent. The one on Schleiermacher and Daub is a masterpiece. From the essays on the Würtemberg demoniacs one can learn an enormous amount of psychology. The other theological and aesthetic essays are equally interesting. — Besides, I am studying Hegel’s Philosophy of History, an enormous work; every evening I dutifully read in it, the tremendous thoughts grip me in a frightful manner. — Recently Tholuck’s old gossip sheet, the Literarischer Anzeiger, in its fatuity, raised the question: why does “modern pantheism” have no lyric poetry, whereas the old Persian etc. does? Let the Literarischer Anzeiger just wait until I and certain other people have thoroughly penetrated this pantheism; the lyric poetry will come all right. Incidentally, it is very nice that the Literarischer Anzeiger recognises Daub and condemns speculative philosophy. As if Daub, too, had not held Hegel’s principle: that humanity and deity are identical in essence. That is the gruesome superficiality: whether Strauss and Daub are in agreement as to their basic principles, that concerns them little; but whether Strauss does not believe in the wedding at Cana, while Daub does, and accordingly one is transferred to heaven and the other designated as a candidate for hell. Oswald Marbach, the popular book editor, is the most confused of all men, especially (cum — tum) the Hegelian. How a child of Hegel can say:

Heaven is also on earth,
I clearly feel God within me become man,

is altogether incomprehensible to me, since Hegel distinguishes the totality very sharply from the imperfect individual. — Nothing has done more harm to Hegel than his disciples; only a few, like Gans, Rosenkranz, Ruge, etc., were worthy of him. But an Oswald Marbach is indeed the Non Plus Ultra of all misunderstanding men. Such a divine fellow! — Herr Pastor Mallet has declared Hegel’s system to be a “loose discourse” in the Bremer Kirchenbote. That would be a bad business, for if the blocks, these granite thoughts, were to fall apart, a single fragment of this cyclopean edifice could crush to death not only Herr Pastor Mallet but the whole of Bremen. If, for example, the thought that world history is the development of the concept of freedom fell with all its might on to the neck of a Bremen parson — how he would sigh!

1 Febr. Today, however, the letter must go, come what may.

The Russians are beginning to become naive;
they assert that the war against the Circassians
has not yet cost as many human lives as one
of Napoleon’s smaller battles. Such naivety
I would not have expected from a barbarian
like Nicholas.

The Berlin people, as I hear, are terribly furious with me. I have run down Tholuck and Neander a bit to them, and did not place Ranke among the Superi, and that has made them raving mad. Moreover, I wrote Heuser divinely crazy stuff about Beethoven. — I have read a very pretty comedy, Woe to Him Who Lies! by Grillparzer in Vienna, which is considerably above the present slovenly routine of comedy. Here and there also shines through a noble, free spirit to whom the Austrian censorship is an unbearable burden. One sees the trouble it costs him to depict an aristocratic nobleman in such a way that the noble censor finds no occasion for objection.

O Tempores, o moria, thunder and Doria, today is the fifth of February, it is disgraceful that I am so lazy, but I cannot help it; God knows, I am doing nothing now. I have several essays on hand, but they are not progressing, and when I want to write verses in the evening I have always eaten so much that I cannot keep myself from sleep. — I should greatly like to make a journey this summer, to Danish territory, Holstein, Jutland, Zealand, Rügen. I must see that my old man sends me my brother; I’ll drag him along. I have an immense longing for the sea, and what an interesting travelogue could be made of it; one could then bring it out together with a few poems. The weather is now so divine and I cannot go out; I should like to immensely; it’s a confounded nuisance. —

This is a fat sugar broker just leaving the house,
whose standing phrase is: “according to my
opinion to”. When he has spoken to someone
at the Exchange and departs, he regularly says:
“You live well!” His name is Joh. H. Bergmann.

There are touching folk here. So I shall at once sketch another life-picture for you:

This old fellow is drunk every morning, and then
steps before his door and shouts, beating his breast:
Ick bin Borger! i.e., I thank Thee, God, that I am not as
those, Hanoverians, Oldenburgers or even Frenchmen,
but a Bremer Borger, a native-born Bremer child!

The facial expression of the old women here of all classes is truly repulsive.

Especially the one on the right with the snub nose is a thoroughgoing Bremer.

The speech by Bishop Eylert at the Order Festival has an essential merit; now one knows what to think of the King, and his perjury is official. The same King who, in the year 1815, when he got frightened, promised his subjects by a cabinet order that if they would get him out of his predicament they should have a constitution, the same scurvy, dog-vile, God-forsaken King now has it proclaimed by Eylert that no one shall receive a constitution from him, because “All for one and one for all is Prussia’s principle of government,” and “No one patches an old rag on to a new garment.” Do you know why Rotteck’s fourth volume is banned in Prussia? Because it says that our majestatic snot-nose from Berlin recognised the Spanish Constitution of 1812 in 1814, and yet in 1823 sent the French into Spain to destroy this constitution and to bring back to the Spaniards the noble gift of the Inquisition and torture. In 1826 Ripoll was burnt in Valencia by order of the Inquisition, and his blood and the blood of twenty-three thousand noble Spaniards, who languished in prison on account of liberal and heretical views, weigh upon the conscience of Frederick William III, “the Just”.

I hate him, and besides him I hate perhaps only two or three others; I hate him unto death; and if I had not to despise him so much, this shit, I should hate him even more. Napoleon was an angel compared with him; the King of Hanover is a god compared with our King if he is a human being. There is no time so rich in royal crimes as the period from 1816 to 1830; almost every prince who reigned at that time deserved the death penalty. The pious Charles X, the treacherous Ferdinand VII of Spain, Francis of Austria, that machine good for nothing but signing death sentences and dreaming of Carbonari, Dom Miguel, who is a greater rascal than all the heroes of the French Revolution put together, and whom Prussia, Russia and Austria cheerfully recognised when he bathed in the blood of the best Portuguese, and the parricide Alexander of Russia, as well as his worthy brother Nicholas, whose abominable deeds it would be superfluous to waste another word on — oh I could tell you delectable stories of how fond princes are of their subjects — I expect good only from that prince against whom the buffets of his people are whizzing about his ears, and whose palace windows are shattered by the stone-throws of the revolution.

Farewell.
Thine,
Friedrich Engels.