Introduction to Sigismund Borkheim's Pamphlet, In Memory of the German Blood-and-Thunder Patriots

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The pamphlet was published on Engels' initiative as issue XXIV of The Social-Democratic Library. Even before the pamphlet appeared the second half of the introduction was published in Der Sozialdemokrat on January 15, 1888 under the heading "Was Europa bevorsteht".

Sigismund Borkheim, the author of the following pamphlet, was born in Glogau on March 29, 1825. After completing his grammar-school education in Berlin in 1844, he studied in turn in Breslau, Greifswald and Berlin. Since he was too poor to bear the costs of the one-year military service, he satisfied his obligations to the army by joining in 1847 the artillery in Glogau as a three-year volunteer. After the 1848 revolution he took part in democratic meetings and this led to his being investigated by a court martial, from which he escaped by fleeing to Berlin. Here, safe from pursuit for the moment, he remained active in the movement and played an outstanding role in the storm on the Arsenal. A further flight to Switzerland became necessary to evade the new threat of arrest arising from this. In September 1848, when Struve organised the march of his volunteer corps to the Black Forest in Baden, Borkheim joined his force, was captured and remained in gaol until the Baden Revolution of May 1849 liberated the prisoners.

Borkheim went to Karlsruhe to offer his services as a soldier to the revolution. When Johann Philipp Becker was appointed colonel in command of the entire people’s militia, he gave Borkheim the task of forming a battery for which the government initially supplied only the unharnessed guns. The horse teams had still not arrived when the movement of June 6 broke out. This was an attempt by the more resolute elements to induce the inert provisional government, which consisted in part of outright traitors, to bestir itself to greater efforts. Along with Becker, Borkheim had taken part in the demonstration whose only immediate effect, however, was that Becker, together with all his volunteers and militiamen, was sent away from Karlsruhe to join the front on the Neckar. Borkheim could not follow him with his battery until he had been provided with horses for his cannons. By the time he was finally issued with these—Herr Brentano, the head of the government, found it was very much in his interest to get rid of the revolutionary battery—the Prussians had already conquered the Palatinate and the first act of Borkheim’s battery was to take position on the Knieling Bridge and cover the withdrawal of the Palatinate army to Baden territory.

Together with the troops from the Palatinate and those from Baden still stationed around Karlsruhe, Borkheim’s battery now advanced in a northerly direction. On June 21 it saw action at Blankenloch and played an honourable part in the encounter at Ubstadt (June 25). As part of the reorganisation of the army for its new positions on the River Murg, Borkheim and his artillery were assigned to the Oborski Division and distinguished himself in the fighting around Kuppenheim.

After the withdrawal of the revolutionary army to Swiss territory, Borkheim went to Geneva. Here he found his old commander and friend, J. Ph. Becker, and some younger comrades-in-arms, and they all banded together to form as cheerful a society as possible amidst the privations of refugee life. I myself spent several enjoyable days with them when I passed through there in autumn 1849. This was the same society that under the name of the “Brimstone Gang” acquired a highly undeserved posthumous notoriety thanks to the colossal lies of Herr Karl Vogt.

However, the fun was not to last long. In the summer of 1850 the arm of the stern Federal Council reached also the harmless “Brimstone Gang”, and the majority of its happy-go-lucky members were forced to leave Switzerland, since they were among the categories of refugees to be expelled. Borkheim went to Paris and subsequently to Strasbourg. But here too his stay was cut short. In February 1851 he was arrested and taken under police escort to Calais for deportation to England. For a whole three months he was dragged from place to place, for the most part in chains, through 25 different prisons. But wherever he came, the republicans had been notified in advance, and they went out to meet the prisoner, made sure he was well-provided for, did deals with and bribed the police and officials, and provided transport whenever possible. In this way he finally arrived in England. Of course, he found the condition of the refugees in London far more wretched than in Geneva or even in France, but even here his resilience did not desert him. He looked around for work and found it at first in a Liverpool emigration firm which needed German clerks to act as interpreters for the numerous German emigrants bidding farewell to their old fatherland in which peace and quiet had at last been restored. At the same time, he looked around for other business contacts and was so successful that after the outbreak of the Crimean War, he managed to despatch a steamship laden with all sorts of goods to Balaclava and, once there, to sell the cargo at fantastic prices, partly to the army authorities and partly to the English officers. On his return he had made a net profit of £15,000 (300,000 marks). But this success only spurred him on to further speculation. He made an agreement with the English Government to arrange for a further shipment. However, since by this time peace negotiations were already underway, the government stipulated in the contract that it could refuse to take delivery of the goods if the peace preliminaries had been settled by the time they arrived. Borkheim agreed to this. When he arrived in the Bosporus with his steamship, peace was already a fact. Since the ship had only been hired for the outward voyage and since any amount of lucrative cargoes could be obtained for the return journey, the captain insisted on unloading without delay. The harbour was full to bursting point and as Borkheim was unable to find anywhere to store the cargo which was now left on his hands, the captain simply unloaded everything on the nearest beach. So Borkheim was stuck there in the middle of his useless crates and bales and barrels and had to helplessly watch his wares being plundered by the rabble that had come to the Bosporus from all corners of Turkey and the whole of Europe. When he returned to England he found himself a pauper again—the £15,000 were all gone. His irrepressible resilience, however, was still there. He had lost all his money through speculation, but had gained a knowledge of business and made contacts in the world of commerce. He now discovered that he had an extremely fine palate for wine and became a successful representative for various Bordeaux exporters.

At the same time, however, he remained as active as he could in the political movement. He had known Liebknecht from Karlsruhe and Geneva. He came into contact with Marx through the Vogt scandal and in this way I renewed my acquaintance with him. Without committing himself to any specific programme, Borkheim always sided with the most extreme revolutionary party. His principal political activity was combating the great bulwark of European reaction, Russian absolutism. So as to be better able to follow the Russian intrigues designed to subjugate the Balkans and indirectly increase its influence in Western Europe, he learnt Russian and spent many years studying the Russian daily press and émigré writings. Among other things, he translated SernoSolovyevich’s pamphlet Our Russian Affairs which denounced the hypocrisies fabricated by Herzen (and continued subsequently by Bakunin) as a result of which the Russian refugees in Western Europe propagated not the truth they knew about Russia, but a conventional legend which fitted in with their nationalist and Pan-Slavist twaddle. He also wrote many essays on Russia for the Berlin Zukunft, the Volksstaat and so on.

In the summer of 1876, while on a visit to Germany, he suffered a stroke in Badenweiler which left him paralysed to his last day on the left side of his body. He was forced to give up his business. His wife died some years later. Since he had a weak chest, he had to move to Hastings so as to enjoy the mild sea air of the South English coast. Neither paralysis, nor illness, nor his straitened and far from assured means of subsistence were able to break his irrepressible mental powers. His letters were always cheerful to the point of exuberance, and when you visited him you had to help him laugh. His favourite reading matter was the Zurich Sozialdemokrat. He died after an attack of pneumonia on December 16, 1885.

The Blood-and-Thunder Patriots appeared straight after the war against France in the Volksstaat and soon after in an off-print. It proved to be a highly effective antidote to the mood of super-patriotic intoxication which overcame and which still affects both the German authorities and the German bourgeois. And, indeed, there could have been no better aid to sobering down than to recall the time when the same Prussia which was now praised to the skies had collapsed ignominiously before the onslaught of the same Frenchmen who were now being derided as the vanquished foe. And the medicine had to be all the more effective since the facts it recounted were drawn from a book in which a Prussian general, who was moreover the director of the general Academy of War, had used official Prussian documents to portray the moment of humiliation—and it should be admitted, in an impartial and dispassionate manner. Like any other large social organisation, a great army is never better than when it turns in upon itself after a major defeat and does penance for its past sins. This was the fate of the Prussians after Jena, and again after 1850. In the latter case, even though they had not suffered a major defeat, their total military decline became palpably clear both to themselves and to the whole world in a series of minor campaigns—in Denmark and South Germany—and in the first large-scale mobilisation of 1850, when they only averted a real defeat by the political humiliations of Warsaw and Olmütz. They were forced to subject their own past to ruthless criticism in order to learn how to repair the damage. Their military literature, which in Clausewitz had brought forth a star of the first magnitude, but which had since sunk to unbelievable depths, arose once more under the necessity for this self-examination. And one of the fruits of this self-examination was Höpfner’s book from which Borkheim culled the material for his pamphlet.

Even today it will be essential to recall again and again that age of arrogance and defeat, of the incapacity of the monarch, of the naive cunning of the Prussian diplomats ensnared in their own double-dealing, of the aristocratic officer-class whose loudmouthed swaggering outlived their cowardly betrayals, and of the total collapse of a state-authority estranged from the people and based on lies and deception. The German philistine (and that includes the nobility and the princes) is, if possible, even more conceited and chauvinistic than he was then; diplomatic practice has become significantly more insolent, but it is as two-faced as ever; the aristocratic officer-class has grown sufficiently, both by natural and by artificial means, to enable it more or less to regain its old control over the army; the state is becoming more and more estranged from the masses of the people and is now well on the way to transforming itself into a consortium of landowners, stockbrokers and big industrialists for the exploitation of the people. True enough, if another war breaks out the PrussianGerman army will have significant advantages over its opponents as well as its allies, if only because it was the model they all imitated. But these advantages will never again be as great as in the last two wars. The unity of the supreme command, for example, such as existed then, thanks to particularly fortunate circumstances, and the corresponding unconditional obedience of the lower echelons, is unlikely to recur in the same way. The business clique which now occupies a dominant position between the agrarian and military nobility—right up to the Emperor’s entourage—and the stockjobbers, can easily prove fatal for the provision of the army in the field. Germany will have allies, but it will leave them in the lurch, and they Germany, at the first opportunity. And, finally, the only war left for Prussia-Germany to wage will be a world war, a world war, moreover, of an extent and violence hitherto unimagined. Eight to ten million soldiers will be at each other’s throats and in the process they will strip Europe barer than a swarm of locusts. The depredations of the Thirty Years’ War compressed into three to four years and extended over the entire continent; famine, disease, the universal lapse into barbarism, both of the armies and the people, in the wake of acute misery; irretrievable dislocation of our artificial system of trade, industry and credit, ending in universal bankruptcy; collapse of the old states and their conventional political wisdom to the point where crowns will roll into the gutters by the dozen, and no one will be around to pick them up; the absolute impossibility of foreseeing how it will all end and who will emerge as victor from the battle. Only one consequence is absolutely certain: universal exhaustion and the creation of the conditions for the ultimate victory of the working class.

That is the prospect for the moment when the systematic development of mutual oneupmanship in armaments reaches its climax and finally brings forth its inevitable fruits. This is the pass, my worthy princes and statesmen, to which you in your wisdom have brought our ancient Europe. And when no alternative is left to you but to strike up the last dance of war—that will be no skin off our noses. The war may push us into the background for a while, it may wrest many a conquered base from our hands. But once you have unleashed the forces you will be unable to restrain, things can take their course: by the end of the tragedy you will be ruined and the victory of the proletariat will either have already been achieved or else inevitable.

London, December 15, 1887

Frederick Engels