Letter to Ernst Dronke, February 3, 1849

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Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 3 February 1849


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Source: Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 38, p. 190;
First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.
Keywords : Ernst Dronke, Frankfurt, Germany, Letter, Refugees

To Ernst Dronke in Paris

Cologne, 3 February 1849[edit source]

Dear Dronke,

Your letter, passed on to me by Engels, I shall answer briefly as follows:

1. As regards your coming here: When I wrote ‘Don’t come to Germany until I write to you’, Kratz had told me that your case was not yet quite settled.[1]

2. Later I wrote to Kapp instead of to you because Kapp was bombarding me with threatening letters. The draft I gave Kapp wasn’t honoured by Korff. In the meantime I had declared at the shareholders’ meeting that either Korff or I must resign from the paper [Neue Rheinische Zeitung]. Moreover, during this period Plasman had again sequestered the postage money, and the paper, as Engels discovered on his arrival, was expecting to announce its insolvency any day.

3. As regards the Meyerbeer business, I know nothing whatever about it. You will appreciate that in a situation in which the compositors were daily rebelling over a few talers, I would hardly have spurned 150 talers.

4. As regards my letter about Kapp, I was justified in writing it. During the most ghastly period of all, Kapp was threatening to attack us publicly. If you put yourself in our situation at that time, you will understand my vexation. As regards Weerth’s comment (which, by the by, referred not to you, but to Imandt, who was writing to us incessantly), this is the first I have heard of it.

5. As regards the 25 talers remitted on 14 January, these were dispatched to you in the presence of witnesses via Ewerbeck’s address. The Post Office here will provide information about this tomorrow. Nota bene: Kapp received 15 talers from me at the same time.

6. As regards my not answering, Lupus will testify that I wrote to you frequently.

7. If the tone of one of my letters was waspish, this was, a) because I was going through an atrociously bad patch with the paper and was under attack from all the paper’s correspondents and creditors, b) because, in a letter to Freiligrath, Imandt depicted you, Kapp, etc., as complaining bitterly about me, while the precious Beust, I think it is Beust (I am not quite sure), was sending similar letters here.

Within a few days the paper must either go under or else consolidate itself, in which case we shall immediately send you more money of which, at the moment, there is a complete lack. However the business of the 25 talers must be cleared up.

That I have constantly regarded you as co-editor of the paper is apparent not only from the new announcement in the various papers [Bestellungen auf die Neue Rheinische Zeitung für das nächste Quartal, Januar bis März 1849] but also from the fact that I placed your article about the expulsion of the Frankfurt refugee [F. Wiedecker] under ‘Cologne’. [E. Dronke, ‘Allianz der europäischen Polizei’, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 11 January 1849]

Your
Marx

[From Wilhelm Wolff]
In entire agreement with the above
Your
Lupus

  1. ↑ Threatened with arrest after the state of siege was declared in Cologne on 26 September 1848 (*), Dronke emigrated to Paris but persisted in the desire to return to Germany. He was kept in Paris only by categorical directions from Marx, who had grounds to fear he would be arrested. It was not till March 1849 that Dronke returned to Cologne and began to work on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

    Neither Marx’s previous letter to Dronke nor his other letters mentioned below have been found.
    (*) On 26 September 1848 the Prussian authorities, fearing the growing revolutionary-democratic movement, declared a state of siege in Cologne (it was lifted on 2 October). By order of the military command political organisations and associations were banned, the civic militia disbanded, democratic newspapers, including the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, suspended, and an order issued for the arrest of Engels and a few other editors. Engels and Dronke had to leave Cologne. For a time Engels lived in hiding in Barmen. On 5 October Engels and Dronke arrived in Paris after a short stay in Belgium whence they were expelled by the police. Dronke remained in the French capital and wrote to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung from there, while Engels started on foot for Switzerland via the south-west of France. About 24 October he arrived in Genoa and at the beginning of November moved to Lausanne (these facts served as a basis for establishing the date of this letter and those by Marx which followed and were not dated); Engels arrived in Neuchâtel on 7 November and in Berne on 9 November. He stayed there until mid-January 1849 when it was possible for him to return to Germany.
    Engels’ letter written to Marx from Geneva has not been found.
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