Letter to Ferdinand Freiligrath, February 23, 1860

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MARX TO FERDINAND FREILIGRATH

IN LONDON

Manchester, 23 February 1860

6 Thorncliffe Grove, Oxford Road

Dear Freiligrath,

I am writing to you again and, indeed, for the last time, about the Vogt affair. You have not so much as ACKNOWLEDGED receipt of my first two communications, a courtesy you would have extended to any philistine. I cannot possibly surmise that you imagine I am trying to extort a letter from you for any public purpose. As you are aware, I possess at least 200 letters of yours, in which there is more than enough material to establish your relations with me and with the party, should it prove necessary.

I am writing to you because, as a poet and a man up to his eyes in business, you would seem to misconceive the significance of the lawsuits I am conducting in Berlin and London. They are crucial to the historical vindication of the party and its subsequent position in Germany; this applies all the more to the lawsuit in Berlin in that it is taking place at the same time as the Eichhoff-Stieber case, which turns mainly on the Cologne communist trial.²

The GRIEVANCES you may perhaps be nourishing against me are the following:

1. That I abused your name (or so you told Faucher). 2. The kind of 'scene' I made you in your OFFICE.

Re I. I personally have never mentioned your name, except for saying in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung that Blind had told you much the same as he told me. This is a FACT. From the first I realised how important it was to call attention to the real origins of the pamphlet, and I had the right to cite a witness in connection with what Blind had said.

As for Liebknecht's letter to the editor of the A. A. Z., in which he mentions your name and mine (with reference to Blind), he will, if necessary, confirm on oath that this was done without my knowledge, just as he sent the Augsb. Allg. Zeit, the pamphlet Zur Warnung without my knowledge and during my absence in Manchester. When Vogt sued the A. A. Z. and the latter turned to him [Liebknecht], he was still in doubt as to whether or not I should disavow him, as I could have done, and was in fact surprised when I immediately said I would do all I could to help him.

If—in the letter I wrote you—I took his side in the matter of your letter to him, this was simply because it seemed ungenerous, in a man of your repute and social standing, to write so harshly to an obscure party member living in a garret and one with whom you had hitherto been on friendly terms.

As regards the irritable tone of my own letter, there were various reasons for that.

Firstly, I was deeply wounded by the fact that you seemed more inclined to believe Blind than myself.

Secondly, from a letter you wrote me in a very irritable vein regarding The Morning Advertiser (Schiller Festival article) you would seem to consider me capable of the enormity, not only of surreptitiously introducing into Blind's article something injurious to yourself, but of actually denouncing this to you as Blind's handiwork. I was at a complete loss to imagine what I could have done to deserve such injurious suspicions.

Thirdly, you showed Blind a private letter I had written you. Finally, I had the right to expect—and all the more so after the Gartenlaube article, that you should include in your statement in the A. A. Z. some allusion, however faint, that would obviate any appearance of its being a personal breach with myself and a public repudiation of the party. The fact that your second statement actually appeared alongside Blind's and your name served as a screen for his lying and fraudulence could hardly be expected to delight me. Incidentally, I give you my word of honour that, prior to their publication, I had no knowledge whatsoever of any of the statements made by Liebknecht in the A. A. Z.

Re 2. The day I came to your office, the two issues of the National-Zeitung (the first contained the libellous excerpts and comments later reprinted in the Telegraph) had just reached me from Berlin. There was utter commotion at home, and my poor wife was in a truly pitiful state. At the same time, I received a letter from Germany informing me that, besides your statements published in the A. A. Z., Vogt's libellous work included a letter of yours, from which your close relationship with Vogt was all too apparent, and that, in particular, your name was the only one of any note out of which Vogt made political capital and which lent plausibility to his infamies in the eyes of the public. Imagine yourself in similar circumstances and then ask yourself whether, in your own case, spleen might not momentarily have prevailed over reason.

Let me repeat once again that this letter has nothing to do with private interests. In the London lawsuit I could have you SUBPOENAED as a witness without your prior permission. As regards the Berlin lawsuit, I am in possession of letters from you which, if required, I could place on the record. Nor do I stand alone in this matter. From every side—Belgium, Switzerland, France and England—Vogt's libellous attack has brought me unexpected allies, even from among people who belong to quite a different school of thought.

But in the first place it would anyhow be better for both parties, as for the cause, to act en entente.

In the second, I must tell you frankly that I cannot resign myself to losing, as a result of irrelevant misunderstandings, one of the few men whom I have loved as friends, in the eminent sense of the word.

If I have failed you in any way, I am at all times ready to admit to my error. Nihil humani a me alienum puto.

Finally, I understand very well that, in your present position, any affair such as the one under consideration could only be obnoxious to you.

You, for your part, will realise that it is impossible to count you out altogether.

Firstly, because Vogt is making political capital out of your name and pretending to have your approval in his indiscriminate mudslinging at a party which prides itself on counting you as one of its number.

Moreover, you happen to be the only member of the former Cologne Central Authority who, between the end of 1849 and the spring of 1851, lived in Cologne and has since that time lived in London.

Inasmuch as we have both consciously, each in his own way, out of the purest of motives and with an utter disregard for private interests, been flourishing the banner for la classe la plus laborieuse et la plus misérable high above the heads of the philistines for years now, I should regard it as a contemptible offence against history, were we to fall out over trifles, all of them attributable to misunderstandings.

In sincere friendship

Your

Karl Marx