Letter to Heinrich Heine, Beginning of April 1846

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To Heinrich Heine in Paris

This letter has no date. The approximate time of its writing was established on the basis of a letter written to Marx on 8 May 1846 by P. V. Annenkov (see ,MEGA2, Abt. III, Bd. 2, S. 187) who had brought this particular letter from Brussels to Paris. Annenkov wrote that he had already been in Paris over a month.

This letter was first published in English in full in The Letters of Karl Marx, selected and translated with explanatory notes and an introduction by Saul K. Padover, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliff, New Jersey, 1979.

Brussels, rue de I'Alliance, 5, hors de la porte de Louvain

My dear Heine,

I am taking advantage of the passage through here of Mr Annenkov, a most engaging and cultured Russian and the bearer of this note, to convey my kindest regards to you.

A few days ago a short lampoon against you happened to fall into my hands — posthumous letters of Börne’s. [L. Börne, Urtheil über H. Heine. Ungedruckte Stellen aus den Pariser Briefen with passages from Börne’s letters to Jeannette Wohl with attacks on Heine] I should never have held him to be so dull, petty and inept as he here reads in black and white. And what miserable rubbish, too, the addendum by Gutzkow, etc. I shall be writing a detailed review of your book on Börne [Heinrich Heine über Ludwig Börne. Hamburg, 1840] for a German periodical. A more clumsy treatment than that suffered by this book at the hands of these Christian-Teutonic jackasses would be hard to find in any period of literature, and yet there’s no lack of clumsiness in Germany of whatever period.

If perchance you should have anything ‘special’ to tell me about your piece, do so quickly.

Yours
K. Marx