| Category | Template | Form |
|---|---|---|
| Text | Text | Text |
| Author | Author | Author |
| Collection | Collection | Collection |
| Keywords | Keywords | Keywords |
| Subpage | Subpage | Subpage |
| Template | Form |
|---|---|
| BrowseTexts | BrowseTexts |
| BrowseAuthors | BrowseAuthors |
| BrowseLetters | BrowseLetters |
Template:GalleryAuthorsPreviewSmall
Special pages :
Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, January 16, 1852
Published in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 39, p.7
This letter was published in English for the first time, slightly abridged, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Letters to Americans. 1848-1895, International Publishers, New York, 1953.
To Weydemeyer in New York
London, January 16, 1852[edit source]
28 Dean Street, Soho
Dear Weydemeyer,
Today I got up for the first time in a fortnight. From this you will see that my indisposition—not yet wholly overcome—was a serious one. Hence, even with the best will in the world, I could not send you No. Ill of my article on Bonaparte[1] this week.
On the other hand, I enclose a poem and a private letter from Freiligrath. I now request you to do the following: 1. Have the poem printed properly with reasonable spacing between the stanzas. Do not try to save space. Poems lose a great deal if they are printed in a cramped and conglomerate fashion. 2. Write Freiligrath a friendly letter. You do not have to be too sparing with compliments, for all poets, even the best ones, are plus au moins [more or less] courtisanes and il faut les cajoler, pour les faire chanter. [one must cajole them to make them sing] Our F[reiligrath] is the most amiable, unassuming man in private life, who beneath his real bonhomie conceals un esprit tres fin et tres railleur; [an extremely keen and scornful mind] his emotion is “truthful” and does not make him “uncritical” and “superstitious.” He is a genuine revolutionary and an honest man through and through — and this can be said of few men. Nevertheless, whatever kind of homme he is, the poet needs praise and admiration. I believe that the genre itself requires this. I am telling you all this simply to point out that in your correspondence with Freiligrath, you should not forget the difference between the “poet” and the “critic.” It is, by the by, very nice of him to address his poetical letter directly to you. I think that this will be helpful to you in New York.
I do not know whether I shall manage to send you another article today. Pieper had promised me to write an article for you. Up till this moment he has not yet turned up and when he does, the article will have, to be put to the test—i.e. whether it is consigned to the flames, or is considered worthy of crossing the ocean. I am trop faible encore1 to go on writing. More today week.
Regards from my family to yours.
Lupus is still not fully recovered and hence has not yet sent anything.
Your
K. Marx
Apropos. Enclosed is yet another ‘statement’ from a member[2] of our League[3] which you should insert in your paper in small print among the advertisements or below the line. Daniels, Becker and Co. have again not been brought up before the January Assizes on the pretext that the investigation was so difficult that it must be begun all over again.[4] They have now been in jug for 9 months.
- ↑ K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, III.
- ↑ On 12 January 1852 Hirsch made a statement, but as early as February 1852 he was found to be a Prussian police spy and was expelled from the Communist League. For this reason Marx, in a letter of 20 February 1852, asked Weydemeyer not to publish Hirsch’s statement. When in the spring of 1853 Hirsch published his anti-Marx and Engels article ‘Die Opfer der Moucharderie’ in America, in an attempt to justify the splitting activity of Willich and Schapper, Cluss and Weydemeyer, in order to expose Hirsch, published his first statement in the Belletristisches Journal und Criminal-Zeitung, No. 7, 29 April 1853.
- ↑ The Communist League was the first German and international communist organisation of the proletariat formed under the leadership of Marx and Engels in London early in June 1847 as a result of the reorganisation of the League of the Just. The programme and organisational principles of the Communist League were drawn up with the personal participation of Marx and Engels. The League’s members took an active part in the bourgeois-democratic revolutions in Europe in 1848-49.
In 1849-50, after the defeat of the revolution, the Communist League was reorganised. In the summer of 1850, disagreements of principle arose in the League’s Central Authority between its majority headed by Marx and Engels and the Willich-Schapper separatist group which tried to impose on the League its adventurist tactics of immediately unleashing a revolution without taking into account the actual political situation and the practical possibilities in Germany and other European countries. After 15 September 1850 the Willich-Schapper group broke away from the League and formed an independent organisation with its own Central Authority.
Owing to police persecutions and arrests of League members in May 1851, the activities of the Communist League ceased in Germany. On 17 November 1852, soon after the Cologne Communist Trial, the London District, on a motion by Marx, declared the League dissolved. However, many of its members, particularly in Germany and America, continued to be active for a long time. - ↑ Members of the Communist League were arrested by the Prussian police in May 1851 and accused of ‘treasonable conspiracy’. The accused remained in detention for about eighteen months. Eleven Communist League members (Heinrich Bürgers, Peter Nothjung, Peter Röser, Hermann Heinrich Becker, Karl Otto, Wilhelm Reiff, Friedrich Lessner, Roland Daniels, Johann Jacob Klein, Johann Erhardt and Abraham Jacobi) were brought to trial which began in Cologne on 4 October and lasted till 12 November 1852. It was rigged by the Prussian police on the basis of fabricated documents and forged evidence which included the so-called Original Minute-book of the Communist League Central Authority meetings and documents stolen by the police from the Willich-Schapper group. The trial was accompanied by an anti-communist hue and cry in the official press of Germany and other countries. On the basis of forged documents and perjury seven of the accused were sentenced to imprisonment for terms of three to six years. Marx, Engels and their friends and associates in England, Germany and America supported the Cologne prisoners in the press and supplied counsel for the defence with documents and material exposing police fabrications. The provocative actions of the prosecution and the contemptible methods of the Prussian police state were exposed by Marx in his pamphlet Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne and by Engels in the article ‘The Late Trial at Cologne’.