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Letter to Karl Marx, December 28, 1848
First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.
To Marx in Cologne
Berne, 28 December 1848[edit source]
Dear Marx,
How are things? Now that Gottschalk and Anneke have been acquitted,[1] shan’t I be able to come back soon? The Prussian curs must surely soon tire of meddling with juries. As I have said, if there are sufficient grounds for believing that I shall not be detained for questioning, I shall come at once. After that they may, so far as I'm concerned, place me before 10,000 juries, but when you're arrested for questioning you're not allowed to smoke, and I won’t let myself in for that.
In any case the whole September affair[2] is crumbling away to nothing. One after another they're going back. So write.
Apropos, some money would come in very handy towards the middle of January. By then you should receive plenty.
Your
E.
- ↑ The arrest of Andreas Gottschalk and Friedrich Anneke, the leaders of the Cologne Workers’ Association, on 3 July 1848 was the subject of Marx’s article ‘Arrests’ which served as a pretext for accusing Marx and other editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of insulting the Public Prosecutor and libelling police officers. On 23 December 1848, Gottschalk and Anneke were acquitted by a Cologne jury.
At the beginning of October 1848 the Cologne Public Prosecutor started an investigation against Marx and other newspaper editors for publishing anonymously Georg Weerth’s series of feuilletons Leben und Taten des berühmten Ritters Schnapphanski. At the end of October 1848 the Cologne Public Prosecutor began another investigation against Marx as the newspaper’s editor-in-chief for publishing the proclamation of the republican Friedrich Hecker. The ‘insult’ to the Public Prosecutor and ‘libel’ against the police officers contained in the article ‘Arrests’ were the main accusations levelled at Marx arid Engels at the trial held on 7 February 1849. The jury acquitted them. - ↑ The reference is to the state of siege declared in Cologne on 26 September 1848 and the persecution of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung editors, Engels among them (*). On 3 October, though the state of siege had been lifted, the Public Prosecutor issued a warrant for Engels’ arrest. Engels was able to return to Cologne only in mid-January 1849.
(*) 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 Geneva 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.