Letter to Karl Marx, July 17, 1851

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To Karl Marx in London

... At last the newspaper subscriptions are again in order here and I have at last seen our old document in the Kölnische Zeitung. By the way the Augsburger Zeitung reports in an article entitled ‘Dresden’ by an author who seems to be usually well informed that Nothjung as a result of unfair practices during the judicial examination finally knuckled under and made very comprehensive confessions. I consider it at any rate quite possible that adroit investigators were able to corner him quickly and get him all tangled up in the craziest contradictions. A Prussian official is said to have gone there to squeeze still more out of him. The King of Hanover is said to have refused to institute prosecutions in his domains, at least in the crude manner practised in Prussia, Hamburg, etc. Miquel’s letter seems to corroborate this. As you know Martens has been arrested in Hamburg. Nothing, by the way, could show up better the stupidity of the Prussians than the domiciliary search of the house of ‘Karl on the Rhine’, who was also suspected of belonging to the Communist League and in whose possession only letters from Raveaux were found!

The old document can harm those under arrest only by the one passage about ‘excesses'; all other passages are levelled at the democrats and would aggravate the prisoners’ position only if they had to face a halfway democratic jury. But judging by appearances they will be brought before an exquisite special or confederate jury if they are brought before a jury at all. And even these things were to a large extent already used in the Burgers document that was seized at the very beginning. On the other hand it is in every other respect of enormous advantage that the thing has been published and has gone the round of the papers. The isolated groups of budding Communists, which have kept silent and are not known at all but which, in line with past experience, must have established themselves in all parts of Germany, will find it to be an excellent prop; and it can be seen even from the article in the Augsburger Zeitung that the thing has affected it in quite a different way from the first discoveries. Its summary of the contents shows that it understood that ‘piece of insanity’ only too well – in fact it could not be misunderstood.

Besides, the feudal reaction advances so recklessly and blindly that the whole scare campaign does not create the slightest impression on the bourgeoisie. It is just too funny for anything to watch the Kölnische Zeitung now preach daily that ‘the Red Sea must be crossed’ and admit all the mistakes of the Constitutionalists of 1848. And indeed, if a Kleist-Retzow is appointed Oberpräsident of Coblenz and that shameless Kreuzzeitung is becoming more and more abusive with its flat jokes and doggerel rhymes, what is the educated and sedate constitutional opposition to do? What a pity that we don’t have the Kreuzzeitung here. I manage to see various excerpts from it. The utterly vulgar, gutter-snipe, disgustingly stupid Prussian manner in which that puny sheet is now assailing the decent, well-to-do and respectable constitutional bigwigs is beyond all imagination. If fellows like Beckerath and his associates could still be credited with one ounce of self-respect and capacity for resistance they would prefer the ill-treatment and abuse of a Père Duchesne in the manner of a Rhenish dock labourer and the whole red terror to the treatment they have daily to endure now at the hands of the Junkers and the Kreuzzeitung...

But it serves those dogs right, who decried the best articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung as ‘vulgar abuse’, that the difference is now drummed into their cringing backs. They will long for the – in contrast to this – extremely Attic derision of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung...