On the other hand, Adelbert von Bornstedt, the editor of the German paper in Brussels, believed that immediate action would result in a socialist society. Georg Herwegh, one of the oddest figures in the German left movement of the time, had the same idea. A few words need to be said about him.
Herwegh, a year older than Marx, had had early success as a poet, and just as early on had been forced to flee to Switzerland to escape charges of rebellious thinking and actions. He had his first contact with Marx as a contributor to Rheinische Zeitung, and Marx thought highly of him at the beginning. But Herwegh was open to many kinds of influences; the Russian anarchist Bakunin soon became one of his teachers. The idea of quick, resolute rebellious actions took root in his world of ideas.
When the March Revolution broke out, he did not hesitate to join, placing himself at the head of a popular but militarily unschooled army that consisted largely of people who had lost their jobs during the crisis. It was not difficult to predict that the adventure would end in complete defeat. ‘The German Democratic Legion’ lost its first and only battle against career soldiers from Württemberg. The Legion dispersed, Herwegh sought refuge in Switzerland, having had enough of military adventures. But he did not lose his ability to move along the outer edges of this innovative history. He became friends with a number of the great minds of the century: Herzen and Turgenev the writers, Wagner the composer, and Semper the architect. Later, he would play a role in the prehistory of the German Social Democratic Party. The whole time, he continued to write his sometimes inflammatory, sometimes bombastic poems and songs. The most known of them was Das Bundeslied, the Song of the League, which was quickly banned but still became one of the central songs of the German workers’ movement.44
Von Bornstedt, his closest friend in the popular campaign, was not as lucky. He ended up in prison, and despite soon being released, never recovered and died in 1851.
Marx did not expose himself to these kinds of dangers. It was not with firearms that this desk-bound family man fought, but with words. True to habit, he devoted himself to organizational work as soon as he got to Paris. With him, the Communist League established its new centre there, and he also started a German Workers’ Club.
During the month of March, the revolution spread to both Vienna and Budapest. On 18 March, barricades were raised in Berlin. Marx was convinced that central Europe was faced with its delayed bourgeois revolution. Together with Engels, he wrote a text titled ‘Demands of the Communist Party in Germany’. The idea was that the communists would also make themselves heard among the various tendencies fighting for democracy. Many of the demands agree with those imposed by other revolutionaries. Germany would be a united republic, universal suffrage would be introduced, a popular army would replace the career armies, elected representatives would receive fair pay and legal aid would be free of charge. Other demands were more far-reaching: the banks and transport system should be nationalized, and the right of inheritance limited. (Still only limited – it was Engels’s, not Marx’s, line that was victorious.) The list of demands was disseminated as a flyer and also printed in several German newspapers.45
But Marx was still trying to influence the Germans from afar. It would not long remain so. At the end of March, he received a letter from his good friend Weerth that encouraged him to leave for Cologne. A new newspaper was in the offing there, and Marx would be crucial to its fate. Communists were unpopular in the Rhineland, Weerth explained.46
He neglected to mention that their enemies were found not only among conservatives and cautious liberals. There were many adherents of the ‘true socialists’, whom Marx and Engels had so vehemently fought against, especially among journeymen, workers, and others far down on the social ladder. They did not want to hear about the detour through bourgeois democracy that Marx recommended. The goal – a society without poverty and injustice – lay within reach for those who dared.
The leader in this opinion was Andreas Gottschalk, a butcher’s son from Düsseldorf who had the opportunity to pursue academic studies in both classic philology and medicine. He became a doctor, and like many other radical young Germans became a government doctor with great insight into destitution and human suffering. In the Rheinische Zeitung period, he found himself on the periphery of the editorial staff. It was not Marx, however, but Moses Hess who made the strongest impression on him. In Gottschalk’s eyes, Marx was a ‘learned sun god’ who devoted ‘only a scientific, doctrinaire interest to the misery of the workers and the hunger of the poor’.47 A sun god is elevated over everything earthly. Like Amon-Ra or Phoebus Apollo, he watches the strivings of humanity from a distance.
Gottschalk had been very successful in organizing workers and journeymen in Cologne. It was ‘true socialism’, not communism, that stood out as the radical popular opposition there. Weerth was convinced that Marx could change the situation, not only for the sake of communism but for the revolution.
Marx did not require a great deal of pressing. He and Engels soon set off across the border. By 11 April, they were in Cologne. Preparations for the new publication were in full swing. Once Marx was on site, he naturally took over the leadership. There were still many in the region – even some bourgeois – who remembered his contributions to Rheinische Zeitung a few years earlier with delight. The new newspaper now being founded was naturally named Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
Funding was, of course, a constant problem. Engels took a trip to his hometown to get moneyed families to contribute, but it was in vain. There was not much coming in from Cologne or its neighbouring cities, either. But Marx as editor-in-chief received a decent salary – the best he would ever get. It was not certain that the entire amount could be paid out each month, but it was enough for the family to reasonably get by. During their time in Cologne, the worst financial problems were lifted from Karl’s – and especially Jenny’s – shoulders (it was she, not he, who managed the family’s finances).
Marx would soon also create an alternative organization to Gottschalk’s great Kölner Arbeiterverein. It would be called the Demokratische Gesellschaft and following Marx, would be a coalition among various democratic forces, not just those furthest to the left. There was no direct conflict between the two associations. Quite the opposite: even though differences of opinion remained, they would ultimately unite.
But now we are hurrying ahead of events. The most important thing for Marx was the newspaper. Like Engels, he began feverish journalistic activity as soon as Neue Rheinische Zeitung started publication. Engels primarily monitored events in other quarters of Europe, while Marx preferred to keep to the political problems of the revolution in the German states.
The Impotence of Parliament and Freedom of the Press
The revolutionaries had succeeded in winning a relatively far-reaching freedom of the press, which Marx – true to habit – would make use of to its breaking point. Equally as important was the German parliament – the Nationalversammlung – that began meeting in May, in Frankfurt am Main. There, 809 members representing the various states – and ideally, the various classes as well – met. But not much would come of it later. The great majority of the representatives were drawn from the growing layer of the population that would distinguish Germany over the course of the nineteenth century: its large and influential educated middle class, the Bildungsbürgertum. Ninety-five percent of the members had high school degrees, and more than two-thirds had taken an academic degree. Of these, more than half were lawyers. A striking number were state employees: judges, professors, and the like. A satirical poem that spread in radical circles ran: ‘Three times one hundred lawyers – O Fatherland, you have been betrayed / Three times one hundred professors – O Fatherland, you are lost.’48
The chief task of the parliament was to create a constitution; the country was not only to become a political unit, but a constitutional monarchy as well. But the work was strenuous and the demands many. However sociologically homogeneous the members were, they represented opinions ran
ging from the conservative right to the radical left. The biggest problem was the assembly’s own status. It was unclear how it stood legally in relation to kings, princes, and governments, as well as to the individual states they represented. The more radical members recommended a truly revolutionary solution: they should simply seize power and push through the new constitution on their own. But a more cautious majority recommended an agreement with the powers already established.
This idea of a possible, peaceful, and successful compromise was sometimes called die Vereinbarungstheorie – a hope that it would be possible to bring the desires of the assembly into line with those of the traditional powers. In Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the idea became the subject of a sweeping polemic.
Other important issues also had to be dealt with. The biggest one, after the constitution, concerned which previous states would be incorporated into the new German community. Two solutions crystallized. In one – the ‘greater German’ solution – the entire Habsburg empire would become part of the new Germany. (There was also a somewhat more modest variant of this, in which only those parts of the Habsburg empire where German was the predominant language would be incorporated, and Hungary and the Slavic parts would be left out.) The ‘lesser German’ solution involved Prussia and the other states in the central, northern, and western parts constituting Germany, while the large Austrian kingdom in the southeast would continue on its own way.
The National Assembly did not come to a decision, and none would come until 1871 when Berlin then became the capital under Wilhelm I, the Kaiser of the German Reich. The lesser German proposal was victorious. The dream of a greater Germany did not die, however – Adolf Hitler was pursuing it when he first annexed Austria, and then the Sudetenland. But the history of greater Germany, as we know, was a brief one.
The Neue Rheinische Zeitung began publication on 1 June 1848 (the first issue actually came out the day before). The editor-in-chief had a staff that was close to him personally: not only Engels, but also Georg Weerth, Heinrich Bürgers, Wilhelm Wolff, and a few others. There was no risk that the newspaper would speak with a forked tongue.
Marx edited his staff with a heavy hand, but the corrections concerned form and not content. In the second issue of the newspaper, he thoroughly remoulded an article on ‘The Democratic Party’ that Bürgers had written.49 Neue Rheinische Zeitung counted itself among the democratic camp; the slogan under its masthead was ‘Organ der Demokratie’ (Organ of Democracy). But the article described how the victorious democrats had been cheated by the bourgeoisie, who created an undemocratic electoral law, thereby thwarting the radical opposition in the National Assembly. It was becoming clear how difficult it would be to create the great democratic coalition Marx had dreamed of.
In the beginning, Engels wrote the most articles about the hardships of the National Assembly, while Marx attacked those who attempted to reconcile the monarchy’s claims to power with the actions of the new parliament. Ludolf Camphausen was the Minister-President after the March Revolution, and as such had a delicate role to play. He was a well-known figure in Cologne, one of the city’s great tradesmen and bankers. He was indeed a bourgeois in the style of the new era, and invested significant capital into railroads and steamer traffic. As a politician, he hoped that the royal power and the National Assembly could unite over a constitution that gave the parliament decisive power. Marx found fault with such naiveté and compared German developments with those of France in 1789. The revolutionaries should not be satisfied with tranquil reforms, he pointed out. He was neither surprised nor saddened when Camphausen had to leave his post.50 But it was no better with new Minister-Presidents; if anything, they grew ever closer to royal power and the state bureaucracy. Marx had his eye in particular on David Hansemann, minister of finance under Camphausen and then in several other governments. For Hansemann, Marx quoted Heine: ‘Der Henker steht vor der Türe’ (The hangman stands at the door). Hansemann’s proposals for press laws would mean that Prussian civil servants could sleep soundly in future. Slander of state servants would be especially punishable.51
In another article, the author makes an assault on the press laws Hansemann wanted to implement. A quote from Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte’s The Marriage of Figaro (‘If you are after the amusement…’) garnishes an article concerning Marx’s friend in London, Carl Schapper. Schapper had returned to Germany after the March revolution and placed his energies at the service of the newspaper, but he was now being threatened with deportation with the curious justification that he was not German.52
Marx described a development further and further from the original ideals of the March Revolution in the appointment of the minister Pfuel. Ernst Heinrich Adolf Pfuel was a sixty-nine-year-old Prussian general, and the monarchy’s – not parliament’s – man. Speaking about him, Marx quoted Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry IV: ‘Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to the vice of lying!’ It could not get worse. ‘The Pfuel Government can only be followed by a Government of Revolution.’53
But it did. When Pfuel resigned in November 1848, he was succeeded by another general: Friedrich Wilhelm, Graf von Brandenburg. It was not possible to get any closer to the king himself, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, than that. Brandenburg was the son of Friedrich Wilhelm II from a morganatic marriage, and thus Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s own uncle.
Marx hailed the new government with a bitter article titled ‘Counter-Revolution in Berlin’. Everything that had been achieved now lay devastated. Those who stood behind Brandenburg had hoped to share the plunder, but they would only get gratuities – and blows. The liberal bourgeoisie would gladly have changed the feudal monarchy into a bourgeois one, but they did not succeed. Brandenburg answered their half-revolution with a counterrevolution. Marx now encouraged everyone who continued to hold fast to the demands for democracy to refuse to pay taxes.54
With the Brandenburg government, Prussia would take an unsympathetic – in fact hostile – attitude towards the National Assembly in Frankfurt. It refused the demands for German political unity, free and general elections, and extensive freedom of the press. The revolution was thus unmade, and the situation that prevailed in the German states before March 1848, with Prussia at their head, would be recreated.
Neue Rheinische Zeitung now became increasingly militant. On 15 November 1848, Marx published a special edition of the newspaper with a fiery article in which Brandenburg, in bold text, was charged with high treason for ignoring the National Assembly. The call to evade taxes was repeated. It was a matter of starving the enemy out. Citizens were encouraged instead to send money to a committee in Berlin that was working for democracy.55
The highest Prussian power in the Rhine province, Franz August Eichmann, issued a formal prohibition on tax evasion. Marx fearlessly responded that Eichmann was merely the henchman of the Brandenburg government, and the charge of high treason therefore also applied to him.
But Eichmann received support from a completely different direction. In the official newspaper, Preussischer Staats-Anzeiger, eighty professors from Berlin and Halle objected to the call for tax evasion. Among the signatories were big names such as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the linguistic researchers and fairy tale collectors, and August Boeckh, the great specialist of antiquity. But Neue Rheinische Zeitung was not impressed. In an article that – judging by the style – Marx himself wrote, these learned men were castigated as men with the nature of lackeys, more subservient than Russia’s serfs and worshipers of the Dalai Lama. But how could they behave otherwise? Without taxes, ‘the privileged erudition’ would go bankrupt.56
Marx acted with the conviction of being completely right in relation to the Prussian powers. In his opinion, the March Revolution opened up the way for a democratic society in which the lords in Berlin had to be pushed aside. He saw, of course, that most revolutionaries were more cautious in their claims. But again, he supported himself with a historic example that lay near at hand: the French Revolution of 1789. Then, the revolutionaries did
not seek to reconcile parliament and royal power; royal power had to yield. The German revolution risked becoming ‘a parody’ of the great French example, Marx said.57
The error lay in the idea that it could be possible to unite the claims of royal power and the central bureaucracy with the National Assembly’s demand for the people’s decisive influence. This Vereinbarungstheorie seemed absurd and repellent to Marx.
It is doubtful whether he knew that to the north, Sweden had established in its 1809 constitution that the king would ‘rule the kingdom alone’ and that ‘all power emanates from the people’ at the same time. This peculiarity gave rise to confusion – and even recurring crises – over a long period, but under this arrangement Sweden could nonetheless ultimately develop into a political democracy that lasted until 1974, when the country got a new, less contradictory, constitution.
Marx did not like such compromises, and he was convinced that the revolutionaries in Germany had to take all power in order to create a new society, as they once did in France. In an imposing series of articles on the crisis and counterrevolution, he maintained that it was impossible to treat the crown and the constituent assembly as parties with equal rights. The result would inevitably be that the revolutionaries lose the initiative to their opponents. It was the people who, through their representatives, would create the new order. They had to appropriate all political power. For the first time, the word ‘dictatorship’ appears in Marx’s vocabulary. Here, as later, he used it in the Roman sense, which was the only meaning it had at the time. The Roman Senate could elect a dictator when the country was in danger. The appointment only lasted six months. Only with Julius Caesar did this system change, when Caesar made himself dictator for life.
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