5. Prospectus for the Founding of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung
A new spirit has broken through in Germany. It has overthrown the old regime, it has doomed the old world to destruction. It demands a new society, a new life.
It is the spirit of the people. The people has taken sovereign power, the people that does not want any division, any class rule, which regards its component parts as co-operating members of one great body. It is its will that is to guide its life, regulate its work, create its well-being.
The first task for this will is to create the forms in which it can deploy its strength safe from oppression or falsification. These are the forms of democracy. Already the people is preparing to elect a double representation[3] from which it expects the establishment of its rights, the division of the state powers and the guarantee of order, in short, a new Constitution.
This is great, difficult work, even though only preparatory. The overthrown power will resist it, personal interest will not voluntarily submit to the demands of the whole. Democracy must stand its ground in the struggle against both these enemies of an order which serves the will of the whole, and whose purpose is the good of the whole: it will have on its side the experience of the past and the needs of the present.
The immediate aim of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung is to co-operate vigorously in this immediate public work. For the time being its chief task will be a thorough examination of the questions which relate to the constitution of Germany and Prussia in conjunction with the same or similar questions which occupy people abroad. It will not close its columns to any tendencies except those stemming from
A reference to the election of the Prussian and the German National Assemblies.— Ed.
absolutism or particular interests, it will not represent any particular party within the democracy, it will not proceed according to any preconceived theory and will not prematurely reject any view, even if it has not yet found general sympathy.
But if the political formation of the fatherland is the most immediate of the great tasks which the German nation is determined to solve, it is by no means the greatest and by far not the most difficult task. Political democracy is merely the means to achieve thoroughgoing changes in civil society. All wishes, all demands are directed to this end. The worst sufferings of unemployment, of deprivation, of misery weigh on the great majority of the nation, in particular the working class. The general demand, the general longing is to abolish a condition in which the existence of the whole is dependent on the carelessness of the governing, on the accidental insight or short-sighted egoism of private individuals, a condition which indeed still lacks guiding principles and general institutions, without which there can be no free activity, no security of earning a living, no true enjoyment of life. Everywhere, in agriculture, in industry, in commerce, in education etc., there is a recognised need for the most important reforms. The nation demands a free, happy life in free, happy work.
Between the will and the deed, between decision and execution, there is, however, a great distance, a hard road. Difficulties of every kind stand in the way. Not only malevolence, but incompetence, even more, will have to be ' overcome. Here every ounce of energy is required to overcome ignorance, narrow-minded particularism, and monopolistic aspirations; it is necessary to subordinate the conflicting interests, due to occupation and locality, to a common order which establishes and maintains the well-being of the whole, to organise work, intercourse and consumption according to the conditions of life of a great nation which strives to promote the well-being of the whole and of every individual not by war and exploitation but by peaceful exchange and united co-operation.
It is in this field, however, that the least thorough preparations have been made; here, where the need became general before the insight did, it is above all the press which is qualified to bring the existing circumstances to public notice, to examine the conditions for change, to discuss the means of reform, to help educate public opinion, to give a salutary direction to the will of the whole. This, then, is also the task of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, on which it will con-centrate its efforts more and more, in the measure in which political discussions retreat into the background.
No special justification is needed for the choice of the city of Cologne as the seat of such an enterprise. Cologne, the capital of the Rhine Province, the capital of all West Germany, as perhaps no other place in Germany, offers a suitable locality and the resources required for the publication of a great newspaper. Cologne can also confidently look forward to any change in the conditions of work and intercourse which is at the same time an improvement, and apart from the patriotism of its inhabitants, their local interest alone would make them sympathetic towards any reforms contributing to the well-being of the nation.
While, therefore, the prospects for the success of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung can in every respect be said to be most favourable, there arises the question of the financial resources which must be raised to cover the costs in the initial period, so long as the number of subscribers and advertisements have not yet made the enterprise secure. For this purpose a capital of 30,000 talers is required, half of which is to be regarded as a reserve fund. This capital is to be raised through a limited joint-stock company.
It will be divided into 600 shares of fifty talers each, and the payment will be in such instalments as to enable the less affluent also to promote the enterprise by their participation.
Lists for the subscription of shares are open at: Herr W. Clouth, at St. Agatha No. 12
Wolff & Kapferer, Hochstrasse No. 55 Max Kemmerich, St. Katharinen 2 B Esch & Henn, Kleine Sandkaul No. 1. Please send applications from outside Cologne to: Dr. Daniels, Mittelstrasse No. 2, Cologne, April 1848. By "provisional agreement" of the first shareholders, the following conditions have been added to those announced above:
1) As soon as 200 shares are subscribed, a general meeting of shareholders will be called to agree upon the Rules of the company. The latter thereupon comes into operation.
2) The management of the editorial office and the engagement of contributors and correspondents will be the responsibility of Herr Heinrich Bürgers.
Written by Heinrich Bürgers in April 1848
Endnotes
[3] At the end of 1848 or the beginning of 184-9 an abridged version of the "Demands" was published in pamphlet form by Weiler Publishers in Leipzig. The slogan at the beginning of the document, the second paragraph of point 9 and the last sentence of point 10 were omitted, and the words "The Committee" were not included among the signatories. In 1853, an abridged version of the "Demands" was printed, together with other documents of the Communist League, in the first part of the book Die Communisten-Ver schworungen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, published in Berlin for purposes of information by Wermuth and Stieber, two police officials, who staged a trial against the Communists in Cologne in 1852. Later Engels reproduced the main points of the "Demands" in his essay On the History of the Communist League, published in November 1885 in the newspaper Sozialdemokrat, and as an introduction to the pamphlet: K. Marx, Enthüllungen über den Kommunisten Prozess zu Köln, Hottingen-Zürich, 1885. English translations of the "Demands of the Communist Party in Germany" appeared in the collections: The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with an introduction and explanatory notes by D. Ryazanoff, Martin Lawrence, London (1930); K. Marx, Selected Works, Vol. II, ed. V. Adoratsky, Moscow-Leningrad, Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR (1936); ibid., New York (1936); Birth of the Communist Manifesto, edited and annotated, with an Introduction by D. J. Struik, International Publishers, New York, 1971, and in other publications. The letter to the editor of the Populaire and the Declaration are in Engels' handwriting. Both documents were drawn up at the end of March 1848 after Engels' arrival in Paris and reflect the struggle which the leaders of the Communist League were waging against those German petty-bourgeois emigrant leaders in Paris, Herwegh and Bornstedt among others, who intended to speed up revolution in Germany by moving in a volunteer legion organised by using private donations and subsidies from the Provisional Government of the French Republic. Appeals to enlist were accompanied by demagogic appeals to the patriotic and revolutionary sentiments of German emigrants. Marx, Engels and other members of the Central Authority of the Communist League spoke out against the adventurist nature of such plans to "export revolution" and advised German workers instead to return to their home country individually in order to take part in the revolutionary events that were brewing there. "We opposed this playing with revolution in the most decisive fashion," Engels later wrote in his work On the History of the Communist League. "To carry out an invasion, which was to import the revolution forcibly from outside, into the midst of the ferment then going on in Germany, meant to undermine the revolution in Germany itself, to strengthen the governments and to deliver the legionaries ... defenceless into the hands of the German troops." The letter and the Declaration were first published in English in the journal Science and Society, 1940, Vol. IV, No. 2. The first publication in the language of the original appeared in the collection Der Bund der Kommunisten. Dokumente und Materialien, Bd. I, 1836-1849, Berlin, 1970. The Cerman Democratic Society (below it is called the Society of German Democrats) was formed in Paris after the February revolution of 1848. The society was headed by petty-bourgeois democrats, Herwegh, Bornstedt (the latter expelled from the Communist League) and others, who campaigned to raise a volunteer legion of German emigrants with the intention of marching into