26. Address to the German National Assembly in Frankfurt Adopted by a Public Meeting Held in Cologne on September 7, 1848
26. Address to the German National Assembly in Frankfurt Adopted by a Public Meeting Held in Cologne on September 7, 1848[357]
An armistice with Denmark, which has been ratified by Prussia, has been presented by the Prussian Government to the Imperial Government, and by the Imperial Government to you.
The undersigned German citizens resident in Cologne protest against this armistice, and, considering:
1. that Prussia has concluded this armistice on the basis of an authorisation issued by the Imperial Regent[3] but not countersigned by any responsible Imperial Minister, and hence legally invalid; 2. that Prussia has exceeded this authorisation in every point thus pursuing only the interests of absolutism and its own, un-German plans; 3. that no political agreement may be concluded without previous authorisation of the National Assembly; 4. that this armistice forces the victorious German troops to an ignominious retreat, instals a Danish Government in Schleswig-Holstein and Lauenburg, betrays to Denmark the Provisional Government, which arose from the revolution and was recognised by Germany, and all its decisions; withdraws the Schleswig troops from the German High Command and delivers Schleswig-Holstein to civil war; 5. that whereas Germany has constantly fought the revolution in Italy, Posen and Prague, the Danish war is the only one in which Germany defends the revolution against legitimism and absolutism;
request you: to reject the armistice concluded by Prussia in violation of the authorisation and in defiance of the Central Authority and the National Assembly, and to defend the revolution in Schleswig-Holstein even at the risk of a European war, and never again to entrust the present Prussian Government with diplomatic negotiations on behalf of Germany; and, finally, to declare that Germany will on no account force the Danish-speaking North Schleswig to become a part of Germany against its will.
Cologne, September 7, 1848
Endnotes
[357] The public meeting in Cologne at which this address was adopted in connection with the debates on the ratification of the armistice at Malmö (see Note 289) in the Frankfurt National Assembly, was convened on the initiative of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, as may be judged from the extant handwritten notes which Marx wrote later (at that time he was away). Engels apparently took part in the drafting of the address. The editorial board of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung published the text of the address in the editorial marked "Cologne, September 8" and supplied it with the following note: "Last night a public meeting was held in Rauch's Riding School to protest against the Prussian-Danish armistice and against the Prussian civic militia law which has been partially passed. Although the posters announcing the meeting were put up only late in the morning, the large hall, which holds no fewer than two and a half thousand people, was filled to overflowing, and at least twice that number were turned away because there was no room...."
[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