V
The first attempt to create such an "organisation" took place as early as the spring of 1850. A magniloquent "Draft Circular to German Democrats, printed in manuscript form" was hawked around London together with a "Covering Letter to the Leaders".[3]
The Circular and Covering Letter invited the readers to found a united democratic church. The immediate aim was to form a Central Bureau to deal with the affairs of German émigrés,™[9] to set up a joint administration for refugee problems, to start a printing press in London, and to unite all patriots against the common enemy, etc. The emigration should then become the centre of the internal movement, the organisation of the emigration was to be the beginning of a comprehensive democratic organisation, those outstanding personalities who were without means should as members of the Central Bureau be paid salaries raised by taxes levied on the German people. This tax proposal seemed all the more appropriate as "the German emigration had gone abroad not merely without a respectable hero but, what is even worse, without common assets". The document does not conceal that the Hungarian, Polish and French committees already in existence provided the model for this "organisation" and the whole of it is redolent of a certain envy of the privileged position of these prominent allies.
The Circular was the joint production of Herr Rudolph Schramm and Herr Gustav Struve, behind whom lay concealed the merry figure of Herr Arnold Ruge, a corresponding member living in Ostend at the time.
Herr Rudolph Schramm—a rowdy, loudmouthed and extremely muddleheaded little man whose life-motto came from Rameau's
Nephew :
"I would rather be an impudent windbag than not exist at all."
When at the height of his power, Herr Camphausen would gladly have given the forward young Crefelder an important post, had it been seemly thus to elevate a mere junior official. Thanks to bureaucratic etiquette Herr Schramm found only the career of a democrat still open to him. And in this profession he really did
R. Schramm, G. Struve, "Entwurf eines Rundschreibens an deutsche Demokra-ten; als Manuscript gedruckt. Begleitschreiben an die Führer".— Ed.
Denis Diderot, Rameau's Neffe. Aus dem Manuscript übersetzt von J. W. Goethe.—Ed.
advance at one point to the post of President of the Democratic Club in Berlin and with the support of some Left-wing Members of Parliament he later became the Deputy for Striegau[3] in the Berlin National Assembly. Here the normally so loquacious Schramm distinguished himself by his obstinate silence, which was accompanied, however, by an uninterrupted series of grunts. After the Constituent Assembly had been dissolved our democratic man of the people wrote a pamphlet in support of a constitutional monarchy0 but he was not re-elected. Later, at the time of the Brentano government, he appeared momentarily in Baden and there in the "Club of Resolute Progress" [17]° he became acquainted with Struve. On his arrival in London he declared his intention of withdrawing from all political activity, for which reason he forthwith published the circular referred to above. Essentially an unsuccessful bureaucrat, Herr Schramm imagined that his family relations qualified him to represent the radical bourgeoisie in exile and he did indeed present a fair caricature of the radical bourgeois.
Gustav Struve is one of the more important figures of the emigration. At the very first glimpse of his leathery appearance, his protuberant eyes with their sly, stupid expression, the mat gleam on his bald pate and his half Slav, half Kalmuck features, one cannot doubt that one is in the presence of an unusual man. And this impression is confirmed by his low, guttural voice, his sentimental and unctuous manner of speaking and the solemn gravity of his deportment. To be just it must be said that faced with the greatly increased difficulties of distinguishing oneself these days, our Gustav tried at least to be different from his fellow citizens; part prophet, part speculator, part bunion healer—he centred his activities on all kinds of odd peripheral matters and made propaganda for the strangest assortment of causes. For example, being a Russian he suddenly took it into his head to enthuse about the cause of German freedom after he had been employed in a supernumerary capacity in the Russian embassy to the Federal Diet m and had written a little pamphlet in defence of the Diet.c Regarding his own skull as the normal human cranium, he vigorously applied himself to phrenology and from then on he refused to trust anyone whose skull he had not yet felt and
The Polish name is Strzegom.—Ed.
R.Schramm, Der Standpunkt der Demokratie in und zur octroyirten zweiten Kammer.—Ed.
examined. He also gave up eating meat and preached the gospel of strict vegetarianism; he was, moreover, a weather-prophet, he inveighed against tobacco and was prominent in the interest of the ethics of German Catholicism[172] and water-cures. Given his thoroughgoing hatred of concrete knowledge it was natural that he should be in favour of free universities in which the four facultiesm would be replaced by the study of phrenology, physiognomy, chiromancy and necromancy. It was also quite in character for him persistently to maintain that he was a great writer precisely because his mode of writing was the antithesis of everything that could be held to be stylistically acceptable.
In the early forties Gustav had already invented the Deutscher Zuschauer, a little paper that he published in Mannheim, that he patented and that pursued him everywhere as a fixed idea. He also made the discovery at around this time that Rotteck's
Weltgeschichte and the Rotteck-Welcker Staats-Lexikon, the two works that had been his Old and New Testaments, were out of date and in need of a new democratic edition. This revision Gustav undertook without delay and published an extract from it in advance under the title Grundzüge der Staatswissenschaft. Since 1848, moreover, the revision had become "an undeniable necessity, for the late Rotteck had not experienced the events of recent years".
In the meantime there broke out in Baden in quick succession the three "popular uprisings" m that have been depicted by Gustav as the very centre of the whole modern course of world history.[3] Driven into exile by the very first of these revolts (Hecker's) and engaged in publishing his Deutscher Zuschauer once again, this time in Basle, he was dealt a hard blow by fate when the publisher in Mannheim continued to print the Deutscher Zuschauer there under a different editor. The battle between the true and the false Deutscher Zuschauer was so bitterly fought that neither paper survived. To compensate for this Gustav devised a constitution for the German Federal Republic[5] in which Germany was to be divided into 24 republics, each with a president and two chambers; he appended a neat map on which the whole plan could be clearly seen.
In September 1848 the second insurrection began, in which our Gustav acted as both Caesar and Socrates. He used the time granted him on German soil to issue serious warnings to the Black Forest peasantry about the deleterious effects of smoking tobacco.
In Lörrach he published his Moniteur with the title of Government Organ — German Free State—Freedom, Prosperity, Education.* This publication contained inter alia the following decree:
"Article 1 . The extra tax of 10 per cent imposed by the aforesaid on goods imported from Switzerland is hereby abolished; Article 2. Christian Müller, the Customs Officer, is given the task of implementing the measure."
He was accompanied in all his trials by his faithful Amalia,who subsequently published a romantic account of them.b She was also active in administering the oath to captured gendarmes; it was her custom to fasten a red band around the arm of every one who swore allegiance to the German free state and to give him a kiss. Unfortunately Gustav and Amalia were taken prisoner and languished in gaol where the imperturbable Gustav at once resumed his republican translation of Rotteck's Weltgeschichte until he was at last liberated by the outbreak of the third insurrection. Gustav now became a member of a real provisional government and the mania for provisional governments was now added to his other fixed ideas. As President of the War Council he hastened to introduce as much muddle as possible into his department and to recommend the "traitor" Mayerhofer for the post of Minister for War (vide Goegg, Rückblick^ Paris, 1851). Later he vainly aspired to the post of Foreign Minister and to have 60,000 florins placed at his disposal. Herr Brentano soon relieved our Gustav of the burdens of government and Gustav now headed the opposition in the "Club of Resolute Progress". He delighted above all in opposing the very measures of Brentano which he himself had supported. Even though the Club was disbanded and Gustav had to flee to the Palatinate, this disaster had its positive side for it enabled him to issue one further number of the inevitable Deutscher Zuschauer in Neustadt an der Haardt—this compensated Gustav for much undeserved suffering. A further satisfaction was that he was successful in a by-election in some remote corner of the uplands and was nominated member of the Baden Constituent Assembly, which meant that he could now return in an official capacity. In this Assembly Gustav only distinguished himself by the following three proposals that he put forward in Freiburg: 1) On June 28: everyone who wants to negotiate with the enemy to be declared a traitor. 2) On June 30: a new provisional government to be formed in which Struve would have a seat and a vote. 3) On the same day that the previous motion was defeated he proposed that as the defeat at Rastatt had rendered all resistance futile the uplands should be spared the terrors of war and that therefore all officials and soldiers should receive ten days' wages and members of the Assembly should receive ten days' expenses together with travelling costs and then they should all repair to Switzerland to the accompaniment of trumpets and drums. When this proposal too was rejected Gustav at once set out for Switzerland on his own and having been driven from thence by James Fazy's stick he retreated to London, where he came to the fore with yet another discovery, namely the six scourges of mankind. These six scourges were: the princes, the nobles, the priests, the bureaucracy, the standing army, mammon and bedbugs. The spirit in which Gustav interpreted the late Rotteck can be gauged from the further discovery that mammon was the invention of Louis Philippe. Gustav preached the gospel of the six scourges in the Deutsche Londoner Zeitung* which belonged to the ex-Duke of Brunswick. He was tolerably rewarded for this activity and in return he gratefully bowed to the ducal censorship. So much for Gustav's relations with the first scourge, the princes. As for his relationship with the nobles, the second scourge, our moral and religious republican had visiting cards printed on which he figured as "Baron von Struve". If his relations with the remaining scourges were less amicable this cannot be his fault. Gustav then made use of his leisure time in London to devise a republican calendar in which the saints were replaced by right-minded men and the names "Gustav" and "Amalia" were particularly prominent. The months were given German designations in imitation of those in the calendar of the French Republic and there were a number of similar beneficial and commonplace innovations. Moreover his favourite fixed ideas made their appearance again in London: to revive the Deutscher Zuschauer and the Club of Resolute Progress and to form a provisional government. On all these matters he found himself of one mind with Schramm and in this way the Circular came into being.
The third member of the alliance,b the great Arnold Ruge with his air of a sergeant-major still waiting for civilian employment, outshines the whole of the emigration. It cannot be said that this noble man commends himself by his notably handsome exterior; Paris acquaintances were wont to sum up his Pomeranian-Slav features with the word "ferret-face" (figure de fouine). Arnold Ruge, the son of peasants of the isle of Rügen, had endured seven years in Prussian prisons for demagogic agitation.[175] He threw himself wildly into Hegelian philosophy as soon as he had realised that once he had leafed through Hegel's Encyclopädie he could dispense with the study of all other science. He also developed the principle (which he advanced in a short story and which he attempted to practise on his friends — poor Herwegh can vouch for the truth of this) of profiting from marriage and accordingly he early acquired a "material basis" in this manner.
With the help of his Hegelian phrases and his material basis he merely contrived to become door-keeper to German philosophy. In the Höllische Jahrbücher and the Deutsche Jahrbücher it was his task to announce and to trumpet the names of rising luminaries and he showed that he was not without talent in exploiting them for his own literary purposes. Unfortunately, the period of philosophical anarchy very soon supervened, that period when science no longer had a universally acknowledged king, when Strauss, B. Bauer and Feuerbach fought among themselves and when the most diverse alien elements began to disrupt the simplicity of the classical doctrine. Our Ruge looked on helplessly; he no longer knew which path to take; his Hegelian categories had always operated in a vacuum, now they ran completely amok and he suddenly felt a strong desire for a mighty movement where people were not very particular about thought and writing.
Ruge played the same role in the Hallische Jahrbücher as the late bookseller Nicolai had done in the old Berlinische Monatsschrift. Like the latter his ambition was to print the works of others and. in so doing, to derive material advantage and also to quarry literary sustenance for the effusions of his own brain. The only difference was that in rewriting his collaborators' articles, in this literary digestive process with its inevitable end product, our Ruge went much further than did his model. Moreover, Ruge was not the door-keeper of German Enlightenment, he was the Nicolai of modern German philosophy and was able to conceal the natural banality of his genius behind a thick hedge of speculative jargon. Like Nicolai he fought valiantly against Romanticism because it had long since been demolished philosophically by Hegel in his Aesthetik and by Heine from the point of view of literature in Die
romantische Schule. But unlike Hegel, Ruge agreed with Nicolai in arrogating to himself the right as an anti-Romantic to set up a vulgar philistinism and above all his own philistinic self as an ideal of perfection. With this in mind and so as to defeat the enemy on his own ground, Ruge went in for making verses. No Dutchman could have achieved the dull flatness of these poems which Ruge hurled so challengingly into the face of Romanticism.
And in general our Pomeranian thinker did not really feel at ease in Hegelian philosophy. Able as he was in detecting contradictions he was all the more feeble in resolving them and he had a very understandable horror of dialectics. The upshot was that the crudest possible contradictions dwelt peaceably together in his dogmatic brain and that his powers of understanding, never very agile, were nowhere more at home than in such mixed company. It sometimes happened that in his own way he imbibed simultaneously two articles by two different writers and conflated them into a single new product, without noticing that they had been written from two opposing viewpoints. Always getting stuck in his contradictions he sought to extricate himself by asserting in his arguments with theorists that his deficient reasoning was due to his practical sense, and on the other hand telling the practical people that his practical clumsiness and inconsistency was the height of theoretical achievement. He would end by maintaining that it was precisely his own entanglement in insoluble contradictions, his chaotically uncritical faith in the purport of all popular slogans that showed him to be a man of "principle'''.
Before we go on to concern ourselves with the further career of our Maurice of Saxony, as he liked to style himself in his intimate circle of friends, we would point to two qualities which made their appearance already in the Jahrbücher. The first is his mania for manifestos. No sooner had anyone hatched any kind of novel opinion that Ruge believed to have a future than he would issue a manifesto. As no one reproaches him with ever having given birth to an original thought, such manifestos were always a suitable opportunity to claim this novel idea as his property in a more or less declamatory fashion. This would be followed by the attempt to form a party, a group, a "mass" which would stand behind him and to whom he could act as sergeant-major. We shall see later to what unbelievable heights of perfection Ruge had developed the art of fabricating manifestos, proclamations and pronuncia-mentos.
The second quality is the particular diligence in which Arnold excels. As he does not care to study overmuch, or as he puts it "to transfer ideas from one library into another"/ he prefers "to gain his knowledge fresh from life", in other words, to note down conscientiously every evening all the novel or bright ideas or "anecdotes" that he has heard, read, or just picked up during the day. As opportunity arises these materials are then made to contribute to Ruge's daily stint which he performs just as conscientiously as his other bodily needs. It is this that his admirers refer to when they say that he cannot hold his ink. The subject of his daily literary production is a matter of complete indifference; what is vital is that Ruge should be able to immerse every possible topic in that wonderful stylistic sauce that goes with everything, just like the English who enjoy their Soyer's relish[1]' or Worcester sauce[1] equally with fish, fowl, cutlets or anything else. This daily stylistic diarrhoea he likes to designate the "strikingly beautiful form" and he regards it as adequate grounds for passing himself off as an "artist".
Contented as Ruge was to be the Swiss guard of German philosophy he still had a secret sorrow gnawing at his innermost vitals. He had not written a single large book and had daily to envy the happy Bruno Bauer who had published eighteen fat volumes while still a young man. To remedy this incongruity Ruge had one and the same essay printed three times in one and the same volume under different titles and then brought out the same volume in a number of different formats. In this way Arnold Ruge's Collected Works[6] came into being and even today he derives much pleasure from counting them every morning volume by volume as they stand there neatly bound in his library, whereupon he exclaims joyfully: "And anyway. Bruno Bauer is a man without principles!"
Even though Arnold did not manage to comprehend the Hegelian philosophy, he did succeed in representing one Hegelian category in his own person. He was the very incarnation of "the honest consciousness" and was strengthened in this when he made the pleasant discovery in the Phänomenologie—which otherwise remained a sealed book to him — that the honest consciousness "always has pleasure in itself".e Though it wears its integrity on its sleeve the honest consciousness uses it to conceal the petty malice
A. Ruge, Unsre letzten zehn Jahre.—Ed.
Marx and Engels use the English words "Soyer's relish".—Ed. Marx and Engels say "Warwickshire sauce".—Ed.
A. Ruge, Gesammelte Schriften.—Ed. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes. VI. Der Geist.—Ed.
and crotchetiness of the philistine; it has the right to allow itself every kind of base action because it knows that its baseness springs from honest motives. Its very stupidity becomes a virtue because it is an irrefutable proof that it stands up for its principles. Despite every arrière pensée it is firmly convinced of its own integrity and the more it intends to perpetrate a deception or a mesquine[a] base act, the more open and trustworthy does it appear. Beneath the halo of good intentions all the petty meannesses of the philistine become transformed into as many virtues; sordid self-interest appears purified when presented as a piece of self-sacrifice; cowardice appears disguised as a higher form of courage; baseness becomes magnanimity; and the coarse manners and obtrusiveness of the peasant become ennobled, and indeed transfigured into the signs of uprightness and good humour. This is the gutter in which the contradictions of philosophy, democracy and phrase-mongering in general all strangely merge; such a man is moreover richly endowed with all the vices, the mean and petty qualities, with the slyness and the stupidity, the avarice and the clumsiness, the servility and the arrogance, the untrustworthiness and the bonhomie of the emancipated serf, the peasant: philistine and ideologist, atheist and slogan worshipper, absolute ignoramus and absolute philosopher all in one—that is Arnold Ruge as Hegel foretold him in 1806.
After the Deutsche Jahrbücher were suppressed Ruge transported his family to Paris in a carriage specially built for the purpose. Here, his unlucky star brought him into contact with Heine, who honoured him as the man who "had translated Hegel into Pomeranian". Heine asked him whether Prutz was not a pseudonym of his, which Ruge could deny in good conscience. However, it was not possible to make Heine believe that our Arnold was not the author of Prutz's poems. Incidentally, Heine discovered very soon that even though Ruge had no talent he knew very well how to give the appearance of being a man of character. Thus it came about that friend Arnold gave Heine the idea for his Atta Troll. If Ruge did not immortalise his sojourn in Paris by writing a great work he nevertheless deserves our thanks for the one Heine produced for him. In gratitude the poet wrote for him this well-known epitaph:
Atta Troll, reforming bear, Pure and pious; a passionate husband,
By the Zeitgeist led astray
A backwoods sansculotte,
Dances badly but ideals
Dwell within his shaggy breast
Often stinking very strongly—
Talent none, but Character![3]
In Paris our Arnold experienced the misfortune of becoming involved with the Communists. He published articles by Marx and
Engels in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücherb that contained views running directly counter to those he had himself announced in the Preface, an accident to which the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitungc
drew his attention but which he bore with philosophical resignation.
To overcome an innate social awkwardness our Ruge has collected a small number of curious anecdotes that could be used on any occasion. He calls these anecdotes yarns. His preoccupation with these yarns, sustained over many years, finally led to the transformation of all events, situations and circumstances into a series of pleasant or unpleasant, good or bad, important or trivial, interesting or boring yarns. The Paris bustle, the many new impressions, socialism, politics, the Palais-Royal,[176] the cheapness of the oysters—all these things wrought so powerfully on the mind of this unfortunate man that his head began to spin permanently and irremediably and Paris for him became an unlimited storehouse of yarns. He himself hit upon the idea of using wood shavings to make coats for the proletariat and in general he had a foible for industrial yarns for which he could never find any shareholders.
When the politically better known Germans were expelled from France,[177] Ruge contrived to avoid this fate by presenting himself to Minister Duchâtel as a savant sérieux.d He evidently had in mind the "scholar" in Paul de Kock's Amant de la lune, who established himself as a savant by means of an original way of making corks pop into the air.e Shortly afterwards Arnold went to Switzerland where he met K. Heinzen, a former Dutch non-commissioned officer, Cologne writer and Prussian tax sub-inspector. These two were soon bound together by bonds of the most intimate friendship. Heinzen learnt philosophy from Ruge, Ruge learnt politics from Heinzen. From this time on we detect in Ruge a growing necessity to appear as a philosopher par excellence only among the coarser elements of the German movement, a fate that led him down and down until at last he was accepted as a philosopher only by "Friends of Light" ministers (Dulon), German-Catholic parsons (Ronge) and Fanny Lewald. At the same time, however, anarchy was growing apace in German philosophy. Stirner's Unique, [Stein's] Socialism and Communism,? etc., all these recent intruders, caused Ruge's head to spin quite intolerably; a great leap had to be ventured. So Ruge escaped into humanism, the catch-phrase with which all confusionists in Germany, from Reuchlin to Herder, have covered up their embarrassment. This catch-phrase seemed all the more appropriate as Feuerbach had only recently "rediscovered man" and Arnold fastened on to it with such desperation that he has not let go of it to this day. But while still in Switzerland Arnold made yet another, incomparably greater discovery. This was that "the ego by appearing frequently before the public asserts itself as a character".h From this point on a new field of activity opened for Arnold. He now elevated the most shameless meddling and importunity into a principle. Ruge had to take part in everything and to poke his nose into everything. No hen could lay an egg without Ruge "editing the rationale" of this "event".[178] Contact had to be maintained at all costs with some obscure local paper where there was a chance of making frequent appearances. He no longer wrote a single newspaper article without signing his name and, where possible, mentioning himself. The principle of the frequent appearance had to be extended to every article; an article had first to appear in letter form in the European papers and (after Heinzen's emigration to New York) in the American papers also; then it was printed as a pamphlet and finally reprinted in the collected works.
Thus equipped, our Ruge could return to Leipzig to obtain definitive recognition of his character. But once arrived all was not a bed of roses. His old friend Wigand, the bookseller, had very successfully replaced him in the role of Nicolai and as no other post was vacant Ruge fell into gloomy reflections on the transitoriness of all yarns. This was his situation when the German revolution broke out.
It brought sudden relief to our Arnold too. The mighty movement in which even the clumsiest could easily swim with the current had finally got underway and Ruge went at once to Berlin where he intended to fish in troubled waters. As a revolution had just broken out he felt that it would be appropriate for him to come forward with proposals for reform. So he founded a paper with that name. The pre-revolutionary Réforme of Paris had been the most untalented, ignorant and boring paper in France. The Berlin Reform demonstrated that it was possible to surpass its French model and that one could unhesitatingly offer the German public such an incredible journal even in the "metropolis of intelligence". On the assumption that Ruge's clumsy language was the best guarantee for the profound content lying behind it Arnold was elected to the Frankfurt Parliament as Member for Breslau.[3] Here he saw his chance as editor of the democratic Left wing to come forward with an absurd manifesto.*[3] Apart from that he distinguished himself only by his passion for issuing manifestos for European peoples' congresses, and hastened to add his voice to the general wish that Prussia should be integrated into Germany. Later, on his return to Berlin, he demanded that Germany should be integrated into Prussia and Frankfurt into Berlin, and when he finally decided to become a peer of Saxony he demanded that Germany and Prussia should both be integrated into Dresden.
His parliamentary activity brought him no laurels other than the fact that his own party despaired at his clumsy ineptitude. At the same time his Reform was going downhill, a situation that could only be remedied, as he thought, by his personal presence in Berlin. As an "honest consciousness" he naturally discovered a strictly political pretext for his resignation and in fact he demanded that the whole of the Left should leave with him. Naturally, they refused and Ruge went to Berlin alone. Once there, he discovered that modern conflicts can best be resolved by the "Dessau method", as he termed the small state, a model of constitutional democracy. Then during the siege of Vienna he again drew up a manifesto in which General Wrangel was exhorted to march against Windischgrätz and to free Vienna.[3] He even obtained the approval of the Democratic Congress for this curious document under the pretext that it had already been set up with the signature and printed.[179] Finally, when Berlin itself was in a state of siege, Herr Rüge went to Manteuffel and made proposals concerning the Reform, which were however rejected. Manteuffel told him that he wished all opposition papers were like the Reform; the Neue Preussische Zeitung was much more dangerous—an utterance which the naïve Ruge, with triumphant pride, hastened to report through the length and breadth of Germany. Arnold became an enthusiastic advocate of passive resistance,[180] which he himself put into practice by leaving his paper, editors and everything in the lurch and running away. Active flight is evidently the most resolute form of passive resistance. The counter-revolution had supervened and Ruge fled before it all the way from Berlin to London without stopping.
At the time of the May uprising in Dresden Arnold placed himself at the head of the movement in Leipzig together with his friend Otto Wigand and the city council. He and his companions issued a vigorous manifesto to the citizens of Dresden urging them to fight bravely—in Leipzig, it went on, Ruge, Wigand and the city fathers were watching, and whoever did not desert himself would not be deserted by Heaven. Scarcely had the manifesto been published when our brave Arnold took to his heels and fled to Karlsruhe.
In Karlsruhe he felt unsafe even though the Baden troops were standing on the Neckar and hostilities were a long way from breaking out. He asked Brentano to send him to Paris as ambassador. Brentano permitted himself the joke of giving him the post for 12 hours revoking it next morning, just when Ruge was about to depart. Undaunted, Ruge went to Paris together with Schütz and Blind, the official representatives of the Brentano government, and once there made such a spectacle of himself that Oppenheim, his former editor, announced in the official Karlsruher Zeitungb that Herr Ruge was not in Paris in any official capacity but merely "on his own initiative". Having once been taken along by Schütz and Blind to see Ledru-Rollin, Ruge suddenly interrupted the diplomatic negotiations with a terrible diatribe against the Germans in the presence of the Frenchman so that his colleagues finally had to withdraw discomfited and compromised. June 13c came and dealt our Arnold such a severe blow that for no reason at all he took to his heels and did not pause to take breath again until he found himself in London, on free British soil. Referring to this flight later he compared himself to Demosthenes.[3]
In London Ruge first attempted to be introduced as the Baden provisional ambassador. He then tried to gain acceptance in the English press as a great German thinker and writer but was always turned away on the grounds that the English were too materialistic to understand German philosophy. He was also asked about his works—a request which Ruge could answer only with a sigh while the image of Bruno Bauer once again rose up before his eyes. For even his Collected Works, what were they but pamphlets reprinted again and again? And they were not even pamphlets but merely newspaper articles in pamphlet form, and basically they were not even newspaper articles but only the muddled fruits of his reading. Something had to be done and so Ruge wrote two articles for the Leader[1]' in which under the pretext of an analysis of German democracy he declared that in Germany "humanism" was now the order of the day as represented by Ludwig Feuerbach and Arnold Ruge, the author of the following works: 1) Die Religion unsrer Zeit, 2) Die Demokratie und der Sozialismus, 3) Die Philosophie und die Revolution. These three epoch-making works which have not appeared in the bookshops to this day are, it goes without saying, nothing more than new titles arbitrarily applied to old essays of Ruge's. Simultaneously he resumed his daily stints when for his own edification, for the benefit of the German public and to the horror of Herr Brüggemann he began to retranslate articles into German that had somehow got out of the Kölnische Zeitung and into the Morning Advertiser. Not exactly burdened with laurels he withdrew to Ostend
The following paragraph is crossed out in the manuscript: "The question arises here: why in particular is Herr A. Ruge in England? In the year 1849 Herr Ruge began to realise at least one thing: that his position in Germany was very untenable, very compromised, and that he needed to be transferred to distant soil to maintain a sort of pretext for his frequent appearances. There are no external reasons whatever to keep him away from the Continent. When he turned his back on the Berlin state of siege, his editors stayed behind; when he withdrew from Leipzig, Wigand and his other associates stayed there without a hair falling from their heads; he did not take part in any compromising activities in Baden any more than he did in Paris. But precisely because Ruge is no refugee in the usual sense of the word, he considers it so important to hold an official position in the emigration." — Ed.
where he found the leisure necessary to his preparations for the role of the worldly-wise Confusius" of the German emigration.
Just as Gustav represents the vegetable nature and Gottfried the sensibility of German petty-bourgeois philistinism, Arnold represents its reason or rather its unreason. Unlike Arnold Winkelried [181] he does not open up a path to freedom; he is in his own person the gutter of freedomb; Ruge stands in the German revolution like the notices seen at the corners of certain streets: it is permitted to pass water here.
We return at last to our circular with its covering latter. It fell flat and the first attempt to create a united democratic church came to nought. Schramm and Gustav later declared that failure was due solely to the circumstance that Ruge could neither speak French nor write German. But then the great men again set to work.
Chè ciascun oltra moda era possente, Come udirete nel canto seguente.
Endnotes
[3] Serfdom was abolished in the territories along the left bank of the Rhine annexed to France during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, as were the privileges of the nobility and the clergy, and the church estates.
[9] The Congress of Vienna of European monarchs and their ministers (September 1814-June 1815) established a system of all-European treaties after the Napoleonic wars. The Congress decisions helped to restore the feudal system and a number of old dynasties in states that had been subjugated by Napoleon and to preserve the political dismemberment of Germany and Italy, sanctioned the annexation of Belgium to Holland and the partition of Poland, and planned measures to combat the revolutionary movement.
[3] Serfdom was abolished in the territories along the left bank of the Rhine annexed to France during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, as were the privileges of the nobility and the clergy, and the church estates.
[17] [Editorial note 17: text not recovered from the source scan.]
[172] [Editorial note 172: text not recovered from the source scan.]
[3] Serfdom was abolished in the territories along the left bank of the Rhine annexed to France during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, as were the privileges of the nobility and the clergy, and the church estates.
[5] The Protective Tariff of 1818 (Schutzzolltarif) abolished internal duties throughout the territory of Prussia and created the conditions for the formation of the Customs Union (Zollverein). The Zollverein, a union of German states, which established a common customs frontier, was set up in 1834 under the aegis of Prussia. Brought into being by the need to create an all-German market, the Customs Union subsequently embraced all the German states except Austria and a few of the smaller states.
[1] Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany was written after Charles Dana, one of the editors of the New-York Daily Tribune, had suggested to Marx, early in 1851, that he contribute to the newspaper. Being engaged in economic research, Marx asked Engels, on August 14, 1851, to write "a series of articles about Germany, from 1848 onwards". Engels agreed, and in the course of thirteen months he wrote 19 articles about the German revolution of 1848-49. He intended to write one more, concluding article, but it did not appear in the Tribune and most probably was not written at all. Engels used as the main source of reference a file of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, apart from some additional material given him by Marx, whom he constantly consulted and who read every article before mailing it. The series of articles, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, was printed in the New-York Daily Tribune over the signature of Karl Marx, the paper's official correspondent. It was only in 1913, when the correspondence between Marx and Engels was published, that it became known that the articles had in fact been written by Engels. Daring Marx's and Engels' lifetime the work was never republished, apart from the first two articles, which were reprinted in the New-Yorker Abendzeitung, a newspaper of the German refugees in the United States, at the end of October 1851. The first separate edition of this work in English was prepared in 1896 by Marx's daughter, Eleanor Marx-Aveling; the same year a German translation appeared. In this and a number of later editions Marx was given as the author. In the New-York Daily Tribune the articles were printed under the general heading: Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, and numbered in Roman figures. In the 1896 English edition Eleanor Marx-Aveling provided subheadings which are preserved in this edition.
[1] Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany was written after Charles Dana, one of the editors of the New-York Daily Tribune, had suggested to Marx, early in 1851, that he contribute to the newspaper. Being engaged in economic research, Marx asked Engels, on August 14, 1851, to write "a series of articles about Germany, from 1848 onwards". Engels agreed, and in the course of thirteen months he wrote 19 articles about the German revolution of 1848-49. He intended to write one more, concluding article, but it did not appear in the Tribune and most probably was not written at all. Engels used as the main source of reference a file of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, apart from some additional material given him by Marx, whom he constantly consulted and who read every article before mailing it. The series of articles, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, was printed in the New-York Daily Tribune over the signature of Karl Marx, the paper's official correspondent. It was only in 1913, when the correspondence between Marx and Engels was published, that it became known that the articles had in fact been written by Engels. Daring Marx's and Engels' lifetime the work was never republished, apart from the first two articles, which were reprinted in the New-Yorker Abendzeitung, a newspaper of the German refugees in the United States, at the end of October 1851. The first separate edition of this work in English was prepared in 1896 by Marx's daughter, Eleanor Marx-Aveling; the same year a German translation appeared. In this and a number of later editions Marx was given as the author. In the New-York Daily Tribune the articles were printed under the general heading: Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, and numbered in Roman figures. In the 1896 English edition Eleanor Marx-Aveling provided subheadings which are preserved in this edition.
[6] The reference is to the uprising of the Silesian weavers on June 4-6, 1844, the first big class battle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in Germany, and to the uprising of the Bohemian workers in the second half of June 1844. The workers' movement, which was accompanied by factory and machine wrecking, was brutally suppressed by government troops.
[3] Serfdom was abolished in the territories along the left bank of the Rhine annexed to France during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, as were the privileges of the nobility and the clergy, and the church estates.
[177] [Editorial note 177: text not recovered from the source scan.]
[3] Serfdom was abolished in the territories along the left bank of the Rhine annexed to France during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, as were the privileges of the nobility and the clergy, and the church estates.
[3] Serfdom was abolished in the territories along the left bank of the Rhine annexed to France during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, as were the privileges of the nobility and the clergy, and the church estates.
[3] Serfdom was abolished in the territories along the left bank of the Rhine annexed to France during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, as were the privileges of the nobility and the clergy, and the church estates.
[3] Serfdom was abolished in the territories along the left bank of the Rhine annexed to France during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, as were the privileges of the nobility and the clergy, and the church estates.
[1] Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany was written after Charles Dana, one of the editors of the New-York Daily Tribune, had suggested to Marx, early in 1851, that he contribute to the newspaper. Being engaged in economic research, Marx asked Engels, on August 14, 1851, to write "a series of articles about Germany, from 1848 onwards". Engels agreed, and in the course of thirteen months he wrote 19 articles about the German revolution of 1848-49. He intended to write one more, concluding article, but it did not appear in the Tribune and most probably was not written at all. Engels used as the main source of reference a file of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, apart from some additional material given him by Marx, whom he constantly consulted and who read every article before mailing it. The series of articles, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, was printed in the New-York Daily Tribune over the signature of Karl Marx, the paper's official correspondent. It was only in 1913, when the correspondence between Marx and Engels was published, that it became known that the articles had in fact been written by Engels. Daring Marx's and Engels' lifetime the work was never republished, apart from the first two articles, which were reprinted in the New-Yorker Abendzeitung, a newspaper of the German refugees in the United States, at the end of October 1851. The first separate edition of this work in English was prepared in 1896 by Marx's daughter, Eleanor Marx-Aveling; the same year a German translation appeared. In this and a number of later editions Marx was given as the author. In the New-York Daily Tribune the articles were printed under the general heading: Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, and numbered in Roman figures. In the 1896 English edition Eleanor Marx-Aveling provided subheadings which are preserved in this edition.
[181] [Editorial note 181: text not recovered from the source scan.]