VI
Rodomonted K. Heimen had arrived in London from Switzerland at the same time as Gustav. Karl Heinzen had for many years made a living from his threat to destroy "tyranny" in Germany. After the outbreak of the February revolution he went so far as to attempt, with unheard-of courage, to inspect German soil from the vantage point of Schuster Island/ He then betook himself to Switzerland where from the safety of Geneva he again thundered against the "tyrants and oppressors of the people" and took the opportunity to declare that "Kossuth is a great man, but Kossuth has forgotten about fulminating silver'.'f Heinzen's horror of bloodshed had turned him into the alchemist of the revolution. He dreamt of an ex-plosive substance that would blast the whole of European reaction into the air in a trice, without its user even getting his fingers burnt. He had a particular aversion to walking amid a shower of bullets and
A pun on Confucius.— Ed. In German a play on words: der Freiheit eine Gasse—a path to freedom, and der Freiheit eine Gosse—a gutter of freedom.—Ed.
For puissant were they all beyond compare, As in our next canto you shall hear (Boiardo, L'Orlando innamorato, Canto 17).—Ed.
to ordinary warfare in which high principle is no defence against them. Under the government of Herr Brentano he even risked a revolutionary visit to Karlsruhe. As he did not receive the reward he thought due to him for his heroic deeds he at first resolved to edit the Moniteur[3] of that "traitor" Brentano. But when the Prussians advanced he declared that Heinzen would not "let himself be shot" for that traitor Brentano.*[5] Under the pretext of forming an élite corps where political principles and military organisation would complement each other, i.e. where military cowardice would pass for political courage, his constant search for the ideal volunteer corps made him retrace his steps until he had regained the familiar territory of Switzerland. Sophiens Reise von Memel nach Sachsen[182] was more bloody than Rodomonte's revolutionary journey. On his arrival in Switzerland he declared that there were no longer any real men in Germany, that the authentic fulminating silver had not yet been discovered, that the war was not being conducted on revolutionary principles but in the ordinary way, with powder and lead, and that he intended to revolutionise Switzerland as Germany was a lost cause. In the secluded idyll of Switzerland and with the bizarre dialect they speak there it was easy for Rodomonte to pass for a German writer and even for a dangerous man. He achieved his aim. He was expelled and despatched to London at federal expense. Rodomonte Heinzen had not directly participated in the European revolution; but, undeniably, he had moved about extensively on its behalf. When the February revolution broke out he collected "revolutionary contributions" in New York, so as to hasten to the aid of his country, and advanced as far as the Swiss border. When the March Association'sI83 revolution collapsed he retired from Switzerland to beyond the Channel at the expense of the Swiss Federal Council. He had the satisfaction of making the revolution pay for his advance and the counter-revolution for his retreat.
In the Italian epics of chivalry we constantly encounter mighty, broad-shouldered giants armed with enormous cudgels who, despite the fact that they lash about them wildly and make a frightening din in battle, never manage to hit their foes but only the trees in the vicinity. Herr Heinzen is such an Ariostian giant in political literature. Endowed by nature with a churlish figure and huge masses of flesh, he interpreted these gifts to mean that he was destined to be a great man. His weighty physical appearance determines his whole literary posture which is physical through and through. His opponents are always small, mere dwarfs, who can barely reach his ankles and whom he can survey with his knee-cap. When, however, he should indeed make a physical appearance, our nomo membruto* takes refuge in literature or in the courts. Thus scarcely had he reached the safety of English soil when he wrote a tract on moral courage.b Or again, our giant allowed a certain Herr Richter to thrash him so frequently and so thoroughly in New York that the magistrate, who at first only imposed insignificant fines, finally, in recognition of his doggedness, sentenced the dwarf Richter to pay 200 dollars damages.
The natural complement to this great physique, so healthy in every fibre, is the healthy commonsense,which Herr Heinzen ascribes to himself in the highest possible degree. It is inevitable that a man with such commonsense will turn out to be a "natural" genius who has learnt nothing, a barbarian innocent of literature and science. By virtue of his commonsense (which he also calls "his perspicacity" and which allows him to tell Kossuth that he has "advanced to the extreme frontiers of thought"), he learns only from hearsay or the newspapers. He is therefore always behind the times and always wears the coat that literature cast off some years previously, while rejecting as immoral and reprehensi-ble the new modern dress he has as yet been unable to become familiar with. But when he has once assimilated a thing his faith in it is quite unshakable; it transforms itself into something that has grown naturally, that is self-evident, that everyone must appreciate and that only the malicious, the stupid or the sophist will pretend not to grasp. Such a robust body and healthy commonsense must of course have also some honest, solid principles, and he even shows to advantage when he takes the craze for principles to extremes. In this field Heinzen is second to none. He draws attention to his principles at every opportunity, every argument is met by an appeal to principle, everyone who fails to understand him or whom he does not understand is demolished by the argument that he has no principles and that his insincerity and pure ill-will are such that he would deny that day was day and night night. To deal with these base disciples of Ahriman he summons up his muse, indignation; he curses, rages, boasts, preaches, and foaming at the mouth he roars out the most tragicomical tirades. He demonstrates what can be achieved in the field of literary invective by a man to whom Börne's wit and literary accomplishment are equally alien. As the muse is, so is the style. An eternal cudgel,[3] but a commonplace cudgel with knots that are not even original or sharp. Only when he encounters scientific terms does he feel momentarily at a loss. He is then like that Billingsgate fishwife with whom O'Connell became involved in a shouting match and whom he silenced by replying to a long string of insults: You are all that and worse: you are a triangulus isosceles, you are a parallelepipedonl
From the earlier history of Herr Heinzen mention should be made of the fact that he was in the Dutch colonies, where he advanced not indeed to the rank of general but to that of non-commissioned officer, a slight for which he later on always treated the Dutch as a nation without principles. Later we find him back in Cologne as a sub-inspector of taxes and in this capacity he wrote a comedy in which his healthy commonsense vainly strove to satirise the philosophy of Hegel.[a] He was more at home in the gossip columns of the Kölnische Zeitung, in the feuilleton, where he let fall some weighty words about the quarrels in the Cologne Carnival Club, the institute from which all the great men of Cologne have graduated. His own sufferings and those of his father, a forester, in their struggle with superiors assumed the proportions of events of universal significance, as easily happens when the men of healthy commonsense contem-plate their small personal problems. He gives an account of them in his Preussische Biireaukratie, a book much inferior to VenedeyV and containing nothing more than the complaints of a petty official against the higher authorities. The book involved him in a trial and although the worst he had to fear was six months in gaol he thought his head was in danger and fled to Brussels. From here he demanded that the Prussian government should not only grant him a safe conduct but also that they should suspend the whole French legal procedure and give him a jury trial for an ordinary offence.[184] The Prussian government issued a warrant for his arrest; he replied with a Steckbrief[c] against the Prussian government in which he preached inter alia moral resistance and constitutional monarchy and condemned revolution as immoral and Jesuitical. From Brussels he went to Switzerland. Here, as we saw above, he met friend Arnold and from him he learned not only his philosophy but also a very useful method of self-enrichment. Just as Arnold sought to assimilate the ideas of his opponents in the course of polemising against them, so Heinzen learned to acquire ideas new to him by attacking and reviling them. Hardly had be become an atheist when with all the zeal of the proselyte he immediately plunged into a furious polemic against poor old Folien because the latter saw no reason to become an atheist in his old age. Having had his nose rubbed in the Swiss Federal Republic his healthy commonsense developed to the point where he desired to introduce the Federal Republic into Germany too. The same commonsense came to the conclusion that this could not be done without a revolution and so Heinzen became a revolutionary. He then began a trade in pamphlets[3] which in the coarsest tones of the Swiss peasant preached immediate "assault" and death to the princes, from whom all the evils of the world stem. He looked for committees in Germany who would drum up the cost of printing and would distribute these pamphlets, and this led naturally to the growth of a large-scale begging industry which first exploited the party members and then reviled them. Old Itzstein could give further particulars about that. These pamphlets gave Heinzen a great reputation among itinerant German wine salesmen who praised him everywhere as a brave "reckless fighter".
From Switzerland he went to America. Here, although his Swiss rustic style enabled him to pass as a genuine poet, he nevertheless very quickly managed to ride the New York Schnellposth to death.
Having returned to Europe in the wake of the February revolution, he sent despatches to the Mannheimer Abendzeitung announcing the arrival of the great Heinzen0 and he also published a pamphlet to revenge himself on Lamartine,d who with his whole government had ignored him despite his mandate as official representative of the American Germans. He did not wish to go back to Prussia as he still feared for his head despite the March revolution and the amnesty. He would wait until the nation summoned him. As this did not happen he resolved to stand in absentia for the Hamburg constituency to the Frankfurt Parliament: his hope was that he would compensate for being a bad speaker by the loudness of his voice—but he was defeated.
Having arrived in London after the termination of the Baden uprising, he became indignant with the young people who had forgotten this great man of before the revolution and of after the revolution, and who caused him to sink into oblivion. He had always been nothing more than l'homme de la veille or l'homme du lendemain, he was never l'homme du jour or even de la journée* As the authentic fulminating silver had still not been discovered, new weapons had to be found to combat the reaction. He called for two million heads so that he could be a dictator and wade up to the ankles in blood — shed by others. His real aim was, of course, merely to create a scandal; the reaction had transported him to London at its own expense; by means of an expulsion order from England it would now, so Heinzen hoped, send him gratis to New York. The coup failed and its only consequence was that the radical French papers called him a fool who shouted for two million heads only because he had never risked his own. But to cap it all, he had published his bloodthirsty sanguinary article in the Deutsche Londoner Zeitungh owned by the ex-Duke of Brunswick—in return for a cash payment, of course.
Gustav and Heinzen had a high opinion of each other for a considerable time. Heinzen praised Gustav as a sage and Gustav
praised. Heinzen as a fighter. Heinzen hid scarcely been able to wait for the end of the European revolution so that he could put an end to the "ruinous disunity in the democratic German emigration" and to re-open his pre-March business. He put forward "a programme of the Germanic revolutionary party in the shape of a draft proposal for discussion".[1] This programme was distinguished by the invention of a special ministry to cater for "the all-important need for public playgrounds, battlegrounds" (minus hail of bullets) "and gardens" and was notable also for the decree "abolishing the privileges of the male sex especially in marriage" (especially also in thrusting manoeuvres'[1] in war, see Clausewitz). This programme was actually no more than a diplomatic note from Heinzen to Gustav as no one else cared a straw about it. And instead of the hoped-for unification it brought about the immediate separation of the two capons; Heinzen demanded that during the "revolutionary transition period" there should be a single dictator who should moreover be a Prussian and, to preclude all misunderstandings, he added: "No soldier can be appointed dictator." Gustav, on the other hand, demanded a triumvirate comprising two Badeners and himself. Moreover, Gustav thought that Heinzen had included in his prematurely published programme an "idea" stolen from him. This put an end to the second attempt at unification and Heinzen, denied recognition by the whole world, receded into obscurity until, in the autumn of 1850, he found English soil too hot for him and sailed off to New York.
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.
[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.
[182] On the demagogues see Note 118.
[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.
[184] [Editorial note 184: 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.
[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.