Written from the end of October to the beginning of December 1852 First published anonymously as a separate pamphlet: Enthüllungen über den Kommunisten-Prozess zu Köln, Basel, 1853
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Title-page of the first edition of Marx's work Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne
I. Preliminaries
On May 10, 1851 Nothjung was arrested in Leipzig and Bürgers, Röser, Daniels, Becker and the others were arrested shortly after. The arrested men appeared before the Court of Assizes in Cologne on October 4, 1852 on a charge of "treasonable conspiracy" against the Prussian state. Thus the preliminary detention (in solitary confinement) had lasted a year and a half.
When Nothjung and Bürgers were arrested the police discovered copies of the Manifesto of the Communist Party,* the "Rules of the Communist League" (a communist propaganda society), two Addresses of the Central Authority of this League b as well as a number of addresses and other publications. A week after Nothjung's arrest had become public knowledge there were house-searches and arrests in Cologne. So if there had still been something to discover it would certainly have disappeared by then. And in fact the haul yielded only a few irrelevant letters. A year and a half later when the accused finally appeared before the jury, the bona fide material in the possession of the prosecution had not been augmented by a single document. Nevertheless as we are assured by the Public Prosecutor's office (represented by von Seckendorf and Saedt) all government departments of the Prussian state had undertaken the most strenuous and many-sided activity. What then had they been doing?
Nous verrons!
The unusually long period of pre-trial detention was explained in the most ingenious way. At first it was claimed that the Saxon government refused to extradite Bürgers and Nothjung to Prussia.
The court in Cologne appealed in vain to the ministry in Berlin, which appealed in vain to the authorities in Saxony. The Saxon authorities however relented. Bürgers and Nothjung were handed over. By October 1851 enough progress had been made at last for the files to be presented to the indictment board of the Cologne Court of Appeal. The board ruled that "there was no factual evidence of an indictable offence and ... the investigation must therefore start again from the beginning". Meanwhile the zeal of the courts had been kindled by a recently approved disciplinary law which enabled the Prussian government to dismiss any official of the judiciary who incurred its displeasure. Accordingly the case was dismissed on this occasion because there was no evidence of an indictable offence. At the following quarterly session of the assizes it had to be postponed because there was too much evidence. The mass of documents was said to be so huge that the prosecutor was unable to digest it. Gradually he did digest it, the bill of indictment was presented to the prisoners and the action was due to be heard on July 28. But in the meantime the great driving wheel of the government's case, Chief of Police Schulz, fell ill. The accused had to sit in gaol for another three months awaiting an improvement in Schulz's health. Fortunately Schulz died, the public became impatient and the government had to ring up the curtain.
Throughout this whole period the police authorities in Cologne, the police headquarters in Berlin and the Ministries of Justice and of the Interior had continually intervened in the investigations, just as Stieber, their worthy representative, was to intervene later on as witness in the public court proceedings in Cologne. The government succeeded in assembling a jury that is quite unprecedented in the annals of the Rhine Province. In addition to members of the upper bourgeoisie (Herstadt, Leiden, Joest), there were city patricians (von Bianca, vom Rath), country squires (Häbling von Lanzenauer, Freiherr von Fürstenberg, etc.), two Prussian government officials, one of them a royal chamberlain (von Münch-Bellinghausen) and finally a Prussian professor (Kräusler). Thus in this jury every one of the ruling classes in Germany was represented and only these classes were represented.
With this jury the Prussian government, it seems, could stop beating about the bush and make the case into a political trial pure and simple. The documents seized from Nothjung, Bürgers and the others and admitted by them to be genuine did not indeed prove the existence of a plot; in fact they did not prove the existence of any action provided for in the Code pénal.[264] But they showed conclusively the hostility of the accused to the existing government and the existing social order. However what the intelligence of the legislators had failed to achieve might well be made good by the conscience of the jury. Was it not a stratagem of the accused that they should have conducted their hostile activities directed against the existing social order in such a way that they did not violate any article of the Code? Does a disease cease to be infectious because it is not listed in the Police Medical Register? If the Prussian government had restricted itself to using the material actually available to prove the harmfulness of the accused and if the jury had confined itself to rendering them harmless by its verdict of guilty, who could censure either government or jury? Who indeed but the foolish dreamer who imagines that a Prussian government and the ruling classes in Prussia are strong enough to give even their opponents a free rein as long as they confine themselves to discussion and propaganda.
However the Prussian government had deprived itself of the opportunity of using this broad highway of political trials. Owing to the unusual delay in bringing the case before the court, the Ministry's direct intervention in the proceedings, the mysterious hints about unheard-of horrors, the rodomontade about a conspiracy ensnaring the whole of Europe and, finally, the signally brutal treatment of the prisoners, the trial was swollen into a procès monstre, the eyes of the European press were upon it and the curiosity and suspicions of the public were fully aroused. The Prussian government had put itself in a position in which for decency's sake the prosecution was simply obliged to produce evidence and the jury to demand it. The jury itself had to face another jury, the jury of public opinion.
To rectify its first blunder, the government was forced into a second one. The police, who had acted as examining magistrates during the preliminary investigation, had to appear as witnesses during the trial. By the side of the ordinary Public Prosecutor the government had to put an extraordinary one, beside the Public Prosecutor's office the police, beside a Saedt and Seckendorf a Stieber together with his Wermuth, his griffin Greif and his little Goldheim.[a] It was inevitable that yet another government department should intervene in court and, by virtue of the miraculous powers of the police, should continuously supply the facts whose shadows the legal prosecution had pursued in vain. The court was so thoroughly aware of the position that with the most laudable resignation the President, the judge and the prosecutor abandoned their functions to Stieber the Police Superintendent and the witness and continually disappeared behind him. Before we proceed to elucidate these revelations made by the police, revelations which form the basis of the "indictable offence" that the indictment board was unable to discover, one more preliminary observation remains to be made.
It became evident from the papers seized from the accused, as well as from their own statements, that a German communist society had existed with a central authority originally based in London. On September 15, 1850, the Central Authority split. The majority—referred to in the indictment[3] as the "Marx party" — moved the seat of the Central Authority to Cologne. The minority, which was later expelled from the League by the group in Cologne, established itself as an independent central authority in London and founded a separate league [265] in London and on the continent. The indictment refers to this minority and its supporters as the "Willich-Schapper party".
Saedt-Seckendorf claim that the split in the London Central Authority had its origin solely in personal disagreements. Long before Saedt-Seckendorf the "chivalrous Willich" had spread the most vicious rumours among the London émigrés about the causes of the split and had found in Herr Arnold Ruge, that fifth wheel on the state coach of European Central Democracy,[266] and in others of the same sort, people who were willing to act as channels leading to the German and American press. The democrats realised that they could gain an easy victory over the Communists by making the "chivalrous Willich" the impromptu representative of the Communists. The "chivalrous Willich" for his part realised that the "Marx party" could not reveal the causes of the split without betraying the existence of a secret society in Germany and in particular exposing the Central Authority in Cologne to the paternal attention of the Prussian police. This situation no longer obtains and so we may cite a few passages from the minutes of the last session of the London Central Authority, dated September 15, 1850.b
In support of his motion calling for separation, Marx said inter alia the following which is given here verbatim:
"The point of view of the minority is dogmatic instead of critical, idealistic instead of materialistic. They regard not the real conditions
Endnotes
[263] [Editorial note 263: 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.
[265] edition was circulated at the time mostly among the German refugees in North America. In 1874 this work was reprinted in 13 instalments in the Volksstaat (Leipzig), organ of the Social-Democratic Workers' Party (from October 28 to December 18, 1874), and Marx was named as its author for the first time. On January 20 and 22, 1875, the Volksstaat published, as a supplement to the Revelations, Marx's Appendix 4 ("The Communist Trial in Cologne") to his pamphlet Herr Vogt written in 1860, and on January 27 it published his special postscript to the Revelations dated January 8, 1875. The Revelations appeared as a book in Leipzig in 1875, reproducing the text from the Volksstaat. The third edition came out in Hottingen-Zürich in 1885 under the editorship of Engels, with notes and an introductory article by Engels: "On the History of the Communist League". Engels included in this edition Marx's Postscript of 1875, Appendix 4 to Herr Vogt and the March and June 1850 Addresses of the Central Authority to the Communist League (see present edition, Vol. 10). The editions of the Revelations printed during Marx's lifetime, and the 1885 edition prepared for publication by Engels after Marx's death, differ only in minor respects, such as discrepancies in separate words, the spelling of some proper names and the use of italics. In the 1875 and 1885 editions some misprints of the first edition are corrected and certain factual and stylistic improvements made, sometimes on the basis of the Boston (1853) edition. In the present edition these improvements of the text, as well as those made in the 1885 edition as compared with the last authorised edition of 1875, are taken into account. In English the Revelations were first published in 1971 in the book: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Cologne Communist Trial, Lawrence and Wishart, London.
[266] [Editorial note 266: text not recovered from the source scan.]