[Draft plan]
1. Caesar and Tacitus. 2. The district and army structure. 3. The first battles against Rome. 4. Progress until the migration period.
Notes
1. in the text 2. the German peoples 3. the Franconian dialect
Endnotes
[1] Engels' works on the early history of the Germans relate to his study of the early stages in the development of society. They laid the basis for the historical materialist explanation of the origin of classes and the state and made a major contribution to the research into the history of the formation of European peoples. These manuscripts were not published during the author's lifetime. Engels used part of the material he had collected in the essay "The Mark" (see present edition, Vol. 24, pp. 439-56). During his work on the manuscript Engels may have changed his initial plan. The material relating to point 2 ("The District and Army Structure") of the draft plan, published here, is missing in the manuscript On the Early History of the Germans and is evidently used in the second chapter of The Frankish Period directly linked with the first manuscript. That Engels departed from his initial plan is also proved by the fact that The Franconian Dialect (see this volume, pp. 81-107), originally planned as a note, was transferred to The Frankish Period and elaborated as its component part. The headings of the first three chapters of Engels' manuscript On the Early History of the Germans ("Caesar and Tacitus", "The First Battles Against Rome" and "Progress Until the Migration Period") were supplied by the editors according to Engels' draft plan; the heading of the fourth chapter ("Note: The German Peoples") is given in the manuscript by Engels himself. On the Early History of the Germans was first published in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XVI, Part I, Moscow, 1937 and in the language of the original in Friedrich Engels, Zur Geschichte und Sprache der deutschen Frühzeit. Ein Sammelband. Besorgt vom Marx-Engels-Lenin Institut beim ZK des SED, Berlin, 1952, S. 37-94. Passages from this work were published in English for the first time in: Marx, Engels, On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976, pp. 187-88 and 212-14 and in full in Marx, Engels, Pre-Capitalist Socio-Economic Formations. A Collection, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1979, pp. 298-360. The dating of the draft plan, as of the works themselves, is given according to MEGA2, Abt. I, Bd. 25, S. 988-89. In this volume, these works have been arranged according to the dates on which Engels completed them.