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"SONG OF THE APPRENTICES" by Georg Weerth (1846)[59]
At the time when the cherries blossomed,
In Frankfurt we did stay.
At the time when the cherries blossomed,
In that city we did stay.
Up spake mine host, the landlord:
"Your coats are frayed and worn."
"Look here, you lousy landlord,
That's none of your concern.
"Now give us of your wine,
And give us of your beer,
And with the beer and wine,
Bring us a roast in here."
The cock crows in the bunghole,
Out comes a goodly flow,
And in our mouths it tastes
Like urinatio.
And then he brought a hare
In parsley leaves bedight,
And at this poor dead hare
We all of us took fright.
And when we were in bed,
Our nightly prayers reciting,
Early and late in bed
The bed-bugs kept on biting.
It happened once in Frankfurt,
That town so fine and fair,
That knows who did once dwell
And who did suffer there.a
3 Translated into English by Alex Miller.— Ed.
I came across this poem by our friend Weerth once again when looking through Marx's estate. Weerth, the German proletariat's first and most important poet, was born in Detmold of Rhenish parents, where his father was a superintendent of churches. When I was staying in Manchester in 1843, Weerth came to Bradford as a clerk for his German firm, and we spent many an enjoyable Sunday together. In 1845, when Marx and I were living in Brussels, Weerth took over the continental agency of his trading house, and organised things in such a way that he could set up his headquarters in Brussels as well.[60] After(1) the March Revolution of 1848 we all met up in Cologne for the founding of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Weerth took charge of the feuilleton, and I doubt whether any other newspaper ever had such a witty and spirited feuilleton. One of his main contributions was Leben und
Thaten des berühmten Ritters Schnapphahnski, describing the adventures of Prince Lichnowski, who was given that name by Heine in
Atta Troll? The facts are all true; how we found out about them we shall perhaps leave to another time. Those Schnapphahnski feuilletons were published together as a book by Hoffmann and Campe in 1849, and are still today most entertaining. However, since Schnapphahnski-Lichnowski, together with the Prussian General von Auerswald (also a member of parliament), went riding out on September 18, 1848 to spy on the columns of peasants who were joining up with the Frankfurt fighters at the barricades, on which occasion he and Auerswald received their just deserts and were beaten to death by the peasants for spying, the German Imperial Vice-Regent brought charges against Weerth for libelling the deceased Lichnowski, and Weerth, who had now been in England for some time, was given a three months' prison sentence long after the forces of reaction had put paid to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. He then duly served his three months' sentence, because his business interests obliged him to visit Germany from time to time.
In 1850-51 he travelled to Spain on behalf of another Bradford firm, and then to the West Indies and across almost all of South America. After a short visit to Europe he returned to his beloved West Indies. He did not wish to forego the pleasure there of seeing, just once, the real original of Louis Napoleon III, the black King Soulouque of Haiti. But, as W. Wolff wrote to Marx on August 28, 1856, he had
"problems with the quarantine authorities, had to give up his project, and on the trip contracted (yellow) fever, with which he arrived in Havana. He took to his bed, his condition was complicated by inflammation of the brain, and — on July 30 — our Weerth died in Havana".
I called him the first and most important poet of the German proletariat. His socialist and political poems are indeed far superior to Freiligrath's in terms of their originality and wit, and particularly in their fervent passion. He often employed forms of Heine's, but only in order to fill them with an entirely original and independent content. At the same time, he differed from most other poets inasmuch as he was totally unconcerned about his poems once he had written them down. Once he had sent a copy to Marx or me, he would forget about the poems and it was often difficult to persuade him to have them printed. Only during the time of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was it otherwise. The reason why is shown by the following extract from a letter Weerth wrote to Marx from Hamburg, April 28, 1851:
"By the way, I hope to see you again in London at the beginning of July, for I cannot bear these GRASSHOPPERS in Hamburg any longer. I stand under threat here of a splendid existence, but it frightens me. Anyone else would seize it with both hands. But I am too old to become a philistine, and across the sea there is the far West...
"Recently I have written all kinds of things, but have completed nothing for I see no point at all, no aim in writing. When you write something on economics there is a point and meaning to it. But me? Cracking feeble jokes, making up cheap jibes in order to squeeze a stupid smile from the faces of the rascals at home — in all seriousness, I know nothing more pitiable! My days as a writer ended well and truly with the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
"I must admit: much as it grieves me to have wasted the last three years on absolutely nothing, it thrills me when I think of the time we spent at Cologne. We did not compromise ourselves. That is the main thing! Since Frederick the Great nobody has treated the German people so completely en canaille(2) as the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
"I don't mean to say that the entire credit was due to me; but I was there... "O Portugal! O Spain!" (Weerth had just come from there.) "If only we had your beautiful skies, your wine, your oranges and myrtles! But not even that! Nothing but rain and long noses and smoked meat!
"Yours in the rain and with a long nose,
G. Weerth."
Where Weerth was a master, where he outstripped Heine (because he was more wholesome and unadulterated) and where he is only surpassed by Goethe in the German language, is in his expression of natural, robust sensuality and carnal lust. Many a reader of the Sozialdemokrat would be horrified were I to have reprinted here some of the articles from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. I have no intention of doing that, however. Nevertheless I cannot help remarking that the moment must come for the German socialists too when they openly reject this last German philistine prejudice, that deceitful, petty-bourgeois moral prudery, which in any case is no more than a cover for furtively cracking dirty jokes. If one reads Freiligrath's poetry, for example, one might well believe that human beings were completely devoid of sex organs. And yet nobody took more pleasure in slipping in a piece of filth than the very same Freiligrath who was so extremely chaste in his poetry. It is high time that the German workers at least got used to speaking just as freely about things they themselves do every day or every night, about natural, essential and extremely pleasurable things, as the Romance peoples do, like Homer and Plato did, like Horace and Juvenal, like the Old Testament and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
Endnotes
[59] On September 27, 1856, soon after Georg Weerth's death, Engels wrote to Marx about his firm intention to write an obituary and have it published in one of the Berlin newspapers (see present edition, Vol. 40, p. 72). However, this proved impossible in the reactionary situation of the 1850s. Engels fulfilled his intention 27 years later. The essay about the revolutionary poet that appeared in the newspaper Sozialdemokrat on June 7, 1883 was entitled "Song of the Apprentices" by Georg Weerth (1846). In the Second Russian Edition of the Works and in the editions in other languages that followed the title of the article was changed in conformity with its subject-matter. The essay was published in English for the first time in K. Marx and F. Engels, Literature and Art, International Publishers, New York, 1947.
[60] Between December 1843 and April 1846 Weerth was a clerk at the Bradford branch of the textile firm Passavant and Co. From April 1846 Weerth was employed by the Hamburg trade firm Emanuel und Sohn with offices in England (Bradford), France, the Netherlands and Belgium.