Letter to Hermann Becker, February 8, 1851

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 8 February 1851


First published: Anklageschrift gegen P. G. Roeser, J. H. G. Bürgers, P. Nothjung, W. J. Reiff, H. H. Becker, R. Daniels, C. W. Otto, A. Jacobi, J. J. Klein, F. Freiligrath, Cologne, 1852
Printed according to Anklageschrift
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 38, p. 282

TO HERMANN BECKER IN COLOGNE[1]


[London,] 8 February 1851

...apropos! Willich and Schapper in company with Barthélémy, etc., have, by monstrous bragging about their influence in Germany and by monstrous calumnies against ourselves, at long last succeeded in bamboozling Louis Blanc to such an extent that he has combined with this 'scum' to arrange a banquet for February and, in concert with same, has issued a programme of festivities along with a kind of manifesto. The little man walked into the trap out of vanity, so as to show Ledru-Rollin that he, too, could wag a German-French-Polish-Hungarian tail. Now the business is en pleine déroute[2] again and the little man suspects that he has compromised himself for nothing and has committed a fruitless piece of perfidy against ourselves who, since 1843, have maintained a kind of lukewarm alliance with him.

But do you know what Willich impresses strangers[3] by most? His tremendous influence in Cologne. Hence it is all the more necessary for you to send me the letters,[4] so that a dyke can be thrown up against the 'carpenter's'[5] machinations.

Adieu....

  1. ↑ The original of the letter is not extant. The excerpt published here was quoted in the indictment of Hermann Becker and others at the Cologne communist trial (1852).
  2. ↑ in utter disarray
  3. ↑ The indictment has Freunden (friends) instead of Fremden (strangers). Later Becker himself expressed the opinion that this change had been made arbitrarily by those who drew up the indictment.
  4. ↑ See this volume, pp. 273, 284.
  5. ↑ Marx's reference to Joseph, the carpenter, husband of Mary, the mother of Christ, is an ironical allusion to August Willich who resigned his commission in the Prussian army just before the 1848 revolution and worked as a carpenter in Cologne.