Letter to Ferdinand Freiligrath, February 23, 1860

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 23 February 1860


First published in Die Neue Zeit, Ergänzungshefte, No. 12, Stuttgart, 1911-1912
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 41


MARX TO FERDINAND FREILIGRATH[1]

IN LONDON

Manchester, 23 February 1860[2]

6 Thorncliffe Grove, Oxford Road

Dear Freiligrath,

I am writing to you again and, indeed, for the last time, about the Vogt affair. You have not so much as ACKNOWLEDGED receipt of my first two communications,[3] a courtesy you would have extended to any philistine. I cannot possibly surmise that you imagine I am trying to extort a letter from you for any public purpose. As you are aware, I possess at least 200 letters of yours, in which there is more than enough material to establish your relations with me and with the party, should it prove necessary.

I am writing to you because, as a poet and a man up to his eyes in business, you would seem to misconceive the significance of the lawsuits I am conducting in Berlin and London.[4] They are crucial to the historical vindication of the party and its subsequent position in Germany; this applies all the more to the lawsuit in Berlin in that it is taking place at the same time as the Eichhoff-Stieber case,[5] which turns mainly on the Cologne communist trial.2

The GRIEVANCES you may perhaps be nourishing against me are the following:

1. That I abused your name (or so you told Faucher). 2. The kind of 'scene' I made you in your OFFICE.

Re I. I personally have never mentioned your name, except for saying in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung that Blind had told you much the same as he told me.[6] This is a FACT. From the first I realised how important it was to call attention to the real origins of the pamphlet,[7] and I had the right to cite a witness in connection with what Blind had said.

As for Liebknecht's letter to the editor of the A. A. Z., in which he mentions your name and mine (with reference to Blind[8] ), he will, if necessary, confirm on oath that this was done without my knowledge, just as he sent the Augsb. Allg. Zeit, the pamphlet Zur Warnung without my knowledge and during my absence in Manchester. When Vogt sued the A. A. Z. and the latter turned to him [Liebknecht], he was still in doubt as to whether or not I should disavow him, as I could have done, and was in fact surprised when I immediately said I would do all I could to help him.

If—in the letter I wrote you—I took his side in the matter of your letter to him, this was simply because it seemed ungenerous, in a man of your repute and social standing, to write so harshly to an obscure party member living in a garret and one with whom you had hitherto been on friendly terms.

As regards the irritable tone of my own letter, there were various reasons for that.

Firstly, I was deeply wounded by the fact that you seemed more inclined to believe Blind than myself.

Secondly, from a letter you wrote me in a very irritable vein regarding The Morning Advertiser (Schiller Festival article) you would seem to consider me capable of the enormity, not only of surreptitiously introducing into Blind's article something injurious to yourself, but of actually denouncing this to you as Blind's handiwork.[9] I was at a complete loss to imagine what I could have done to deserve such injurious suspicions.

Thirdly, you showed Blind a private letter I had written you. Finally, I had the right to expect—and all the more so after the Gartenlaube article,[10] that you should include in your statement in the A. A. Z.[11] some allusion, however faint, that would obviate any appearance of its being a personal breach with myself and a public repudiation of the party. The fact that your second statement[12] actually appeared alongside Blind's[13] and your name served as a screen for his lying and fraudulence could hardly be expected to delight me. Incidentally, I give you my word of honour that, prior to their publication, I had no knowledge whatsoever of any of the statements made by Liebknecht in the A. A. Z.

Re 2. The day I came to your office, the two issues of the National-Zeitung (the first contained the libellous excerpts and comments later reprinted in the Telegraph) had just reached me from Berlin. There was utter commotion at home, and my poor wife was in a truly pitiful state. At the same time, I received a letter from Germany informing me that, besides your statements published in the A. A. Z., Vogt's libellous work included a letter of yours, from which your close relationship with Vogt was all too apparent, and that, in particular, your name was the only one of any note out of which Vogt made political capital and which lent plausibility to his infamies in the eyes of the public. Imagine yourself in similar circumstances and then ask yourself whether, in your own case, spleen might not momentarily have prevailed over reason.

Let me repeat once again that this letter has nothing to do with private interests. In the London lawsuit I could have you SUBPOENAED as a witness without your prior permission. As regards the Berlin lawsuit, I am in possession of letters from you which, if required, I could place on the record. Nor do I stand alone in this matter. From every side—Belgium, Switzerland, France and England—Vogt's libellous attack has brought me unexpected allies, even from among people who belong to quite a different school of thought.

But in the first place it would anyhow be better for both parties, as for the cause, to act en entente.

In the second, I must tell you frankly that I cannot resign myself to losing, as a result of irrelevant misunderstandings, one of the few men whom I have loved as friends, in the eminent sense of the word.

If I have failed you in any way, I am at all times ready to admit to my error. Nihil humani a me alienum puto.[14]

Finally, I understand very well that, in your present position, any affair such as the one under consideration could only be obnoxious to you.

You, for your part, will realise that it is impossible to count you out altogether.

Firstly, because Vogt is making political capital out of your name and pretending to have your approval in his indiscriminate mudslinging at a party which prides itself on counting you as one of its number.

Moreover, you happen to be the only member of the former Cologne Central Authority[15] who, between the end of 1849 and the spring of 1851, lived in Cologne and has since that time lived in London.

Inasmuch as we have both consciously, each in his own way, out of the purest of motives and with an utter disregard for private interests, been flourishing the banner for la classe la plus laborieuse et la plus misérable high above the heads of the philistines for years now, I should regard it as a contemptible offence against history, were we to fall out over trifles, all of them attributable to misunderstandings.

In sincere friendship

Your

Karl Marx

  1. ↑ A rough draft of this letter has been preserved. It was published by M. Häckel in Freiligralh's Briefwechsel, Berlin, 1968. The texts of the draft and final version are practically identical.
  2. ↑ 1850 in the original.
  3. ↑ In his letter of 16 December 1859 (it has not been found) Marx probably asked Szemere to help him out of his financial difficulties. In his reply of 29 December Szemere informed Marx that his efforts had been to no avail.
  4. ↑ Marx means the lawsuits he intended to bring against the Berlin National-Zeitung and the London Daily Telegraph for reprinting Vogt's libellous fabrications against himself and his associates (see also this volume, pp. 40-45, 59-76).
  5. ↑ In late 1859, the German socialist Eichhoff was brought to trial by the Prussian authorities for publishing in the London weekly Hermann a series of articles exposing the part played by Wilhelm Stieber, chief of the Prussian political police, in organising the trial of the Communist League members in Cologne in 1852.
    In December 1859, Hermann Juch, the editor of the weekly, asked Marx for information on the Cologne trial, which he needed for Eichhoff's defence (see Marx's letter to Engels of 13 December 1859, present edition, Vol. 40 and also pp. 80-81 of this volume). In May 1860 a Berlin court sentenced Eichhoff to 14 months imprisonment.
  6. ↑ K. Marx, 'Declaration', 15 November 1859.
  7. ↑ See this volume, pp. 30-32.
  8. ↑ In a statement to the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung of 5 November 1859, published in the supplement to No. 319 of that paper on 15 November, Freiligrath declared that he had never contributed to the Volk newspaper and had been named among Vogt's accusers against his own will. A note by A. Z. editor Gustav Eduard Kolb, published together with the statement, claimed that the information in question concerning Freiligrath derived from Liebknecht's reports from London and a private letter of his dated 12 September 1859, which said, in particular: 'Should Vogt bring his action before London courts, and he is morally forced to do so, Marx and Freiligrath will act as witnesses, and so will I.' It is this letter of Liebknecht's that Marx means here.
  9. ↑ An anonymous article by Blind on the Schiller centenary festival in London, published in The Morning Advertiser on 11 November 1859, described Freiligrath's jubilee poem as being 'above mediocrity'. In a letter to Marx dated 17 November, Freiligrath hinted that this passage had been interpolated at Marx's request. For details see Marx's letter to Engels of 19 November 1859, present edition, Vol. 40.
  10. ↑ The illustrated literary weekly Die Gartenlaube, No. 43, 1859, carried an article, 'Ferdinand Freiligrath', signed 'B' (an abbreviation of 'Beta', the pen-name of Johann Heinrich Bettziech), which attributed the flagging of Freiligrath's powers as a poet to the 'influence' of Marx. See on this Marx's letters to Engels of 19 and 26 November and Engels' letter to Marx of 11 (or 12) December 1859 (present edition, Vol. 40).
  11. ↑ F. Freiligrath. 'Erklärung', Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 319 (supplement), 15 November 1859.
  12. ↑ F. Freiligrath, 'Erklärung', Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 345 (supplement), 11 December 1859.
  13. ↑ K. Blind, 'Erklärung', Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 345 (supplement), 11 December 1859.
  14. ↑ Nothing human is alien to me—an allusion to Terence's Heautontimorumenos, I, 1, 25.
  15. ↑ of the Communist League