Marx-Engels Correspondence 1856
Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 30;
First Published: First published in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 2, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXII, Moscow, 1929.
Translated By: Peter and Betty Ross
Dear Frederic,
It is high time I wrote again. I’ve been prevented from doing so by all kinds of domesticities.
Enclosed 1 letter from Levy to me, from Düsseldorf. The Touroute mentioned in the letter is a French ex-colonel. He called yesterday while I was out and so I shall not be seeing him for several days as he has gone to Liverpool. He had a longish conversation with my wife, the quintessence of which is contained in enclosure 2,[39] composed by Madame herself. The M. mentioned in Levy’s letter is Miquel.
In a few days’ time you will receive Igor,[22] which has now arrived; Russian-German; the Blue Book [Papers Relative to Military Affairs in Asiatic Turkey, and the Defence and Capitulation of Kars]; Destrilhes, Confidences sur la Turquie and a cutting from L’Homme, which I have mislaid and hence cannot send today, viz. a letter from a déporté in Cayenne, Tassilier by name, to M. le Ministre de la Marine,[F. A. Hamelin] in which the frightful abominations to which Boustrapa[40] subjects the deportees are revealed.[41] You would have had the Blue Book long ago but d’abord [first of all] the pressure of daily events has several times compelled me to suspend work on my articles [A series of artides entitled The Fall of Kars which Marx was writing for The People’s Paper. It was based on his article of the same title written for the New-York Daily Tribune.] on this subject and write about other themes, so that I was unable to do without the book. Then the friends whom you know arrived. They wanted to have the novelty just for one day, and had not yet returned it a week later.
As to these Kars papers, The Times, in three fulminating leaders, [‘The Capitulation of Kars’, The Times, Nos. 22320, 22322 and 22323, 20, 22 and 24 March 1856.] gave a rehash of the section covering August 1854 to about February 1855, i.e. did not so much as touch on the really interesting and crucial period. The object of this is, of course, to shift all responsibility from the Ministry onto Redcliffe and the Turkish pashas in Asia. The best of it is that the English government, as you will see from Destrilhes, forcibly kept at the helm Reddiffe’s rotten Turkish ministry, thus partly condoning and partly bringing about the abominations of which Williams complains. That, however, is only a minor matter. By a procedure similar to the one used in Stieber’s case [Marx refers to his pamphlet Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne.] — namely, by producing proof of falsified dates and forged passages — I have, in my view, proved irrefutably that the responsibility for planning the fall of Kars and for the systematic execution of that plan, lay with the British government, which furthermore had the good fortune this time to figure in Bonaparte’s eyes as zealous ‘in the cause’. I have not, of course, gone into the military aspect proper, i.e. the defence of Kars; I have some misgivings, however, about the ‘stature’ of Williams. Jones, to whom I have shown my manuscript, intends if possible — i.e. if he can get together enough money to take St. Martin's Hall [a venue of public gatherings in London. The inaugural meeting of the International Working Men’s Association was held there in September 1864.] — to lecture on the fall of Kars at the said venue before the debate on it in Parliament begins.
*There is now going on a bitter controversy between the Chartists and the Urquhartites at Newcastle upon Tyne, London, Birmingham, and several other places.*[42] As you will have heard, Jones, with Finlen for shadow, has proclaimed himself dictator of Chartism and set up a new organisation which, indeed, is in process of growing but has, on the other hand, evoked a great storm of indignation against him.[43]
The ‘speculation upon speculation’ — not in ideas but in shares — which has invaded the Rhine Province and Berlin from France would appear to be proliferating as viciously there as on the other side of the Rhine. Jeremiads about this social mischief, this infatuation, are appearing in the Ministry’s Preussische Correspondenz, in which the imminence of an ‘inevitable’ and general financial crisis is seriously and emphatically hinted at.
You will know about Heine’s death, but not about Ludwig Simon of Trier pissing — passing water, I mean — on his grave in the New York Neue Zeit run by Löwe, quondam lion [Löwe von Calbe] of the Parliament of the ‘Cherman’ Nation[44] after its retreat to Stuckert. [Stuttgart (Marx deliberately uses this word and a number of others in this paragraph in their South German dialectal form).] This poet or minnesinger of the female Yid, Madame Hohenscheisse-esche or-linden of Frankfurt am Main, is naturally of the opinion that Heine was no poet; he had ‘no sensibility’, was full of ‘malevolence’ and calumniated not only Kobes I, [Nickname of Jakob Venedey under which he was ridiculed by Heine in his poem ‘Kobes I’ (Kobes means Jakob in the Cologne dialect).] but even Berne’s [Ludwig Borne] lady friend, the great Berne’s ‘mouse’, muse or moose — the Strauss woman. [Jeanette Wohl-Straus. Heine described Borne’s relations with her in his ‘Ludwig Borne’.]
Down here there is a society for the protection of small tradesmen. This society publishes a weekly rag [Protection for Trade] for the said protection. In that weekly our friend Seiler ‘along with his wife’ is pilloried as a ‘swindler’.
But greater things are afoot. Pieper, thanks to his genius, has again been living a freebooter’s existence since January and, despite the not inconsiderable subsidies provided by me, has been daily on the qui vive vis-à-vis his landlady. Now it has suddenly occurred to him that all he requires to become a great man is a little capital. Seiler’s sister-in-law, the greengrocers 2nd daughter, a tallow-candle in green spectacles, has long been mortally in love with the said Pieper. Her entire person green like verdigris rather than veg., and greens to boot without any meat or flesh whatever. While declaring her to be ugly as the day, Pieper has nevertheless discovered that she is not without intelligence, of which she gives incontrovertible proof by regarding our Hanoverian lambkin as a German Byron manqué. So, the day before yesterday, therefore, Pieper, to whom this person clings, not simply like a burr but like a caterpillar, resolved to pour out his heart to Seiler’s father-in-law. He did not wish to do so in front of his ‘beloved’ for fear he might have to kiss her, which indeed is hard work for an occidental unaccustomed to feed upon tallow. But in true Pieper-fashion, the declaration of love was combined with — a touch for a loan. Pieper could not disburden his heart to the greengrocer without inviting the greengrocer to disburden his pockets, not to say his till. On the grounds, that is, of his needing a little capital, say 20-40 pounds, to create himself a position as a fashionable tutor. Meanwhile he intends to let his ‘beloved’ enjoy the pleasures of widowhood while still betrothed, nor will his compassion ever permit him to marry her. Greens or no greens, the whole business is most unsavoury, but Pieper imagines he will come out of it as a man of honour, i.e. at a certain epoch looming in the future repay down to the last farthing the advances he ‘hopes’ to obtain from his would-be father-in-law, generously leaving him his daughter into the bargain. Since that fateful day he has been back to my house only once, for a minute, while I was out. Called himself a ‘happy man’. Little Jenny called him ‘Benedick the married man’, [Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing; Act V, Scene 4] but little Laura said: ‘Benedick was a wit, he is but “a clown”, and “a cheap clown” too.’ The children are constantly reading Shakespeare.
Liebknecht has at last achieved something, to wit, a little Liebknecht.
By ‘His Majesty’s supreme and special command’ my wife has received a passport from Berlin. In May she will travel to Trier with the whole family for 3-4 months.
Salut. Regards to Lupus.
K. M.