Karl Marx: Man and Fighter Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen

Chapter 13: The 'Mad Year' in Cologne

In Germany the members of the Communist League scattered in all directions. Most of them went to their native town or to the place where they had lived before going into exile. Engels spent April and May in the Wuppertal, Wilhelm Wolff went to Breslau, Schapper to Wiesbaden, Born to Berlin, Wallau to Mainz. In practically every place where workers' unions arose in the months that followed the lead was taken by members of the League or of organisations affiliated to it.

The immediate task was to bring together the workers' organisations that had been founded before the outbreak of the Revolution. The first appeal for unity came from the Mainz Workers' Educational Union. Marx, who stopped for two days at Mainz on the way from Paris to Cologne, helped to draft it.

Marx went to Cologne because he had connections with that city which had never been entirely broken off during his years of exile and because Cologne, the biggest city in the most highly industrialised part of Germany, was the obvious place for the headquarters of the Communist League. He arrived on April 10, accompanied by Engels and Ernst Dronke, a gifted young political writer who had earned himself a good reputation by his books and stories and been made famous by his big trial for lèse-majesté, when he was condemned to two years' imprisonment. His daring escape from the fortress of Wesel made him still more famous.

A branch of the Communist League had existed in Cologne since the autumn of 1847. Its leaders were Andreas Gottschalk, a physician, and August von Willich, a former artillery lieutenant. Both these highly distinctive personalities, each in his own way characteristic of the 'mad year' of 1848, will be repeatedly mentioned in the pages that follow, and a few words about their careers will not be out of place.

Gottschalk, son of a Jewish butcher, was born at Düsseldorf in 1815. He studied medicine and philosophy at Bonn--he was at Bonn at the same time as Marx--and passed his finals with distinction in 1839. In 1840 he started a medical and surgical practice in Cologne. From the first he worked almost exclusively in the working-class quarters of the city, as healer, helper and friend of the poorest workers. 'It is intelligible,' states a pamphlet written in his memory in 1849, 'that the man who had the most abundant opportunity of observing poverty, misery and distress at close quarters and was also a warm sympathiser with the sufferings of the proletariat, who were almost on the brink of utter destitution--it is readily intelligible, I say, that such a man should reflect upon the ways and means of most rapidly and effectively redressing pauperisation and distress.' Gottschalk made the workers' cause his own. The Cologne workers idolised their warm-hearted doctor and friend. He was their undisputed leader.

August von Willich was a man of entirely different type. He was descended from an ancient, aristocratic, military Prussian family, attended the military academy at Potsdam, and at the beginning of the forties was a captain in an artillery brigade stationed in Westphalia. The ideas of the time--democracy, Socialism, revolutionary substitution of a new world for the old--found their way even into the stuffy atmosphere of a Prussian barracks. Willich belonged to the not so very small group of officers to whom these ideas appealed. When Lieutenant Fritz Anneke, later Gottschalk's closest friend and colleague, was deprived of his officer's status because of his courageous avowal of Socialism, Willich wrote an open letter to the king on his behalf. For this he was placed before a court of honour and deprived of his rank. He went to Cologne and joined the local branch of the Communist League. He earned his living as a carpenter. When the former Prussian army captain made his way across the Cologne parade ground, as he did deliberately every morning on his way to work, walking very slowly past the drilling squads, wearing his leather apron and with his tools on his back, it had a very provocative effect. This was just what Willich intended. He wanted to get himself--and consequently democracy and Socialism--talked about. The Cologne Communist group attached great importance to propaganda in the army.

Its members met twice a week, discussed 'Communism and history,' and carried on 'retail propaganda,' to employ an expression Gottschalk used in a letter to Hess. The branch did not yet number twenty members. Its influence on the working-class population of Cologne was effectively demonstrated when things started to happen.

The revolution in Paris made a great impression throughout Germany, but nowhere was its effect so great as in the Rhineland. In every Rhineland town petitions to the Government were drafted, demanding radical reforms in an altogether unprecedented manner. They were promptly covered with thousand and tens of thousands of signatures. The initiative for all this activity came from Cologne, and in Cologne itself the initiative came from the branch of the Communist League. On March 3 it organised a mass-meeting outside the town hall. A deputation led by Gottschalk and Willich appeared in the council chamber and announced their demands to the startled city fathers. The four thousand people outside lent emphasis to what they said. Soldiers were brought to the scene, there were collisions between them and the demonstrators, the soldiers fired, there were dead and wounded and Gottschalk, Willich and Anneke were put under arrest. Three weeks later they were freed by the victory of the revolution in Berlin. The demonstration had attained its purpose of setting the movement on the Rhine under way.

At the end of March, when Gottschalk and his friends were set at liberty, the situation had completely altered. As Marx had foreseen, the news that a republican legion was coming from France to invade Germany had visibly helped the forces of conservatism. A panic fear of the French seized the south and west of Germany. The French were visualised going through the land, looting and burning. The governments of Germany diligently fostered the general alarm. 'You have no idea of how our bourgeoisie fear the word "republic,"' Gottschalk wrote on March 26 to his friend Hess. 'For them it is synonymous with robbery, murder, or a Russian invasion, and your legions would be so execrated as bands of murderous incendiaries that but few proletarians would come to your aid.' Georg Weerth wrote to Marx on March 25 almost in the same terms, also from Cologne. Communism, he added, was a word people shuddered at, and anyone who came out openly as a Communist would be stoned. And when the legion crossed the frontier and on top of it the rapidly suppressed Republican rising took place in Baden, the word 'republic' took on the most evil connotations, at any rate for the time being, in people's minds. Another thing that added strength to the counter-revolution was that the newspapers printed lies about letters of Marx said to have been found on captured leaders of the legion, so that Republican, Communist and national enemy became synonymous.

A furious hue-and-cry for the ringleaders of the dispersed demonstration started in Cologne, a 'veritable battue,' as one newspaper put it, and Willich felt the place had become too hot to hold him. He went to Baden and took part in the insurrection there, and Cologne saw him no more. Gottschalk remained to defy the storm. Finding himself defended by the moderate Democrats either faint-heartedly or not at all, he did not mince matters but turned his face from them and confined the whole of his agitation to the workers. On April 6, four days before Marx's arrival in Cologne, he issued an appeal for the foundation of a 'Democratic Socialist Union.'

Three hundred people were present at the inaugural meeting on April 13. The overwhelming majority were workers. For this reason they promptly adopted the additional title of 'Workers' Union.' The success of the new organisation was astonishing. At the beginning of May the newspapers estimated its membership at between three and four thousand. By the end of June the membership had risen to nearly eight thousand. Every one of its meetings at the Gürzenich-haus was packed to overflowing. The workers in their blouses sat before a platform adorned with the red flag, wearing red sashes across their breasts, some of them with red Jacobin caps on their heads. Many of the audience were women, and many were illiterate workers, porters and boatmen, who were particularly hard hit by the prevailing unemployment.

Popular as Gottschalk was among the workers of Cologne, his name alone would not have sufficed to hold this great mass of people together had he not skilfully and effectively represented their most immediate interests. The Workers' Union was at one and the same time an educational association, a political club, and also a breeding ground of trade unionism. Gottschalk divided the union into occupational sections, and what with the prevalent trade crisis--for the employers, hampered by no law, lowered wages, lengthened hours, gave their apprentices worse victuals--these sections had enough and more than enough to do. They worked out wage rates, tried to establish standards for the working day, busied themselves with conditions of labour. The workers brought their troubles and needs to the Union as though it were omnipotent.

It was hated by the employers in proportion. Not only the employers but the whole propertied class regarded the Workers' Union as a nefarious assault upon humanity. The most incredible rumours gathered round the Union and its president, Gottschalk, 'the Communist apostle.' One reactionary journal stated that the demagogue was putting the craziest ideas into the workers' heads. The workers no longer worked but spent all their evenings at the political clubs, from which they went home drunk and beat their wives and children, whom they left to starve. Gottschalk was credited with hatching the most infamous plots. It was said at the end of April that Gottschalk nightly had 'terrible troops of workers drilling with the eleven thousand flints that Abd-el-Kadr had sent him.'

However absurd it may sound, all this was taken perfectly seriously by a great many people. The more sinister the Workers' Union came to appear in the eyes of the property-owners, the more willingly did they listen to the voice of reaction. But dislike of the Workers' Union was widespread even among the most democratically-minded artisans of Cologne. The 'Association of Employers and Employed,' the leader of which was Hermann Becker, a Democrat, who became active in the Communist League in 1850 and 1851, though later he underwent a complete change of view and eventually became burgomaster of Cologne, was mainly an association of small master-craftsmen and educated artisans. It took its stand on the basis of class peace.

Such was the situation when Marx arrived in Cologne. At first he naturally enough adhered to the party of Gottschalk. He took part in the first meetings of the Workers' Union. But in a very short time differences of opinion concerning the policy of the Union arose between Gottschalk and him. A contemporary record has survived of a meeting which took place shortly after Marx's arrival between the leaders of the Communist League on the one side and the members of the Cologne branch on the other. The discussion is said to have become 'very violent' and Dr. Gottschalk was harshly criticised in regard to the organisation of the Workers' Union. Further information is not available, but from the subsequent development of the dispute it is safe to conclude that as soon as he had surveyed the situation in the first few days after his arrival Marx resolutely opposed Gottschalk's policy. The situation in Germany being what it was, Gottschalk's programme could not result in anything but parting the proletariat from the Democratic movement and completely isolating it.

The Revolution had created, for the first time in German history, a Parliament for the whole of Germany, including Austria. The National Assembly was to meet in Frankfurt. In Prussia a Chamber was to be elected by a secret and universal indirect ballot. Gottschalk demanded a boycott of the elections both for the Frankfurt and the Berlin assemblies. He claimed that indirect voting was objectionable in itself, and besides there was not sufficient time for the necessary preliminary campaign. The majority of the workers who supported Gottschalk followed him in this, and other extreme Left groups also proclaimed an election boycott, in which they may have been influenced by the example of the Blanquists in France. There is no doubt that the Blanquist example influenced Gottschalk. Blanqui was not Gottschalk's model in this alone. Gottschalk may well have had some contact with Blanqui as early as 1848. Herwegh bears witness to his having visited Blanqui in prison when in Paris at the beginning of 1849.

Marx condemned the extreme Left boycott of the elections as an idle and futile demonstration, ultra-revolutionary in form, reactionary in content. By it the Lefts cleared the political battlefield for the forces of Reaction and the lukewarm centre. Marx's dispute with Gottschalk became intensified.

Gottschalk's standing out for a boycott was merely the consequence of his general attitude. He utterly rejected all and every compromise and would not hear of even the most temporary coalition with non-proletarian Democratic groups. The probable effects of his demands and slogans on others than his own followers did not trouble him at all. He conducted his propaganda openly under the Republican banner, and not just the Republican banner, but the Socialist banner too--the banner of the Republic of Labour. Gottschalk simply shut his eyes to the whole political backwardness of Germany.

The Democrats were not themselves agreed as to how the three dozen Fatherlands of Germany were to be united. There were advocates of constitutional monarchy upon the broadest democratic basis, there were advocates of a 'republic with hereditary royal officials,' there were those who wanted the several states to be republics subject to an all-German monarchy, while others again wanted their own state to be a constitutional monarchy subject to a German federal republic. Between the advocates of extreme federalism and extreme centralisation there were advocates of every conceivable form of compromise. Even among the Democrats, to say nothing of the Liberals, there were but few who favoured the 'one and indivisible republic' which was the first of the seventeen demands which the Communist League formulated and distributed in the form of a pamphlet. Marx was convinced of this by letters sent him by friends and sympathisers from all over Germany. Engels wrote from Barmen: 'If a single copy of our seventeen points were distributed here, as far as we were concerned all would be lost.' Marx issued warnings against illusory hopes in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung not long afterwards. 'We do not at the outset make the Utopian demand for a single and indivisible German republic,' he wrote, 'but we demand of the so--called Radical-Democratic Party that it do not confound the point of departure of the struggle and of the revolutionary movement with its final aims. It is not now a matter of realising this or that point of view, this or that political idea, but of insight into the course of development. The National Assembly (in Frankfurt) has only to perform the immediate and practically possible steps.'

In these circumstances Gottschalk's line of action meant parting the advanced workers not only from the Liberal and Democratic bourgeoisie but also from the great mass of the workers themselves. It meant destroying the coalition of proletariat and revolutionary bourgeoisie in the struggle against absolutism, a coalition that the Communist Manifesto had proclaimed as inevitable but temporary.

Marx's attitude was clearly defined in the very first months of revolution. He was opposed to coming out prematurely and independently with the seventeen points. 'When we founded a great newspaper in Germany,' Engels wrote in 1884, 'the banner for us to take our stand under presented itself. It could only be the banner of democracy, but the banner of a democracy which emphasised its specifically proletarian character in details only, since it was not yet possible to proclaim its proletarian character once and for all. Had we been unwilling to do this ... we should have had no choice but to content ourselves with teaching the doctrines of Communism in an obscure local paper and founding a small sect instead of a great party of action. The time had passed for us to be preachers in the wilderness. We had studied the Utopians too well not to know that. We had not drafted our programme for that.'

In the middle of April Marx and his friends participated in the formation of the Democratic Union in Cologne. It did not at first stand out in any particular way, but took the line that the form of government of the future united Germany should be left to be decided by the National Assembly at Frankfurt and that the relations between throne and people in Prussia should be left to the Chamber in Berlin. This evasion of a clear answer to the most elementary questions left the members of the Democratic Union more than dissatisfied. Someone at the meeting asked what the members of the Democratic Union wanted themselves. Seven-eighths of them were in favour of a republic, as the discussion showed, but no resolution in favour of a republic was made. The few who had not yet made up their minds should not be antagonised and driven over to the moderates.

The Democratic Union's first definite action was taking part in the elections for Frankfurt and Berlin. Marx's critics maintained that thanks to his tactics not so much as a single Democrat was sent to Parliament, but only a fortuitous Left of the type of Franz Raveaux, whom Marx himself was very soon forced to criticise in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. But there is no doubt that but for the Democratic Union Cologne would have been represented by Rights and moderates only.

The Communist League was not equal to the situation the Revolution had created. It was inadequate in every way. It very soon demonstrated itself to be incomparably weaker in Germany than the central office had supposed. All the emissaries of the League, who were dispersed in every direction, were unanimous to that effect. In Berlin there was no organisation whatsoever, and the handful of approximately twenty sympathisers had practically no contact with each other. In Breslau the League was entirely unrepresented. In Mainz the organisation was on the point of collapse, and in other centres the story was the same. The League's emissaries were certainly not lacking in energy and enthusiasm, but the branches, in the places where they did manage to found them, very soon demonstrated that they had no real life in them. All the really active members devoted themselves to legal work in the workers' unions, on newspapers and so forth. Marx refused to keep the Communist League alive artificially and go on leading a movement because it had once existed. Besides, there were difficulties Marx had to contend with within the League itself.

In Marx's opinion the appearance of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung did away with the excuse even for the appearance of the Communist League's existence. A secret organisation had become entirely superfluous, and all that Marx had to say, all the general guidance he had to offer, could be made public through the Press. Because of the infinite variety of conditions in Germany, which varied from state to state and from province to province, it was not possible to give more than general guidance. Marx therefore proposed to the central office that the League be dissolved. Schapper and the other members of the London group put up some opposition to this course. Though they agreed with him on general political questions and sided with him in the struggle with Gottschalk, they had lived in the League and with the League and for the League and it had been dear to them too long for them to be able to consent to its dissolution. So Marx, in the words of a contemporary, 'made use of his discretionary powers and dissolved the League.'

Gottschalk had agreed with Marx with regard to the dissolution of the League. In the Workers' Union he had an incomparably more powerful weapon than the small local branch of the Communist League, so he was able to watch it die with a light heart. Another motive may also have influenced him. He wanted to sever all party connection with Marx in order to be able to attack him with the less restraint. Even before the appearance of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung sharp collisions arose between Marx's, and Gottschalk's followers. After the collapse of the republican rising in Baden, Willich fled to France and gathered the fugitives at Besançon. Most of them were workers, and their state was so piteous that Willich appealed to the Democrats in Germany to assist them. Anneke had joined the Democratic Union in spite of his friendship with Gottschalk. At a meeting of the Union he rose, read Willich's letter of appeal and proposed that the Union collect money for the Republican refugees at Besançon. A lively discussion ended in a vote heavily turning down the proposal. Anneke was the only one to vote for it. According to the newspapers the Democrats, in spite of their sympathy for the hungering and exiled worker-refugees, declined to help them because doing so might be interpreted as approval of the policy by which they had been guided. Anneke resigned from the Democratic Union. At his and Gottschalk's suggestion the Workers' Union started a collection which raised quite a respectable sum. That made it perfectly clear, of course, that Marx and his Democrats were cowardly and inhuman, while Gottschalk and the Workers' Union were noble and courageous Republicans.

Marx's name had not yet been mentioned and the second attack was not directed openly at him, either, but at the Neue Rhenische Zeitung, the first number of which had recently appeared. The printer did not pay the wages which the Workers' Union was trying to establish as the minimum for the trade. No other printer in Cologne paid the minimum wage either, but Gottschalk had no need to mention that. The editorial staff of the Neue Rhenische Zeitung, i.e. Marx, had nothing whatever to do with the printer and the wages he paid his staff. Gottschalk's newspaper started a violent campaign against the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which described itself as an organ of democracy but was in the hands of a group of inveterate aristocrats--indeed the most dangerous kind, money-aristocrats. They were 'trampling on the proletariat and betraying the people.'

Marx had just obtained an organ in which he could state his position clearly. His task was by no means confined to defending himself against the agitation carried on against him by the ultra-Lefts in Cologne. The paper was to be a substitute for the Communist League throughout Germany, and over and above that the organ of the 'great party of action' of the German Revolution. A few radicals, in particular Georg Weerth and Heinrich Bürgers, both friends of Marx from earlier years, had busied themselves with the project of founding a newspaper before Marx's arrival in Cologne. Bürgers was no Communist, and the paper was not originally intended to be more than a local Cologne newspaper, and Marx had not been intended to work on it. When he arrived he was advised to go to Berlin. He declined. 'We knew the Berlin of that time only too well from personal observation,' Engels wrote later. 'Berlin with its barely arisen bourgeoisie, its loquacious but timid and obsequious lower middle-class, its completely undeveloped workers, its teeming bureaucracy, its swarms of nobles and courtiers.' The decisive factor, however, was that the Code Napoléon was in force in Cologne, involving freedom of the Press, which was not even remotely conceivable in Berlin even after the events of March.

Marx succeeded in gaining control of the paper within a very short time. For this purpose it was necessary to secure the consent of the Cologne Democrats. The newspaper had to be 'edited from the German Democratic viewpoint, which regarded the question of whether Germany should have a monarchy or a republic as an open one, though it gave the advantage to the republican idea both from the practical and the theoretical point of view.' This was how Bürgers formulated the conditions on which the editorship would be given to Marx. Bürgers was himself on the editorial board. Marx naturally accepted these terms.

There was greater difficulty in raising the money for the paper than its backers had expected. The upper bourgeoisie would have nothing whatever to do with the Democrats, particularly with those suspected of having anything whatever to do with Communism. Marx appealed to Engels to try to place some of the shares in the Wuppertal. His success was meagre. According to his son, old Engels would rather send him a thousand bullets than a thousand thalers. Marx did not fare much better in Cologne. Meanwhile events were pressing. The National Assembly met at Frankfurt and from the first day showed itself so timid, so undecided, so conscience-stricken that the future of this half-revolution seemed to promise the worst. It was essential that the paper should appear as soon as possible. Marx plunged his hand in his own pocket and produced every penny he possessed. All the money available, such as it was, was laid down, and the first number of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung appeared on June 1, 1848.

With the exception of Bürgers, the editorial board consisted entirely of ex-members of the Communist League: Dronke, Weerth, Ferdinand Wolff, Wilhelm Wolff. Marx was the editor. The organisation of the editorial staff, in the words of Engels, was 'a simple dictatorship by Marx. A great daily which had to be ready by a definite time could not maintain a consistent attitude in any other way. Marx's dictatorship was accepted as a matter of course. It was undisputed and gladly acknowledged by us all. It was above all his clear views and firm principles that made it the most famous newspaper of the revolutionary years.'

Marx's editorship was distinguished by the fact that he did not publish any general theoretical articles of the kind that filled the other Democratic newspapers of the time to a surfeit. Facts were the language of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. While Democratic professors explained the advantages of the republican form of government at interminable length--to which they were particularly prone in the South German Press--lectures of this kind were completely absent from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The reason for this was not alone because of the agreement with Bürgers. Marx's task was to give his readers an 'insight into the course of development.' The way in which Marx presented his facts, made them demonstrate the inevitability of a republican solution, was the most effective possible propaganda for republicanism, though the word was never mentioned.

The paper's policy was determined by Marx and Marx alone. Marx edited it as he had edited the Rheinische Zeitung five years before. Just as behind every word of the Rheinische Zeitung there had been the voice of Marx, so did he now make every word of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung his own. The paper called itself the 'organ of democracy' and in speaking of the battle-front against the forces of feudal absolutism it used the phrase 'we Democrats.' During the first months it avoided anything that might possibly disturb the united front. Not a word was spoken of the antagonism between proletarian and non-proletarian, bourgeois or petty-bourgeois democracy. There was not a word about the special interests of the working classes, of the workers' special tasks in the German Revolution. Neither Engels or Marx wrote a word about the position of the workers until the end of 1848. Engels, writing to Marx from Barmen before the appearance of the paper, expressed himself very strongly on this question of the policy of the united front at any price. 'The workers are beginning to stir a little, still very crudely, but in a mass. That, however, does not suit us,' he wrote. The proletariat must march in the great democratic battle-line, always at the extreme Left wing, always taking care not to lose connection with the rest of the army. It must be at its most impetuous in attack, its fighting spirit must animate the host in the storming of the Bastille. For the Bastille is not yet taken, Marx cried to those who threatened to tire, absolutism is not defeated yet. As long as the Bastille is still standing the Democrats must remain united. The proletariat must not isolate itself; however difficult the task may be, it must reject everything tending to divide it from the rest.

The Communist Manifesto had allotted the Communist Party a twofold task, not only that of taking part in the common struggle of the bourgeoisie against the reactionary classes but of 'instilling into the workers the clearest possible recognition of the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, so that the German workers may straightway use as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie the social and political conditions which the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce with their supremacy, and in order that the fight against the bourgeoisie may immediately begin after the downfall of the reactionary classes.'

First the bourgeoisie must come into power, but really into power. The proletariat must support it in this, urge it forward, pitilessly scourge every weakness, every hesitation, every compromise the bourgeoisie might want to make with the forces of reaction. But so long as the revolutionary advance of the bourgeoisie continued it must maintain a united front with it. After the victory the united front must be destroyed. Once the bourgeoisie had in all essentials got the power, the struggle against it would begin. In Germany it could not, must not begin yet. In France and England it was different.

The Neue Rheinische Zeitung gave more space to events abroad than any other German paper. What had already come to pass in France and England must come to pass in Germany to-morrow. There could be no better way of creating the 'clearest possible awareness of the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat' than by constantly drawing the workers' attention to events abroad. But in Germany the Bastille must first be stormed. In Germany compromise was inevitable. In Germany 'we Democrats' must fight shoulder to shoulder until victory was gained. In France the time for compromise had passed. Strenuously as Marx avoided anything that might have weakened the joint Democratic forces in Germany, he sided just as resolutely with the insurrectionary Paris workers in those days of June.

Consideration for his allies in the struggles did not mean that he spared their weaknesses. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung treated its contemptible opponents, the monarchy, the military camarilla, the whole of the forces of reaction, with the greatest contempt. That goes without saying. It poured just as much scorn and contempt upon the irresolution and pusillanimity of the Left. The revolution had not yet been accomplished. It was an illusion to suppose that nothing was left now but to gather in its fruits. The Assembly at Frankfurt was only a timid beginning, and if it stood still it must be whipped forward. 'The very first number began with an article which ridiculed the ineffectiveness of the Frankfurt Parliament, the uselessness of its long-winded speeches, the vanity of its timid resolutions. It cost us half our shareholders.' Engels still remembered that with pleasure nearly forty years later.

War with Russia would drive the revolution forward, cut off every possibility of a bourgeois retreat, destroy half-slain feudalism with a single mighty blow. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung demanded it from the very first day. There was no other way of freeing Poland than by war. Russia was the mainstay of European reaction; it must be overthrown in war. With every month it became clearer that only war with Russia could save the German Revolution. The German Revolution had got stuck in 'a tedious philistine cul-de-sac,' as Engels complained in September, 1848. It failed to overcome the old impediment of its division into innumerable petty states. Prussia, though it had sustained some heavy blows, was fundamentally intact, and remained the single serious internal opponent. Austria stood firm in spite of all shocks and threatened to become strong once more. The only possibility of uniting Germany was for Germany to make a united war on Russia. 'If Germany could be brought to war with Russia, it would be all up with Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns, and the Revolution would be victorious all along the line.' Marx scarcely expected the war to revolutionise Russia. The liberation of Poland, though a desired aim, was nevertheless a by-product. The war must be fought for the salvation and completion of the German revolutionary will. The Tsar would be the saviour of the German Revolution, because he would centralise it. That was how Marx regarded the question of war.

But the Tsar hesitated and did not attack the Revolution, and the Revolution in its turn was too feeble, too little centralised, to take the offensive itself.

A perceptible change took place in Cologne after Marx started addressing the workers directly. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung found its way to the workers and to the members of Gottschalk's Union, who obviously started by mistrusting it. The Workers' Union published a pitiful little sheet which contained practically nothing but minutes of Union meetings and short paragraphs about the workers' everyday life. It did not satisfy even the most modest demands. Complaints about it were made at meetings, but Gottschalk, a good speaker and organiser, was a less than mediocre journalist.

Marx's field of activity also extended in another direction. The various Democratic Unions, which were distributed all over Germany, sent their representatives to a Congress which took place in Frankfurt-on-Main on June 14 and 15. The Workers' Union in Cologne also took part in it. If Gottschalk had been consistent he would have boycotted the Democratic Congress just as he had boycotted the two Parliaments. He did not do so. The Workers' Union sent him to Frankfurt as their only delegate, because 'Gottschalk alone was completely competent to represent the Workers' Union of Cologne.' He was to demand an open avowal of a republic and an open disavowal of the Frankfurt and Berlin Parliaments.

Gottschalk played an important rôle at the Democratic Congress. One delegate described him as a man 'born to be a dictator, possessing indefatigable energy and intelligence as sharp as a guillotine, an image of Robespierre.' Of the two resolutions that he proposed the anti-Parliamentary one was rejected and the other accepted with a highly significant alteration. A Democratic republic was declared to be not, as Gottschalk demanded, the 'only possible' system of government but as the 'only tenable' one. He did not leave the Congress on this account but actually gave his vote in favour of the resolutions which determined the constitution of the Union itself. These declared the Neue Rheinische Zeitung to be one of the three official organs of the Democratic Party, and appealed to all Democratic associations existing at any one place to unite.

Three organisations had sent their representatives to the Congress from Cologne: the Workers' Union, the Democratic Union and the Association of Employers and Employed. These ought now to have united. Gottschalk wanted a complete fusion of the three, which, in view of the great numerical preponderance of the Workers' Union, would have meant the complete submergence of the other two organisations in his. The Democratic Union declined to be submerged and proposed that a bureau of co-operation be created instead. Negotiations were still in progress when events occurred which fundamentally altered the situation of the Cologne Democrats.

The bourgeoisie were not alone in their hatred of Gottschalk. The police had had an eye on him for a long time, and they stepped in now. According to the police report Gottschalk and Anneke were said to have proposed to the Workers' Union 'the foundation of a republic by violent means.' Gottschalk and Anneke were arrested on July 3. The prison gates closed behind them for six months.

An interregnum in the Workers' Union now began. Not one of Gottschalk's adherents was capable of replacing him. Joseph Moll was elected temporary president. Although he was an opponent of Gottschalk's, his energy, courage and knowledge had earned him general respect. He and Schapper now became the leaders of the Union, and both of them were political partisans of Marx. An attempt to attack Marx from another quarter miscarried. Marx's old opponent, Wilhelm Weitling, came to Cologne in the middle of July. On July 21, at the Democratic Union, he made 'an exciting speech in which he proclaimed the necessity of a complete reorganisation of our political and social institutions,' in the words of a newspaper favourably disposed towards him. This speech was reported in full in the official organ of the Democratic Union. In America Weitling had learned nothing whatever. He still preached government by the 'judicious' because neither in Germany nor in America nor even in the Democratic Union, as he not very politely added, was the mob capable of recognising where its real interests lay. Marx answered him at a meeting on August 4. In their social development, he said, the Germans were now where the French had been in 1789. To set up a dictatorship to realise any one man's ideas would be absurd. The sovereign power, as in the case of the provisional government in Paris, must be formed of the most heterogeneous elements, which then, by the exchange of ideas, must decide on the most effective method of government. The drafting of the report cannot be said to be very clear, but Marx's line of argument can be detected through the muddled statement. He demanded that the German Revolution be completed, the bourgeois revolution, the German 1789, representing the coalition of all the forces of Democracy, all 'the highly heterogeneous elements.'

In the meantime a joint committee of Cologne Democrats had been formed. Marx and Schneider, a lawyer, represented the Democratic Union, Schapper and Moll the Workers' Union, and two others represented the Association of Employers and Employed. This combination assured the leadership of Marx. The committee displayed tremendous activity. In the middle of August it organised the first Rhineland Democratic Congress, at which forty delegates represented sixteen organisations. Marx was the life and soul of the Congress. Karl Schurz, the German-American statesman, who was a young student at Bonn at the time, described forty years later the impression that Marx made upon him. 'Marx was thirty years old and already the recognised head of a school of Socialism. A thick-set, powerful man, with his high forehead, his pitch-black hair and beard and his dark, flashing eyes, he immediately attracted general attention. He had the reputation of great learning in his subject, and what he said was in fact solid, logical and clear.' People with unclear minds were always repelled by Marx's clarity and logic. Schurz was of the opinion that he had never met a man of such wounding and intolerable arrogance of manner. He never forgot the tone of biting contempt with which he uttered, almost spat the word 'bourgeois.' Albert Brisbane, correspondent of the New York Tribune, who was staying in Cologne at the time, also saw Marx but saw him through different eyes. 'His features gave one the impression of great energy, and behind his sober-minded reserve one could see the passionate fire of a courageous spirit.'

The more outspoken the Neue Rheinische Zeitung became, the more energetically it denounced the Lefts for an irresolution bordering on cowardice if not positive treason to the Revolution, the more plainly it hinted that the co-operation of bourgeoisie and proletariat could only be temporary, however necessary it might be in Germany at the moment, the more alarmed the shareholders became. Half of them were lost as soon as the newspaper appeared, and articles about the June fighting cost Marx the other half. The paper was brought sharply up against serious practical difficulties. The printer refused to extend credit any further, and one issue of the paper failed to appear. Fortunately another printer was found, but the position became so threatening that at the end of August Marx had to undertake a journey through Germany and Austria to raise the funds necessary to continue. His travels took him to Berlin, to Vienna, then to Berlin again. In Vienna Marx addressed the local Democratic Union and he lectured on wage-labour and capital at the first Vienna Workers' Union. In both cities he negotiated with the leaders of Left organisations. Whether he obtained the assistance he required is not known. All that is known is that the Neue Rheinische Zeitung received very generous support from the Polish Democrats. On September 18 Vladislav Koscielsky sent the Neue Rheinische Zeitung two thousand thalers in their name.

Marx returned to Cologne just when the events of September, the stormiest period of the 'mad year' in Cologne, were beginning. Their outbreak coincided with the resignation of the Prussian ministry of Auerswald-Hansemann. Marx had castigated it for the cowardice with which it retreated step by step before the forces of reaction, which were growing bolder every day. Incompetent a government as it had been, it had by no means been reactionary in intent, and all the key positions in it had been occupied by members of the bourgeoisie. Its resignation was an indication of the impending crash. Marx summoned the Democrats to mass action. In the midst of this critical situation a number of clashes which had been brewing for a long time and had no connection, at least no direct connection, with the political change of scene, broke out in Cologne. In Cologne, as everywhere else along the Rhine, feelings between townsmen and soldiery were very strained. The garrisons consisted predominantly of troops from east of the Elbe and were systematically incited against the people by their officers. There had been serious collisions between military and civilians in Mainz and Aachen during the past spring. Cologne's turn came now. Soldiers attacked and beat civilians without any cause whatever. There was general indignation at this, and it was by no means confined to the Democrats. It was widespread among the otherwise entirely 'loyal' population. The editorial staff of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung took the protest in hand. Wilhelm Wolff and Engels summoned an open-air mass-meeting at which the brutality of the soldiery was denounced and a committee of public safety, thirty strong, was elected to prevent a repetition of such attacks. Marx was a member of the committee.

To the excitement caused by these events in Cologne there was now added indignation at the advance of reaction in Prussia and at the Prussian armistice with Denmark. This indignation swept through the whole of Germany and created a situation which caused many to believe that the outbreak of a second revolution was at hand. To the Democrats and Liberals, even the most moderate of them, the war with Denmark was an affair of the whole of the German people. Schleswig-Holstein was German territory subject to the Danish throne; to liberate it from its Danish overlords was one of the foremost tasks of the United Germany movement. When the war broke out students and workers who had just been fighting at the barricades in Berlin hurried to volunteer for the army. The struggle for Schleswig-Holstein had become a symbol of German unity. And now Prussia signed an armistice with Denmark. That meant its abandonment of the United German front and its return to the old, purely Prussian and purely dynastic policy. The armistice at Malmö was felt as a deliberate challenge, an insolent slap in the nation's face. As for the National Assembly, it vacillated, swung unworthily this way and that, and on September 16 expressed its consent to the armistice.

On September 17, a huge mass-meeting gathered at Worringen, near Cologne. It was attended by delegations from innumerable Rhineland towns and many peasants from the surrounding district. It resolved, on Engels's proposal, that should Prussia and the National Assembly at Frankfurt come into conflict they would stand by Germany 'through thick and thin.' That the National Assembly had capitulated to Prussia in the meantime was not yet known at Cologne. When the news arrived anger knew no bounds. Indignation was widespread throughout Germany. There was serious fighting in Frankfurt on September 18, and two of the most hated reactionary deputies were lynched. The Democratic Union and the Workers' Union at Cologne declared their solidarity with the fighters at the Frankfurt barricades and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung started a subscription fund for the insurrectionaries and their families. Next day the king appointed General Pfuel Prime Minister of Prussia. Pfuel was hated by the Democrats as the Oppressor of the Poles. His nomination only served to pour oil on the flames.

The military had made their preparations, the troops in the fortresses were ready for action and guns were directed on the town. The second Rhineland Democratic Congress was intended to meet on September 25. On that day, at seven o'clock in the morning, Hermann Becker and Karl Schapper were arrested. Moll escaped arrest because a crowd quickly gathered and prevented the police from seizing him. The City Militia refused to help the police. The whole city was in an uproar. Marx hurried to the Workers' Union. He and Bürgers, who were informed of the situation in full, 'declared in the name of the Congress that in no circumstances, least of all at the present moment, did they want a rising.' The workers, exasperated at the loss of their leaders, listened 'with gloomy looks.' Other meetings took place, here and there people actually started putting up barricades, but no actual fighting took place. The preponderance of the military was so great that the City Militia, who in any case were not so very determined to carry matters to extremes, held back, and the workers, unarmed or badly armed, could not fight alone. The outbreak must not be confined to Cologne and could not start yet. The crisis must first become even more acute. Marx declined to consent to a local riot. Germany was not ready for a general rising yet.

Not a single shot had been fired in Cologne, but the military wished to savour their triumph to the full. Martial law was proclaimed, all political associations were dissolved, all meetings were forbidden, and the radical papers, starting with the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, were suspended. The reactionary Press could scarcely contain itself with joy at the end of its hated enemies. 'The entire editorial staffs have had to take flight,' it exulted. This was an exaggeration. Warrants were issued for the arrest of Engels, Dronke and the two Wolffs. Marx not having spoken at any public meeting, the police had no excuse for taking proceedings against him. But the position of the newspaper was more than difficult. Besides Marx, only Georg Weerth, who was in charge of the feuilleton, remained. All the rest of the staff had been forced to fly.

If the Reaction thought the time had come for rejoicing, they rejoiced a little too soon. Marx had no intention of laying down his arms. In spite of the paper's financial position, which was now, of course, more desperate than ever, he promptly opened negotiations to continue publication at Düsseldorf should the state of martial law be prolonged.

The negotiations turned out to be superfluous. The unnecessary declaration of martial law roused even the tamest citizens of Cologne against the military command. The city council unanimously demanded its withdrawal. There were debates about' it in the Berlin Chamber, and they were very embarrassing to the Government. On October 3 the military authorities withdrew martial law very reluctantly, but under orders from Berlin. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung appeared again a week later. Marx prominently announced that the editorial staff remained unchanged, but with the addition of Ferdinand Freiligrath, who had just been acquitted of a charge of high treason. Before the period of martial law the newspaper had had six thousand subscribers, which placed it in the front rank of German newspapers in circulation as well as in influence. In a short time it reached its old position and even surpassed it.

Marx's influence on the Workers' Union had grown stronger and stronger. It was only natural that the Union should now invite him to become its leader. It had lost its president for the second time since Gottschalk's arrest. Moll was a fugitive and Schapper in prison. A delegation approached Marx, but it was only after a good deal of hesitation that he agreed to accept the position. He explained his reasons at a meeting on October 16. His position in Cologne was precarious. He was no longer a Prussian subject, and although the Cologne Council had granted him a permit to stay in the city, the State authorities would not hear of his being renaturalised. Besides, he would shortly have to appear before a jury because of an alleged offence against the Press Laws, to say nothing of his being overwhelmed with work on account of the temporary dispersal of the editorial committee of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. 'Nevertheless,' according to the minutes of the meeting, 'he was prepared temporarily to comply with the wish of the workers until Dr. Gottschalk should be released. Government and bourgeoisie must be convinced that despite all persecution there are always people ready to place themselves at the workers' disposal.'

Marx, who had in effect been president of the Workers' Union ever since the temporary election of Moll to that position, now became its president in name as well. It was the outward sign of his victory in the struggle he had been carrying on for six months in the ranks of the workers' organisations and the Communist League in Cologne.