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There are life-moments that, like border markers, stand before an expiring time while at the same time clearly pointing out a new direction. In such transitional moments we feel ourselves compelled to observe the past and the future with eagle-eyes of thought, in order to attain consciousness of our actual position. Indeed, world history itself loves such looking back and inspection, which often impresses it with the appearance of retrogression and stagnation, while it is really only sitting back in the easy chair, in order to comprehend itself and to intellectually penetrate its own activity, the act of spirit. The individual, however, becomes lyrical in such moments, for every metamorphosis is partly a swan song, partly the overture of a great new poem that strives to win a pose in blurred but brilliant colors. At such times we wish to erect a memorial to what has already been lived, so it may win back in the imagination the place it lost in the world of action; and where could we find a holier place than in the heart of our parents, who are the mildest judges and the innermost participants, like the sun of love whose fire warms the innermost center of our strivings! How better could amends and pardons be found for all that is objectionable and blameworthy than to take on the appearance of an essentially necessary condition? How at least could the often hostile game of chance, the straying of the spirit, better distance itself from the reproach of being due to a twisted heart? If at the end of a year spent here I now cast a glance back at its conditions and so, my good father, answer your dear, dear letter from Ems, allow me to review my circumstances just as I observe life itself, as the expression of a spiritual activity, which develops on all sides, in science, art, and private affairs. As I left you a new world was born for me, a world of love, and, indeed, in the beginning a love intoxicated with longing and empty of hope. The trip to Berlin, which otherwise would delight me in the highest degree, would excite in me the appreciation of nature, would fire up a love of life, left me cold. Indeed it put me in a noticeably bad humor, for the rocks which I saw were neither steeper nor more intimidating than the feelings of my soul, the wide cities were not more lively than my own blood, the tavern tables no more filled or indigestible than the packets of fantasy I carried with me, and finally, the art not so beautiful as Jenny. Having arrived in Berlin, I broke off all previous relationships, made only few visits and those without joy, and sought to lose myself in science and art. According to the spiritual situation at that time, the first subject, or at least the most pleasant and simplest to pick up was necessarily lyrical poetry. But my situation and development up to that point made this purely idealistic. My heaven, my art, became a remote beyond, just like my love. Everything real faded, and all faded things lose their boundaries. All of the poems of the first three volumes that Jenny received from me are characterized by attacks on the present times, by broad and formless feelings thrown together, where nothing is natural, everything constructed from out of the moon, the complete opposition of what is and what should be, rhetorical reflections rather than poetical thoughts, but perhaps also by a certain warmth of feeling and wrestling for vitality. The whole extent of a longing that sees no limit finds expression in many forms and makes poetic composition into mere diffusion. But poetry may only and should only be an accompaniment. I had to study jurisprudence and felt above all the urge to wrestle with philosophy. These were so tied together that, on the one hand, I read through Heineccius, Thibaut, and the sources purely uncritically, as a student would, and, for example, translated the two first books of the Pandects into German; on the other hand, I sought to delineate a philosophy of right through the whole field of law. I attached a few metaphysical propositions to it as an introduction and continued this unfortunate opus all the way to public law, a work of nearly 300 pages. More than anything else, what came to the fore here was the same opposition between the actual and the possible that is peculiar to idealism, a serious defect that gave birth to the following clumsy and incorrect division. First came what I was pleased to christen the metaphysics of law, that is, foundational propositions, reflections, and conceptual determinations that were separated from all actual law and from every actual form of law, just like in Fichte, only in my case it was more modern and less substantial. Moreover, the unscientific form of mathematical dogmatism where the subject runs around the matter, here and there rationalizing, while the topic itself is never formulated as a richly unfolding living thing was from the very beginning a hindrance to grasping the truth. The triangle allows the mathematician to construct and to demonstrate, yet it remains a mere idea in space and doesn t develop any further. One must put it next to other things, and then it takes on other positions, and when this difference is added to what is already there, it acquires different relations and truths. By contrast, in the concrete expression of a living concept world, as in law, the state, nature, and all of philosophy, the object must be studied in its development, arbitrary divisions may not be brought in, and the reason of the thing itself must be disclosed as something imbued with contradictions and must find in itself its unity. As a second division followed the philosophy of right, that is, according to my view at the time, an examination of the development of thoughts in positive Roman law, as if the positive law in its conceptual development (I do not mean in its purely finite determinations) could ever be something different from the formation of the concept of law, which was supposed to be covered in the first part. On top of this, I had further divided this part into a doctrine of formal and material law. The former was the pure form of the system in its succession and its connections, the division and scope, while the latter, by contrast, was supposed to describe the content, the embodiment of the form in its content. This was a mistake that I shared with Herr v. Savigny, as I found later in his scholarly works on property, only with the difference that he calls the formal concept-determination finding the place which this or that doctrine takes in the (fictitious) Roman system, and material concept-determination as the doctrine of positivity which the Romans ascribe to a concept established in this way, while I understood by form the necessary architectonic of conceptual formulations, and by material, the necessary quality of these formulations. The error lies in the fact that I believed that one could and must develop the one apart from the other, so that I obtained not an actual form, but only a desk with drawers, into which I afterwards poured sand. The concept is certainly the mediating link between form and content. In a philosophical development of law, therefore, the one must spring forth from the other; indeed the form may only be the continuation of the content. Thus I arrived at a division whereby the subject could at best be sketched in an easy and shallow classification, but in which the spirit of the law and its truth disappeared. All law is divided into contractual and non-contractual. In order to make this clearer, I take the liberty of setting out the schema up to the division of jus publicum, which is also dealt with in the formal part. I. II. jus privatum. jus publicum. I. jus privatum. a) on conditional contractual private law, b) on unconditional non contractual private law. A. on Conditional Contractual Private Law. a) personal law; b) property law; c) personal property law. a) Personal law. I. on the basis of encumbered contracts; II. on the basis of contracts of assurance; III. on the basis of charitable contracts. 1. on the basis of Encumbered Contracts. 2. commercial contracts (societas). 3. contracts of casements (location conductio). 3. Locatio conduction 1. insofar as it relates to operae. a) location conduction proper (neither Roman renting nor leasing is meant!), b) mandatum. 2. insofar as it relates to usus rei. a) on land: ususfructus (also not in the merely Roman sense), b) on houses: habitation. II. on the basis of Contracts of Assurance. 1. arbitration or mediation contract. 2. insurance contract. III. on the basis of Charitable Contracts. 2. Promissory Contract. 1. fidejussio. 2. negotiorum gestio. 3. Gift Contract. b) Law of Things. 1. on the basis of Encumbered Contracts. 2. permutation stricte sic dicta. 1. permutation proper. 2. mutuum (usurae). 3. emtio venditio. IL on the basis of Contracts of Assurance. pignus. III. on the basis of Charitable Contracts. 2. commodatum. 3. depositum. But how could I continue to fill the pages With things that I myself rejected? Tripartite divisions run through the whole thing, it is written with enervating complication, and the Roman concepts are barbarically misused so as to force them into my system. On the other side, I at least gained in this way an appreciation and an overview of something, at least in a certain way. At the conclusion of the part on material private law I saw the falsity of the whole, the basic plan of which borders on that of Kant, but which diverges entirely from Kant in its elaboration, and again it became clear to me, that without philosophy it could not be pressed through to the end. So with a good conscience I allowed myself to be thrown into her arms again and wrote a new system of metaphysical principles, though at the conclusion I was once again compelled to observe the wrong-headedness of it, as with all of my earlier efforts. Meanwhile I made a habit of the practice of excerpting passages from out of all the books that I read. I did so from Lessing s Laokoon, Solger s Erwin, Winckelmann s art history, Luden s German history, and at the same time scribbled down my own reflections. I also translated Tacitus Germania, Ovid s Tristria, and started learning English and Italian on my own, that is, out of grammar books, though up to now I have accomplished nothing from this. I also read Klein s criminal law and his annals, and all of the newest literature, though this last only incidentally. At the end of the semester I again sought muse dances and satyr music, and already in the last notebook that I sent to you, idealism plays its part through forced humor ( Scorpio and Felix ) and through an unsuccessful, fantastic drama ( Oulanem ), until it finally undergoes a complete turnabout and turns into pure formal art, lacking inspired objects in most parts, and without any genuine train of thought. And yet these last poems are the only ones in which suddenly as if touched by magic ah! it was like a shattering blow in the beginning the realm of true poetry flashed before me like a distant fairy palace, and A my creations crumbled into nothing. Busy with these various occupations, I was awake through many nights during the first semester. Many battles had to be fought through, and I experienced both internal and external excitements. Yet in the end I emerged not so very enriched, and moreover I had neglected nature, art, and the world, and had pushed away my friends. My body apparently made these reflections, and a doctor advised me to visit the country. And so it was that I rode for the first time through the entire length of the city, all the way to the gate, and then to Stralow. I did not realize that there I would ripen from a pale, scrawny figure into a man with a robust and solid body. A curtain was fallen, my holiest of holies was ripped apart, and new gods had to be set in their place. From the idealism, which by the way, I had compared and nourished with the Kantian and Fichtean, I arrived at the point of seeking the idea in actuality itself. If the gods had earlier dwelt over the earth, so they were now made into its center. I had read fragments of the Hegelian philosophy, whose grotesque rocky melody did not please me. I wanted to dive down into that ocean one more time, but with the certain intention of finding that the nature of the mind is just as necessary, concrete and sure grounded as the corporeal nature. I no longer wished to practice the fencing arts, but to bring pure pearls out into the sunlight. I wrote a dialogue of about 24 pages: Cleanthes, or the Starting Point and Necessary Progress of Philosophy. Here art and science, which had gotten entirely separated from each other, were to some extent unified, and like a vigorous wanderer I strode into the work itself, a philosophical dialectical account of divinity and how it manifests itself conceptually, as religion, as nature, and as history. My last proposition was the beginning of the Hegelian system, and this work, for which I acquainted myself to some extent with natural science, Schelling, and history, and which caused me endless headaches is so [... unintelligible here] written (since it was actually supposed to be a new logic) that I now can hardly think myself into it again. This, my dearest child, reared by moonlight, had carried me like a false siren to the arms of the enemy. From irritation I couldn t think at all for a few days, walked around like mad in the garden by the dirty water of the Spree, which washes the soul and dilutes the tea. I even joined a hunting party with my landlord, and then rushed off to Berlin, where I wanted to embrace every person standing on the street corner. Shortly thereafter I pursued only positive studies: Savignys study of ownership, Feuerbach s and Grolmann s criminal law, de verborum significatione from Cramer, Wening-Ingenheim s Pandect system, and Muhlenbruch s Doctrina pandectarum, on which I am still working, and, finally, a few tides from Lauterbach, on civil process and above all ecclesiastical law, the first part of which, Gratian s Concordia discordantium canonum, I have almost entirely read through in corpus and excerpted, as also the appendix, and Lancelotti s Institutiones. Then I translated Aristotle s Rhetoric in parts, read de augmentis scientiarum from the famous Bacon of Verulam, occupied myself much with Reimarus, whose book On the artistic instincts of the Animals I thought through with much enjoyment, and I also tackled German law, though primarily only insofar as going through the capitularies of the Franconian kings and the letters of the Popes to them. From grief over Jenny s illness and my futile, failing intellectual labors, and out of debilitating irritation from having to make an idol out of a view I hated, I became sick, as I have already written you, dear father. When I was once again productive, I burned all of the poems and plans for novellas, etc., under the illusion that I could leave off from them entirely, for which I have until now delivered no evidence to the contrary. During my period of poor health I had gotten to know Hegel from beginning to end, including most of his students. Through several meetings with friends in Stralow I got into a Doctor s Club, which includes several instructors and my most intimate of Berlin friends, Dr. Rutenberg. In argument here many conflicting views were pronounced, and I became even more firmly bound to the contemporary world philosophy, which I thought to escape, but everything full of noise was silenced and a true fit of irony came over me, as could easily happen after so many negations. This was also the time of Jenny s silence, and I couldn t rest until I had acquired modernity and the standpoint of the contemporary scientific view through a few terrible productions like The Visit, etc. If I have perhaps presented here this entire last semester neither clearly nor in sufficient detail, and if I have blurred over all subtleties, forgive me, dear father, for my longing to speak of the present. Herr v. Chamisso sent to me a highly insignificant note, wherein he reports that he regrets that the almanac can not use my contributions, because it has long since been printed. I swallowed this out of irritation. Bookseller Wigand has sent my plan to Dr. Schmidt, publisher of Wunder s warehouse of good cheese and bad literature. I enclose this letter; Dr. Schmidt has not yet replied. Meanwhile I am by no means giving the plan up, especially since all the aesthetic notables of the Hegelian school have promised their collaboration through the mediation of university lecturer Bauer, who plays a large role in the group, and of my colleague Dr. Rutenberg. Now regarding the question of a career in cameralistics, my dear father, I have recently made the acquaintance of an assessor Schmidth nner, who advised me to go over to this as a justiciary after the third legal exam, which would be much easier for me to agree to, as I really prefer jurisprudence to any kind of administrative study. This man told me that in three years he himself and many others from the M nster provincial court in Westphalia had become assessors, which is not supposed to be difficult, with hard work of course, because the stages there are not like those in Berlin and elsewhere, where things are strictly determined. If one is later promoted from assessor to doctor, there are also much brighter outlooks, in the same way, of becoming an extraordinary professor, as happened with Herr G rtner in Bonn, who wrote a mediocre book on provincial legislation and otherwise is only known from belonging to the Hegelian school of jurists. But my dear, good father, wouldn t it be possible to discuss all of this with you in person?! Eduard s condition, the suffering of dear mother, your own poor health although I hope that it is not bad everything leads me to wish, indeed makes it nearly into a necessity, to hurry home to you. I would already be there, if I did not definitely doubt your permission and agreement. Believe me my dear, true father, no selfish intention pushes me (although I would be ecstatic to see Jenny again), but there is a thought that moves me, though I have no right to express it. It would in many respects be a hard step to take, but as my only sweet Jenny writes, these considerations all fall apart when faced with the fulfillment of duties, which are sacred. I beg you, dear father, however you might decide, not to show this letter, or at least not this page, to my angel of a mother. My sudden arrival could perhaps comfort the great, wonderful woman. The letter which I wrote to mother was composed long before the arrival of Jenny s lovely correspondence, and so perhaps I have unknowingly written too much about things that are not entirely or even very little suitable. In the hope that little by little the clouds disperse that have gathered around our family, that it may not be begrudged me to suffer and weep with you and, perhaps, to demonstrate in your nearness the deep affection and immense love that I am so often only able to express so poorly; in the hope that you too my dear, eternally beloved father, mindful of my agitated state of mind, will forgive me where my heart so often appears to have erred, overwhelmed as it is by my combative spirit, and that you will soon be fully restored again, so that I can press you to my own heart and express to you all of my thoughts. Your ever loving son Karl Forgive dear father, the illegible script and the poor style; it is nearly 4 in the morning, the candle is completely burnt out and the eyes dim; a true unrest has taken mastery of me and I will not be able to calm the excited spirits until I am in your dear presence. Please give my greetings to my sweet, dear Jenny. Her letter has already been read twelve times through, and I always discover new delights. It is in every respect, including style, the most beautiful letter that I can imagine from a woman. | Letter from Marx To his Father by Karl Marx November 1837 | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1837-pre/letters/37_11_10.htm |
See overhead the cloud sails, lowering, Around its flanks roar eagle-wings. Stormwards it rushes, fire-sparks showering, Night thoughts from morning's realm it brings. Thought blazes up, so heavy-stupendous, Curse-frenzy batters the vaults of Aether. Blood spurts from eyeball, terror-enormous, Sea-waves spit up at Heaven's rafters. The silent Aether, tranquil-tremendous, Girdles the brow with blazing brands. Clash of arms. In its womb--Ur-darkness, Cloud swoops, howling woe to the land. | Book of verse--Karl Marx | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1837-pre/verse/verse39.htm |
From my dreamings I would coax Soft an image in scent-woven web; I would weave rings passing fair From the locks of my own hair; Night-encompassed, heart's blood I would swell That, from waves of dream, fire-image well, Image, ebbing and a-flowing, Fair in love, Aeolian music sighing. It would soar, all golden shining, And the little house would arch up higher, And my locks would wander, curling, Divinest girl in darkness furling, Forth in pearly songs my blood would flow, Streaming round the marble shoulders' glow, And the lamp would flicker Suns, My heart would flood Heaven's dome. Down would shake the rooms all round, But for me, grown into Giant-Hero, In his mighty gaze high festal fire, World-great would be storm's lyre, Thunder-song my heart would beat amain Suns would be its love and rock its pain, Proudly-humble, I'd sink down, Proud-audacious, rush unto the breast. | Book of verse--Karl Marx | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1837-pre/verse/verse40.htm |
There dances a woman by moonlight, She glimmers far into the night, Robe fluttering wild, eyes glittering clear, Like diamonds set in rock-face sheer. | Book of verse--Karl Marx | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1837-pre/verse/verse8.htm |
Bremen, Aug. 28, 1838 Dear Marie, As soon as I saw your letter I realised at once that it was from you although I don t know your handwriting. Because the letter is just like you written in a terrible hurry, everything in a lovely confusion, sermons that are not a bit seriously meant: how are you, your health, news about Emilchen [Emilie Engels] and Adelinchen [Adeline Engels] accidents, all mixed up together. We had an accident here too, a house painter the second in a week fell from the scaffolding and died immediately. It is a great surprise to hear that Emilchen and Adelinchen are leaving. The Treviranuses at any rate were quite astonished; they all thought that Karl [Karl Engels] was bringing them up. August 29 It s a very good thing that you want to go to Xanten and you should really go there if Mother [Elisabeth Engels promised Auntie [Friderike von Griesheim] and Grandmother [Franciska van Haar] that you would. You must arrange to go there during the grape season, for then you will be able to eat all you can manage. We have grapes in our garden here too, but they are not ripe yet. But we have apples which are ripe Paradise apples; they are much more delicious than those on the big tree in Caspar [Engels] s a yard, the one they have now cut down. Just think, Marie, we ve got a broody hen here with seven chicks hardly eight days old and when there s nothing to do at the office, we go down to the yard and catch flies, gnats and spiders and then the old hen comes and takes them out of our hands and feeds them to the chicks. But there s a black chick, the size of a canary, which gobbles up the flies out of our hands. And all these little creatures will become hens with croups and have feathers growing on their feet. I wager that you would be delighted with this hen and her chicks. You are a chicken yourself, just like them. You must tell Mother that next year she too should place some eggs under a hen. There are also pigeons here, not only at the Treviranuses but also at the Leupolds , crested pigeons and pouters, which are called crown pigeons (because they have a crest on their fronts which is called a crown here). The crested ones are particularly handsome. We Eberlein and I feed these every day. They don t eat vetch, which doesn t grow here, but they will eat peas or very small beech nuts, which are no bigger than peas. You should see some time, when the market is full in the morning, what remarkable costumes the peasant women wear. Their caps and straw hats are especially remarkable. If I can only get a quiet look at one of them some time, I ll try and draw her and send it to you. The girls wear very small red caps over their hair, which is coiled up in a bun, while old women have big close-fitting winged bonnets which hang over their foreheads, or big velvet caps trimmed with black frilled lace in front. It looks quite odd. The window of my room looks out on an alley which is uncanny. If I m still up late of an evening, round about eleven o clock, things begin to get noisy in the alley and the cats squeal, the dogs bark, the ghosts laugh and howl and rattle the windows of the house opposite. But it s all quite natural because the lamplighter lives in the alley and he goes on his rounds at eleven o clock. Now I have written two full pages and if I wanted to do what you do, I would now write: Now you will probably be satisfied because I have told you so much. Next time I shall tell you just as much. This is the way you do it; you write me two pages, with the lines set very far apart, and you leave the other two pages quite empty. But so that you can see that I don t do the same as you and do not give tit for tat, I shall do my best to fill up four closely written pages for you. This morning a barber came round and Herr Pastor [Georg Gottfried Treviranus] wanted me to have a shave for he said I looked quite revolting. But I do not do so. Father [Friedrich Engels] said that I should leave my razors locked up until I need them and he left a fortnight ago today and my beard certainly cannot have grown so much in that time. And now I shall not shave until I have a moustache as black as a raven. And you know, Mother told Father to give me a razor to take with me and Father answered that would be tempting me to start shaving, and he would buy me some himself in Manchester, but I don t use them on principle. I have just come back from the parade which takes place every day on the Domshof. There the great Hanseatic army, composed of about 40 soldiers and 25 bandsmen as well as 6 to 8 officers, does its exercises, and (if I leave out the drum major) they all have as much moustache between them as one Prussian hussar. Most of them have no beard at all; others just a suspicion of one. The parade lasts the whole of two minutes. The soldiers arrive, line up, present arms and go off again. But the music is good (very good, wonderful, beautiful, say the Bremen people). Yesterday one of these Hanseatic soldiers, who had deserted, was brought in. This fellow was a Jew and was taking religious instruction with Pastor Treviranus and wanted to be baptised. Then he deserted, without leaving the town, but wrote a letter to Pastor Treviranus saying he was in Brinkum and had been persuaded by a relative to go there. He asked the Pastor to intercede for him so that his punishment might be mitigated. The Pastor wanted to do this too, when the fellow was suddenly arrested near Bremen yesterday and it came out where he was. He will now probably get a stretch or sixty strokes, for the soldiers always get whipped here. No Jews at all live in Bremen, only a couple of Jews with permits in the suburbs, but none can move into the town. It has been raining again all day long today. Yesterday week it did not rain at all for once, otherwise it has rained every day even though often only a little. It was very hot on Sunday and yesterday too the air was somewhat oppressive although the sky was frequently overcast, but as for today, really it s unbearable. You get soaking wet as soon as you put your nose out of doors. What is it like in your place? Now I am going to write to Mother.- Have you made it up again with the Kampermanns, old geese? Adieu, Marie. Your brother Friedrich | Letters: Engels Letters 1838 | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1838/letters/38_08_28.htm |
[Bremen] September 1 To the Graeber brothers, of Barmen, now in Elberfeld. Acknowledging receipt of the esteemed letter of your Herr F. Graeber, I am taking the liberty to send you a few lines. Thunder and lightning, things are looking up. We will now begin right away with the plastic arts. Namely with my fellow lodger by the name of George (pronounced as in English) Gorrissen, the greatest Hamburg fop that ever existed. Take the mean between the two drawings you see here, place it on a slim trunk and long legs, give the eyes a real boorish look, a speech exactly like Kirchner s, only in the Hamburg dialect, and you have the most complete picture of this lout that you can get. I wish I could only draw him as well as last night when I drew him on a board, and it was so like him that everybody recognised him, even the maids. Even a painter [G. W. Feistkorn] who lives in our house and otherwise doesn t think much of anything found it very good. This G. Gorrissen is the most boorish fellow on earth; he is busy with some new nonsense every day and is inexhaustible in commonplace and boring ideas. The fellow already has on his conscience at least twenty hours that he has bored me. The other day I bought myself Jacob Grimm s defence; it is extraordinarily good and is written with a rare power. I read no less than seven pamphlets about the Cologne affair in one bookshop. N.B. I have read things here and come across expressions I am getting good practice especially in literature-which one would never a be allowed to print in our parts, quite liberal ideas, etc., arguments about the old Hanoverian he-goat, [Ernst August] really wonderful. There are some sheets with very fine satirical drawings here. One I saw was rather badly drawn but the faces are very characteristic. A tailor on a goat is being stopped by his master and the cobblers are looking on. What happens is expressed in the text underneath: Old master, don t stop my charger! But about that next time, for I cannot now get this because the Principal [Heinrich Leupold] is sitting here. Otherwise he s a terribly nice fellow, oh so good, you can t imagine. Excuse me for writing so badly, I have three bottles of beer under my belt, hurrah, and I cannot write much more because this must go to the post at once. It is already striking half-past three and letters must be there by four o'clock. Good gracious, thunder and lightning you can see that I've got some beer inside me. [... ] Please have the goodness to scribble me something in reply right away; Wurm knows my address, and you can give it to him. Oh dear, what shall I write? Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. What a lamentable state! The old man, i. e., the Principal, is just going out and I am all mixed up, I don t know what I'm writing. There are all sorts of noises going on in my head. Give my greetings to P. Jonghaus and F. Pl macher, and tell them to write, and I will bore them shortly with my scribbling too. Can you read my scrawl? Roland, the knight of Bremen What will you give me for a pound of muddlement? I have heaps in store. Oh dear. Your devoted Your Honour s devoted F. Engels | Letters: Engels Letters 1838 | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1838/letters/38_09_01.htm |
[Bremen] Sept. 11 Dear Marie, Hoping to receive another four-page letter from you, I remain, etc. Yes, you little goose, you shall have four pages but they are according to the saying that with the same measure as you measure will it be measured unto you, [Cf. Matthew 7:2.] and even that is too much for you. For I manage to get as much on a small page like this as you do on a big one, and I forbid such a waste of paper in future; when Fatty writes so spread out, that s a different matter. Do you understand me, little Mamsell? If you don t go to Xanten this year, you must say: Console yourself with job And anoint the monk with syrup. I can t help it, they say here in Bremen. You can imagine to yourselves that you have already been there, and don t you, Marie, know how Hermann [Hermann Engels] went on when he had a glass of wine? He drank it very slowly so as to have the pleasure of it for a long time. So you should say to yourselves: If we were at Xanten now, we would not be able to be glad that we were still to go there, but now we have a whole hopeful year ahead of us and we can be glad to our fill. See, that s the political way, Socrates and Eulenspiegel would say just the same thing. Remember this for the future. You see, I can lecture you just as well as you me. And when you write to me again, don t begin every paragraph with Just imagine. How did you get such a noble habit? How can you say I don t know what else to write about when you have not yet told me what kind of school report you and Anna [Engels] have and who worked out your programme this year. Fatty must also have cracked a joke or two during the eight weeks I've been away, couldn t you perhaps have written to me about that? How much else may have happened that I cannot know anything about? Tell me, what kind of excuse is I don t know what else to write about. I don t know what to write about either. When I begin a line, I don t yet know what to put in the following one, but something always comes to me, and I hope that what I write to you will be useful and of no little profit to you. But when you have filled two pages with lines wide apart, you immediately think you have performed a colossal Herculean labour, but what about me? When I have finished this letter to you, I must still write three others and they must he ready for posting tomorrow or the day after. And I have not much time, for the Panchita is being sent off to Havana this afternoon and so I have to copy letters instead of writing some of my own. I am expecting a letter from Str cker at midday today and then he'll be wanting an answer too, and I can t write exactly the same thing to one as I have written to the other. So, you see that it would be right if you wrote me six pages and should not complain if I only wrote you one-sixth of a page? However, this lecture is already as long as your whole letter and so that you can see that I can also write about other things I will now make so free as to tell you that if I have brushes before this letter goes off, I will enclose a few drawings of Bremen peasant fashions. But now you are right, I don t know what else to write about, but I just want to see if I get anything more to do. The four pages will be filled, and quite honestly too. What is very unpleasant is that in the evenings the city gates are closed when it gets dark and whoever wants to go out or come in has to pay a toll and it now starts at seven o clock, when you have to pay two groats, and this increases as it gets later. You pay three groats after nine and six groats at ten and twelve groats at eleven. If you are on horseback you have to pay even more. I too have had to pay toll once or twice. The Consul [Heinrich Leupold] is at this moment talking to Herr Grave about the letters which have to be written this afternoon. I am listening with the greatest excitement like a rascal who sees the jury return and is waiting to hear Guilty or Not guilty . Once Grave starts writing, before I know where I am I have six, seven, eight or even more letters to copy, each of which may be of one, two or perhaps three pages. During the time I have been here I've already copied forty pages, forty pages in a huge copy-book. Another letter for Baltimore is lying in front of me now, and look the four pages are full, it is 11.30 and I shall go to the post under the pretext of collecting the Consul s letters but really to see if there is a letter from Str cker. Adieu, dear Marie, I'm looking forward to four big pages. Your brother Friedrich | Letters: Engels Letters 1838 | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1838/letters/38_09_11.htm |
[Bremen, September 17-18, 1838] September 17. First the black ink, then the red ink from the beginning again. Carissimi! In vostras epistolers haec vobis sit respondentia. Ego enim quum longiter latine non scripsi, vobis paucum scribero, sed in germanico-italianico-latino. Quae quum ita sint, [My dearest ones, let this be an answer to your letters. As I haven t written in Latin for a long time, I shall write you only a little, but in German-Italian-Latin. This being so...... ] you will not get one more word in Latin, but only pure, unalloyed, unadulterated, perfect German. And now to deal at once with a matter of considerable importance, I want to tell you that my Spanish romance has been a failure; the fellow seems to be an anti-romantic and he looks like one too. But a poem of my own The Bedouin a copy of which I enclose, was inserted in a different paper; only the fellow went and changed the last verse and so created the most hopeless confusion. He does not seem to have understood Your desert robes do not belong with our Parisian coats and vests, nor with our literature your song , because it appears to be baroque. The main idea is to contrast the Bedouin, even in their present condition, and the audience, who are quite alien to these people. For this reason the contrast must not be expressed only by the bare description given in the two clearly distinguishable parts, but comes really to life only at the end through the contrast and the conclusion drawn in the last verse. There are also a number of other details expressed in the poem: 1) Delicate irony at the expense of Kotzebue and his supporters with Schiller counterposed as the good principle for our theatre; 2) grief over the present condition of the Bedouin as contrasted with their former condition. These two incidentals run parallel in the two main contrasts. Take the last verse away, and the whole thing falls apart. But if the editor wishes to make the conclusion less striking and ends with: They jump at money s beck and call, and not at Nature s primal urge. Their eyes are blank, they're silent, all, except for one who sings a dirge , then, first of all, this ending is feeble because it consists of previously used rhetorical phrases, and secondly, it destroys my main idea by replacing it with the subsidiary one sorrow over the present condition of the Bedouin and the contrast with their former condition. So he has done the following damage: he has completely destroyed 1) the main idea, 2) the cohesion of the poem. However, this will cost the fellow an additional groat (=1/2 silver groschen) for he will get an answer from me in the form of a sermon. By the way, I wish I had never written the poem. I have completely failed to express the idea in a clear, pleasant form. Str. s [Str cker] a fine phrases are simply phrases. Dattelland [Land of date-palms] and Bled-el-Djerid are one and the same thing, so one idea is expressed twice with the same words, and what dissonance schallend Laihen zollt and Mund gewande"! It gives one a peculiar feeling to see one s verses in print like this. They have become something strange and one sees them with a much clearer eye than when they are handwritten. I had a good laugh when I saw myself thus made public, but I soon lost any desire to laugh. As soon as I saw the changes I became very angry and raged in a most barbaric fashion. Satis autem de hac re locuti sumus! [But we have said enough about this!] I found a quite peculiar book this morning in an antiquarian s shop an extract from the Acta Sanctorum, unfortunately only for the first half of the year, with portraits, lives of the saints and prayers, but all very short. It cost me twelve groats, six silver grogchen, and I paid the same for Wieland s Diogenes von Sinope, oder Swkrarhs mainomenos [The raging Socrates]. I doubt my ability and my productivity as a poet more and more every day since I read Goethe s two essays F r junge Dichter in which I find myself described as aptly as could be, and from which it has become clear to me that my rhyming achieves nothing for art. All the same, I want to go on rhyming because, as Goethe says, it is a pleasant addition and I shall also probably get a poem or two published in some journal because other fellows also do so who are just as big if not bigger asses than I am, and because my efforts will neither raise nor lower German literature. But when I read a really good poem then fury seizes my soul to think that I couldn t have done that. Satis autem de hac re locuti sumus! My cari amici, how much I miss you! When I remember how I often entered your room and there sat Fritz, so comfortable behind the stove, with his short pipe in his mouth, and Wilm rustled around the room in his long dressing-gown, could not smoke anything but four-pfennig cigars and cracked jokes which shook the whole room, and then the mighty Feldmann rose like zandos Menelaos and entered, and then Wurm came in in his long coat and with his stick in his hand, and then we all caroused and all hell was let loose and now we have to make do with letters it s outrageous. But that you write to me a lot from Berlin too is combat and naturaliter, letters there only take a day longer than to Barmen. You know my address, but it doesn t matter if you don t for I have struck up such a close acquaintance with our postman that he always delivers my letters to the office. But still, honoris causa, you might put St. Martini Kirchhof No. 2 on the envelope if necessary. This friendship with the postman comes from our names being similar, his is Engelke. Letter-writing is a bit hard for me today. The day before yesterday I sent off a letter to Wurm at Bilk and today I posted one to Str cker the first was eight pages long, the second seven, and now you too want your ration. If you receive this letter before you go to Cologne, please do the following for me. When you get there will you find Streitzeuggasse and go to Everaert s the printers at number 51 and buy me Volksb cher. I have Siegfried, Eulenpiegel and Helena. The ones I need most are Octavianus, Die Schildb rger (incomplete in the Leipzig edition), Die Haimonshinder, Dr. Faust and any of the others which are illustrated with woodcuts. If there is anything mystical there buy it as well, especially the Sibyllenweissagungen. You can go up to two or three talers in any case. Then send the books on to me by express post, tell me how much they come to and I shall send you a letter of credit drawn on my Old Man, who will gladly pay it. Or, better still, you can send the books to my Old Man, to whom I'll explain the whole business and he can give them to me as a Christmas gift or as he likes. A new subject of study for me is Jacob B hme. He is a dark but deep soul. But most of it must be studied terribly hard if one wants to understand any of it. He is rich in poetic ideas and a very allegorical man, his speech is quite original, for he gives all words a different meaning from the usual one. Instead of essence [Wesen], substance [Wesenheit], he says torment [Quat]. He calls God a non-cause [Ungrund] and a cause [Grund] because He has no cause or beginning of His existence, but is Himself the cause of His own and all other life. So far I have been able to find only three of his books admittedly enough to begin with. But here I want to insert my poem about the Bedouin. [September] 18th Cur me poematibus exanimas tuis, [Why do you torture me with your poems?] you will be shouting. But I am going to torture you still more with them or rather because of them. Guilelmus [Wilhelm Graeber] has still got an exercise book of my verse, just as I wrote it. I'm now asking for this exercise book back and you can send it in the following way: you can cut out all the blank paper and you can then enclose a few sheets with every letter you write: it won t increase the postage. If need be you can also add one or two bits of reading matter if you pack it cunningly and press the letter well, for instance, laying it for a night between a couple of dictionaries before you send it, so they won t notice anything. See that Blank gets the sheet I've enclosed for him. I am getting a terribly extensive correspondence, with you in Berlin, with Wurm in Bonn, and similarly with Barmen and Elberfeld. But if I didn t have it, how would I kill the endless time I have to spend at the office without being allowed to read? The day before yesterday I spent with the Old Man, [Heinrich Leupold] id est principalis his wife is called the Old Woman [Altsche] (the elk, alce in Italian, pronounced just like that) in the country where his family lives, and I enjoyed it very much. The Old Man is an excellent fellow, he always scolds his boys in Polish. You Ledshiaks, you Kashubs, he shouts. On the way back I tried to give a philistine who was also there some idea of the beauty of Low German, but saw it was impossible. A philistine like that is really an unhappy soul yet over-happy nonetheless in his stupidity, which he regards as the greatest wisdom. I went to the theatre the other evening. They were playing Hamlet, but in a quite horrifying manner. So I would rather say nothing at all about it. It s good that you are going to Berlin. There will be more art there than you are likely to get at any other university except Munich; the poetry of nature, on the other hand, is lacking sand, sand, sand! It is far better here. The roads outside the town are mostly very interesting and very charming with their groups of various trees. But the mountains, the mountains, that s what you miss. What is also lacking in Berlin is the poetry of student life, which is at its best in Bonn, and to which the wandering about in the poetic surroundings contributes not a little. Well, you too will be going to Bonn one day. My dear Wilhelm, I would madly love to answer your witty letter with one equally witty, if it were not for the fact that I don t feel at all witty and especially at the moment I am lacking precisely in that desire which one cannot give oneself and without which everything is forced. But I feel as if for me the end were near, as if my head no longer held a single idea, as if my life were being stolen away. The tree of my mind of its leaves is stripped, my witticisms too fine are clipped, the kernel out of the shell has been nipped. And my Mahamas" hardly merit the name, while yours robbed R ckert of all his fame; those here written with gout are smitten, they limp, they totter, fall, nay, have fallen to the bottom of the pit of oblivion, not climbed the peaks of readers opinion. Oh doom, here I sit in my room, and even if I hammered my head sore, only water would come out with a roar. That helps not a louse, it does not bring wit into the house. When I went to bed last night I banged my head and it sounded just like when you knock against a bucket of water and the water splashes against the other side. I had to laugh at the way my nose was properly rubbed in the truth. Yes, water, water! My room is full of spooks. Last night I heard a death-watch beetle in the wall. In the alley near me there is a noise of ducks, cats, dogs, hussies and people. And incidentally I expect a letter from you just as long if not longer than this one, et id post notas let there be no mistake about it. The most marvellous hymn book in existence is undoubtedly the one used here. It contains all the famous names in German poetry: Goethe (the song, Der Du von dem Himmel bist), Schiller (Drei Worte des Glaubens), Kotzebue and many others. Also songs against cow-pox and all kinds of other nonsense. It is sheer barbarism unequalled anywhere. One must see it to believe it. It is an appalling spoiling of all our beautiful songs, a crime which Knapp also made himself. guilty of in the Treasury of Songs. The occasion of our sending a cargo of hams to the West Indies, reminds me of an extremely interesting story. Somebody once sent a cargo of hams to Havana. The letter with the bill did not arrive till later, and the recipient, who had already noticed that the cargo was 12 hams short, saw reckoned up in the bill: Loss through rats 12 pieces. But those rats were the young office lads who had helped themselves to the hams. That s the end of the story. While I take the liberty to fill the remaining space with artistic renderings of outward appearances chosen at random (Dr. He), I must confess that I shall hardly be able to tell you much about my trip for I promised both Str cker and Wurm they would hear about it first. I even fear that I shall have to write about it to them twice over, and to go through all that tedious stuff three times, mixed up with all kinds Of other nonsense, would really be too much. But if Wurm cares to send you the exercise book, which he is hardly likely to receive before the end of the year, that s all right with me. Otherwise I can t do anything for you until you go to Bonn yourselves. Your most humble Servant Greetings to P. Jonghaus. He can enclose a letter with yours. I would have written to him too but the fellow is certainly away. Reply soon. Your Berlin address!!!!!!! Friedrich Engels | Letters: Engels Letters 1838 | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1838/letters/38_09_17.htm |
Bremen, Oct. 9, 1838 Dear Marie, At last four full pages! Well, I shall have to praise you till you can no longer bear it, as they say. Riding is now over unfortunately, so I am mostly at home on Sundays, but I enjoy myself quite a lot. Either I listen to somebody playing or... or I write, and in the evening we do all kinds of crazy things. The day before yesterday, which, as you know, was Sunday, we put a ring in a cup of flour and then played the well-known game of trying to get it out with your mouth. We all had a turn the Pastor s wife, [Mathilde Treviranus] the girls, the painter [G. W. Feistkorn] and I too, while the Pastor [Georg Gottfried Treviranus] sat in the corner on the sofa and watched the fun through a cloud of cigar smoke. The Pastor s wife couldn t stop laughing as she tried to get it out and covered herself with flour over and over again, and when the painter s turn came, he blew with all his might so that the flour puffed out right and left and descended like a cloud on his green and red dressing-gown. Afterwards we threw flour in each other s faces. I blackened my face with cork, at which they all laughed, and when I started to laugh, that made them laugh all the more and all the louder. Then I laughed, ha ha ha ha ha, so loudly that all the others followed suit with he he he he he and ha ha ha ha ha, until it was just like in the story where the Jew has to dance in the bramble bush, and at last they all begged me to stop for heaven s sake. You are still a real goose if you let that Jettchen Troost bore you. Why don t you tell her to go away? Now the goose is starting to lecture me; that is touching. Tell me, goose, don t you know the saying I shall behave to you as you behave to me? Don t you know that no matter how small you write, I still write twice as small? But let s settle the matter once and for all. If you write me four pages then you shall get four pages back and there s an end of it. Besides, if you only knew how many letters I've already written this week and how many I still have to write, you would have pity on me and be satisfied with two pages. Ask Str cker some time how much I've written to him, Ask Wurm some time but he s not there, so I shall tell you at least twelve pages just like these and as much again across the page in red ink. But he writes just as much to me in reply. And I have also to write to Mother, Hermann [Engels], August [Engels, cousin], Rudolf [Engels], what do you think that adds up to? I think that as you can read the other letters you ll be fair and only expect half as much from me as you write to me. You say that I praise Anna [Engels] to the skies, no, so god over nit, dat do ek nit, [But not so good, I don t do that] but if she writes me four pages and you only write three, isn t she better than you? Apart from all this I ll gladly admit that you are a loyal soul and write to me most diligently. But you must not presume to start such rows and quarrels with me and imagine all the right is on your side when you really ought to be on your knees begging forgiveness. You complain about the shoulder-brace, but oh, my little goose, hold yourself straight and then they won t put one on you. We had the same weather here as you describe but now it s horrible; it rains and drizzles continuously, sometimes it pours down and then we have a bit of blue sky every 24 hours and a ray of sunshine every half-year. You want me to write what I would like for Christmas? Well, you needn t make me what I've already got and you know what I haven t got, so what shall I write? Embroider a cover for a cigar box or I don t know what, but you can keep nagging Mother a little every two or three days to send me the Goethe for Christmas Day. I really need it very badly, for you can hardly read anything without there being some reference to Goethe. Who was this man Goethe? Herr Riepe: Children, he was ... ! Your drawing of the poultry-yard I could comprehend quite easily and it is very practical cats or polecats can t get in and the hens can t get out. Last Friday I went to the theatre. They were playing Nachtlager in Granada, [An opera by Kreutzer] an opera which is very nice. Tonight they are giving Die Zauberfl te. [Mozart s The Magic Flute] I must go to it. I really must manage to see what it is like. I hope it will be really good. October 10. I went to the theatre. I liked Die Zaubfl te very much. I should like you to be able to come and see it with me some time, I bet you would like it very much. Yes, Marie, what shall I write about now? Shall I grumble a bit for want of anything better? I can t think of anything better and you will certainly be satisfied if the four pages are filled, no matter what is in them. Here in Bremen the merchants houses are all built in a very remarkable way. They are not built with their long sides facing the street like ours but with their short sides, so that the roofs are very close together, and the hall is very large and high, just like a small church. They have hatches above and below, one on top of the other, which are closed by trapdoors and through which a hoist can move up and down. Up in the attic is the store-room and coffee, linen, sugar, whale-oil, etc., are brought up by the hoist. All halls have thus two rows of windows one above the other. The Consul s wife has now moved into town again with her four small children; they make an awful uproar. Luckily two of them, Elisabeth and Loin (really Ludwig), go to school, so one does not have to listen to their noise all day long. But when Loin and Siegfried are together they make such a row that you just can t stand it. The other day they started dancing on the linen chests, each armed with a gun and a sword; they challenged each other to a duel and Loin blew on his trumpet so loudly that it made your ears ring. I have a very nice place, in front of my desk there is a big window giving on to the hall and so I can see everything that happens. Since you drew me the poultry-yard I'm drawing you the church as seen from the office. Farewell. Your brother Friedrich | Letters: Letters of Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1838/letters/38_10_09.htm |
Bremen, Nov. 13, 1838 Dear Marie, Both your letters gave me very great pleasure and I will see what I can do, time and space permitting, to tell you something. It is now past three o'clock and the letter must be posted by four. But I really don t know anything much to tell you. Nothing out of the ordinary happens here, apart from the fact that the Bremen people have mounted their two splendid cannon at the main guardhouse again, that instead of saying footstool they say footboard here, that very many people are now wearing macintoshes here, that it was immensely cold last night and ice-ferns were formed on the window-panes and that the sun is now shining, and the like. Something else occurs to me that you should mention to Mother, namely, that I wrote to the Graebers at the end of September saying that when they went to Cologne they should send me Volksb cher and get the money from Father. But as they never got to Cologne, they have written to their cousin, so if he sends some per mezzo Pastor Graeber it would be fine, and I'm sure Father would do me the favour of settling the bill for me. If he doesn t send any that will be all right too and you won t be bothered with it. I would have written about this before now, but was only given noteworthy information of the correct procedure today. Wilhelm Graeber also writes to me and this is certainly something for you that there are no lavatories properly so-called in Berlin, only commodes, and these have to be hired separately and cost five silver groschen a month; as the sons of a pastor, however, they are exempted from this as from other taxes. They also tell me a great deal about their walking tour through the Harz Mountains and up the Blocksberg, and how they travelled from Magdeburg to Berlin with a very tall Guards N. C. O. If you come to visit me some time I shall read you the whole story as well as that of the lovely Dorothee, which happened in Siebertal, in the Harz country, where a very, very rich man fell in love with a little girl of seven and gave her father a ring, telling him that he would come back and marry her when the ring fitted her, and how, when he did come back after ten years, the girl had already been dead for a year, and the gentleman himself also died of sheer boredom, about which Fritz Graeber composed a moving song, etc. But now the page is almost full and I shall just copy another letter which must go with it, and take them both to the post. Are you writing to Ida [Engels]? Herr Holler took a great liking to Julchen [Julie Engels] in Mannheim, but Karl [Engels] was very cross because he visited her so often. But don t tell that to anyone else. Adieu, dear Marie. Yours, Friedrich | Letters: Letters of Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1838/letters/38_11_13.htm |
[Bremen, end of December 1838] Dear Marie, Well, you really are making a good thing out of being ill, lying in bed most of the time, you lazy-bones. You'll have to get out of that habit. You must be up and about by the time you get this letter, do you hear? Thank you for the nice cigar-box cover. I can assure you that it has met with the most complete approval, not only for the choice of pattern, but also for the execution, from that most severe of critics, Herr G. W. Feistkorn, painter. Marie Treviranus also embroidered one for me but she took it back again and is now going to send it to Herr Pastor Hessel in M nster am Stein near Kreuznach, to whom she also promised one. She is making me a basket for cigars instead. The Pastor s wife [Mathilde Treviranus] has crocheted a purse for me, and Leupold s boys got a rifle that fires caps, as well as swords, and the Old Man [Heinrich Leupold] keeps calling them Old Soldiers, Kashubs! I can t make out that riddle of yours about the pond but I'll ask you one myself. Do you know what a Ledshiah is? (I don t know myself. It s a term of abuse which the Old Man uses very often.) If you can t find the answer then hold this up against a mirror and then you will be able to read it. I have just heard that there has been an addition to the Leupold family a little girl. I should also like to tell you that I have now started composing and am working on chorals. But it is terribly difficult. The measure and the sharps and the chords give one a lot of trouble. I haven t got very far yet but I am sending you a specimen. It s the first two lines of Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott. I have not yet been able to do it for more than two voices, for four voices is still too hard. I hope I have not made any mistakes in the score, so try and play it some time. Adieu, dear Marie. Your brother Friedrich | Letters: Letters of Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1838/letters/38_12_31.htm |
As is well known, people understand by this name, held in much ill-repute among the Friends of Light, the two towns of Elberfeld and Barmen, which stretch along the valley for a distance of nearly three hours travel. The purple waves of the narrow river flow sometimes swiftly, sometimes sluggishly between smoky factory buildings and yarn-strewn bleaching-yards. Its bright red colour, however, is due not to some bloody battle, for the fighting here is waged only by theological pens and garrulous old women, usually over trifles, nor to shame for men s actions, although there is indeed enough cause for that, but simply and solely to the numerous dye-works using Turkey red. Coming from D sseldorf, one enters the sacred region at Sonnborn; the muddy Wupper flows slowly by and, compared with the Rhine just left behind, its miserable appearance is very disappointing. The area is rather attractive: the not very high mountains, rising sometimes gently, sometimes steeply, and heavily wooded, march boldly into green meadows and in fine weather the blue sky reflected in the Wupper causes the red colour to disappear completely. After a bend round a cliff, one sees the quaint towers of Elberfeld straight ahead (the humble houses are concealed behind gardens), and a few minutes later one reaches the Zion of the obscurantists. Almost outside the town is the Catholic church; it stands there as if it has been expelled from the sacred walls. It is in Byzantine style, built very badly by a very inexperienced architect from a very good plan; the old Catholic church has been demolished to make room for the left wing, not yet built, of the Town Hall; only the tower remains and serves the general good after a fashion, namely, as a prison. Immediately afterwards one comes to a large building, its roof supported by columns, but these columns are of a most remarkable kind; they are Egyptian at the bottom, Doric in the middle, and Ionic at the top; moreover, for very sound reasons, they dispense with all superfluous accessories, such as a plinth and capitals. This building used to be called the museum, but the Muses kept away and there remained only a huge burden of debt so that not very long ago the building was sold by auction and became a casino, a name which adorns the bare fa ade, dispelling all reminders of the former poetic name. Incidentally, the building is so clumsily proportioned that at night it looks like a camel. Here begin the dull streets, devoid of all character; the fine new Town Hall, only half completed, is situated so awkwardly owing to lack of space that its front faces a narrow, ugly side street. Finally, one comes to the Wupper again, and a fine bridge shows that you are approaching Barmen, where at least more attention is paid to architectural beauty. As soon as you cross the bridge, everything assumes a more friendly character; large, massive houses tastefully built in modern style take the place of those mediocre Elberfeld buildings, which are neither old-fashioned nor modern, neither beautiful nor a caricature. New stone houses are springing up everywhere; the pavement ends and the street continues as a straight highway, built up on both sides. Between the houses one catches sight of the green bleaching-yards; the Wupper is still clear here, and the closely approaching mountains with their lightly sketched outlines, and the manifold alternation of forests, meadows and gardens from which red roofs peep out everywhere, make the area increasingly attractive the farther one goes. Halfway along the avenue one sees the fa ade of the Lower Barmen church, set somewhat back; it is the valley s most beautiful building, very well constructed in the noblest Byzantine style. But soon the pavement begins again and the grey slate houses jostle one another. There is, however, far more variety here than in Elberfeld, for the monotony is broken by a fresh bleaching-yard here, a house in modern style there, a stretch of the river or a row of gardens lining the street. All this leaves one in doubt whether to regard Barmen as a town or a mere conglomeration of all kinds Of buildings; it is, indeed, just a combination of many small districts held together by the bond of municipal institutions. The most important of these districts are: Gemarke, the ancient centre of the Reformed faith; Lower Barmen in the direction of Elberfeld, not far from Wupperfeld and above Gemarke; farther on Rittershausen, which has Wichlinghausen on the left, and Hekinghausen with the remarkably picturesque Rauhental on the right. These are all inhabited by Lutherans of both churches ; the Catholics at most two or three thousand are scattered throughout the valley. After Rittershausen, the traveller at last leaves behind the Berg area and goes through the turnpike to enter the Old-Prussian Westphalian region. This is the outward appearance of the valley which in general, apart from the gloomy streets of Elberfeld, makes a very pleasant impression; but the latter, as experience shows, is lost on the inhabitants. There is no trace here of the wholesome, vigorous life of the people that exists almost everywhere in Germany. True, at first glance it seems otherwise, for every evening you can hear merry fellows strolling through the streets singing their songs, but they are the most vulgar, obscene songs that ever came from drunken mouths; one never hears any of the folk-songs which are so familiar throughout Germany and of which we have every right to he proud. All the ale-houses are full to overflowing, especially on Saturday and Sunday, and when they close at about eleven o'clock, the drunks pour out of them and generally sleep off their intoxication in the gutter. The most degraded of these men are those known as Karrenbinder, totally demoralised people, with no fixed abode or definite employment, who crawl out of their refuges, haystacks, stables, etc., at dawn, if they have not spent the night on a dung-heap or on a staircase. By restricting the previously indefinite numbers of ale-houses, the authorities have now to some extent curbed this annoyance. The reasons for this state of affairs are perfectly clear. First and foremost, factory work is largely responsible. Work in low rooms where people breathe more coal fumes and dust than oxygen and in the majority of cases beginning already at the age of six is bound to deprive them of all strength and joy in life. The weavers, who have individual looms in their homes, sit bent over them from morning till night, and desiccate their spinal marrow in front of a hot stove. Those who do not fall prey to mysticism are ruined by drunkenness. This mysticism, in the crude and repellent form in which it prevails there, inevitably produces the opposite extreme, with the result that in the main the people there consist only of the decent ones (which is what the mystics are called) and the dissolute riff-raff. This division into two hostile groups, irrespective of their nature, is capable by itself of destroying the development of any popular spirit, and indeed what hope is there in a place where even the disappearance of one of the groups would be of no avail, since the members of both are equally consumptive? The few healthy people to be found there are almost exclusively joiners or other craftsmen, all of whom have come from other regions. Robust people can also be found among the local-born leather-workers, but three years of such a life suffice to ruin them physically and mentally: three out of five die from consumption, and it is all due to drinking spirits. But this would not have assumed such horrifying proportions if the factories were not operated in such a reckless way by the proprietors and if mysticism did not take the form it does and did not threaten to gain an increasing hold. Terrible poverty prevails among the lower classes, particularly the factory workers in Wuppertal; syphilis and lung diseases are so widespread as to be barely credible; in Elberfeld alone, out of 2,500 children of school age 1,200 are deprived of education and grow up in the factories merely so that the manufacturer need not pay the adults, whose place they take, twice the wage he pays a child. But the wealthy manufacturers have a flexible conscience, and causing the death of one child more or one less does not doom a pietist s soul to hell, especially if he goes to church twice every Sunday. For it is a fact that the pietists among the factory owners treat their workers worst of all; they use every possible means to reduce the workers wages on the pretext of depriving them of the opportunity to get drunk, yet at the election of preachers they are always the first to bribe their people. In the lower social strata mysticism is most prevalent among the craftsmen (I do not include manufacturers here). It is a pitiful sight to see one of them in the street, a bent figure in a very long frock-coat, with his hair parted in the pietist fashion. But anyone who really wants to get to know this breed should visit the workshop of a pious blacksmith or boot-maker. There sits the master craftsman, on his right the Bible, on his left very often at any rate a bottle of schnapps. Not much is done in the way of work; the master almost always reads the Bible, occasionally knocks back a glass and sometimes joins the choir of journeymen singing a hymn; but the chief occupation is always damning one s neighbour. One sees that the tendency here is the same as everywhere else. Their proselytising zeal is not without fruit. In particular, many godless drunkards, etc., are converted, mostly in a miraculous way. But this is not surprising; these proselytes are all enervated, spiritless people, and persuading them is a mere bagatelle; they become converted, allow themselves to be moved to tears several times a week, and secretly continue their old way of life. Some years ago all this business suddenly came to light, to the . horror of all the hypocrites. An American speculator turned up calling himself Pastor J rgens; he preached several times attracting large crowds, for most people imagined that being an American he must be dark-skinned or even black. How amazed they were that he was not merely white but preached in such a way that he had the whole church in tears; incidentally, the reason for this was that he himself began to whimper when all other means of moving his audience had failed. The believers were unanimous in their wonder; true, there was some opposition from a few sensible people, but they were simply decried as godless. Soon J rgens began to organise secret gatherings; he received rich gifts from his prominent friends and lived in clover. His sermons attracted larger crowds than any others, his secret gatherings were filled to overflowing, his every utterance made both men and women weep. All were now convinced that he was at the very least a demi-prophet and would build a new Jerusalem, until one day the fun came to an end. What was going on at his secret gatherings suddenly came to light; Herr J rgens was arrested and spent a few years doing penance for his piety, while under investigation in Hamm. Later he was released, after promising to make amends, and sent back to America. It also became known that he had already practised his tricks in America, for which he had been deported, and in order not to get out of practice had given a rehearsal in Westphalia, where, owing to the leniency, or rather the weakness, of the authorities, he had been freed without further inquiries and had finally crowned his dissolute life by another repetition in Elberfeld. When it was revealed what had actually taken place at the gatherings of this noble creature, everyone rose up against him, and no one wanted to have anything to do with him; everyone turned away from him, from Lebanon to the Dead Sea, that is to say, from Mount Rittershaus to the weir at Sonnborn on the Wupper. But the real centre of all pietism and mysticism is the Reformed community in Elberfeld. From the early days it was marked by a strict Calvinist spirit, which in recent years owing to the appointment of extremely bigoted preachers at present four of them officiate there has developed into the most savage intolerance and falls little short of the papist spirit. Regular trials of heretics take place at the meetings; the behaviour of anyone who fails to attend the meetings is reviewed; they say: so and so reads novels, it is true the title-page states that it is a Christian novel, but Pastor Krummacher has said that novels are godless books; or so and so seems to be a God-fearing man, but the day before yesterday he was seen at a concert and they wring their hands in horror at the abominable sin. And if a preacher is reputed to be a rationalist (by this they mean anyone whose opinion differs in the slightest from theirs), he is taken to task and carefully watched to see whether his frock-coat is perfectly black and his trousers of the orthodox colour; woe to him if he allows himself to be seen in a frock-coat with a bluish tinge or wearing a rationalist waistcoat! If someone turns out not to believe in predestination, they say at once: he is almost as bad as a Lutheran, a Lutheran is little better than a Catholic, and Catholics and idolaters are damned by their very nature. But what sort of people are they who talk in this way? Ignorant folk who hardly know whether the Bible was written in Chinese, Hebrew or Greek, and who judge everything, whether relevant or not, from the words of a preacher who has been recognised for all time as orthodox. This spirit had existed ever since the Reformation gained the upper hand here, but it remained unnoticed until the preacher G. D. Krummacher, who died a few years ago, began to foster it in precisely this community. Soon mysticism was in full bloom, but Krummacher died before the fruit ripened; this occurred only after his nephew, Dr. Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher, had developed and formulated the doctrine in such a strict form that one is at a loss whether to regard the whole thing as nonsense or blasphemy. Now the fruit has ripened, but no one knows how to pluck it and so in time it will inevitably fall off miserably rotten. Gottfried Daniel Krummacher, brother of the Dr. F. A. Krummacher who was well known for his parables in Bremen, died about three years ago in Elberfeld after a long period of office. When over twenty years ago a preacher in Barmen taught predestination from his pulpit in a less strict form than Krummacher, the congregation began smoking in the church, created a disturbance and prevented him from preaching on the pretext that such a heretical sermon was no sermon at all, so that the authorities were compelled to intervene. Krummacher then wrote a dreadfully rude letter to the Barmen magistracy, such as Gregory VII might have written to Henry IV, demanding that the bigots should not be touched, since they were only defending their beloved Gospel. He also preached a sermon on the same lines, but he was only ridiculed. All this is characteristic of his frame of mind, which he preserved to his dying day. Moreover, he was a person of such peculiar habits that thousands of anecdotes were told of him, judging by which he should be regarded either as a strange eccentric or an exceptionally rude individual. Dr. Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher is a man of about forty, tall, strong, with an impressive figure, but since he settled in Elberfeld his circumference has noticeably increased. He has a very peculiar way of dressing his hair, which is imitated by all his supporters. Who knows, some day it may become the fashion to wear one s hair la Krummacher, but such a fashion would surpass all preceding ones, even powdered wigs, in lack of taste. As a student he was involved in the demagogy of the gymnastic associations, composed freedom songs, carried a banner at the Wartburg festival , and delivered a speech which is said to have made a great impression. He still frequently recalls those dashing times from the pulpit, saying: when I was still among the Hittites and Canaanites. Later the Reformed community in Barmen chose him for their pastor and his real reputation dates from this period. He had hardly been appointed before he caused a split by his doctrine of strict predestination, not only between Lutherans and Reformists, but also among the latter, between the strict and moderate supporters of predestination. On one occasion an old orthodox Lutheran coming back a little tipsy from seeing friends had to cross a broken-down bridge. That seemed to him somewhat dangerous in his condition and he began to reflect: if you get over safely it will be all right, but if not you will fall into the Wupper and then the Reformists will say that this was as it should be; but that is not as it should be. So he turned back, looked for a shallow place and then waded across waist-deep, with the blissful feeling that he had robbed the Reformists of a triumph. When a vacancy occurred in Elberfeld, Krummacher was chosen for it, and immediately all dissension ceased in Barmen, whereas in Elberfeld it became still fiercer. Already Krummacher s inaugural sermon made some people angry and delighted others; the dissension continued to increase, particularly because soon every preacher, although they all held the same views, formed his own party consisting of his congregation alone. Later people got bored with the business and the eternal shouting of I am for Krummacher, I am for Kohl, etc., ceased, not through love of peace, but because the parties became more and more distinct from one another. Krummacher is undeniably a man of excellent rhetorical, and also poetic, talent; his sermons are never boring, the train of thought is confident and natural; his strength lies primarily in painting gloomy pictures his description of hell is always new and bold no matter how often it occurs and in antitheses. On the other hand, he very often resorts to biblical phraseology and the images found in the latter, which, although his use of them is ,always ingenious, are bound in the end to be repetitive; interspersed with them one finds an extremely prosaic picture from daily life or a story based on his own life-history and his most insignificant experiences. He drags all this into the pulpit, whether appropriate or not; not long ago he regaled his reverent audience with two sermons about a journey to W rttemberg and Switzerland, in which he spoke of his four victorious disputes with Paulus in Heidelberg and Strauss in T bingen, naturally quite differently from Strauss account of the matter in a letter. In some passages his declamation is very good, and his powerful, explicit gesticulations are often entirely appropriate, but at times incredibly affected and lacking in taste. Then he thrashes about in the pulpit, bends over all sides, bangs his fist on the edge, stamps like a cavalry horse, and shouts so that the windows resound and people in the street tremble. Then the congregation begins to sob; first the young girls weep, then the old women join in with a heart-rending soprano and the cacophony is completed by the wailing of the enfeebled drunken pietists, who would be thrilled to the marrow by his words if they still had any marrow in their bones; and through all this uproar Krummacher s powerful voice rings out pronouncing before the whole congregation innumerable sentences of damnation, or describing diabolical scenes. And what a doctrine this is! It is impossible to understand how anyone can believe in such things, which are in most direct contradiction to reason and the Bible. Nevertheless, Krummacher has formulated the doctrine so sharply, following and firmly adhering to all its consequences, that nothing can be refuted once the basis is accepted, namely, the inability of man on his own to desire what is good, let alone do it. Hence follows the need for this ability to come from outside, and since man cannot even desire what is good, God has to press this ability on him. Owing to God s free will, it follows that this ability is allotted arbitrarily, and this also, at least apparently, is supported by the Scriptures. The entire doctrine is based on such pretence of logic; the few who are chosen will, nolentes, volentes, be saved, the rest damned for ever. For ever? Yes, for ever!! (Krummacher.) Further, the Scriptures say: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me [John 14:6.]. But the heathen cannot come to the Father by Christ, because they do not know Christ, so they all exist merely to fill up hell. Among Christians, many are called but few are chosen; but the many who are called are called only for the sake of appearance, and God took care not to call them so loudly that they obeyed him; all this to the glory of God and in order that they should not be forgiven. It is also written: for the wise men of this world the wisdom of God is foolishness [Cf. 1 Corinthians 3:18]; the mystics regard this as an order to make their creed quite meaningless so that this statement may be fulfilled. How all this fits in with the teaching of the apostles who speak of rational worship of God and the rational milk of the Gospel is a secret beyond human understanding. Such doctrines spoil all Krummacher s sermons; the only ones in which they are not so prominent are the passages where he speaks of the contradiction between earthly riches and the humility of Christ, or between the arrogance of earthly rulers and the pride of God. A note of his former demagogy very often breaks through here as well, and if he did not speak in such general terms the government would not pass over his sermons in silence. The aesthetic value of his sermons is appreciated only by very few in Elberfeld; for, compared with his three colleagues, nearly all of whom have an equally large congregation, he appears as figure one, and the others as mere noughts who serve only to enhance his value. The oldest of these noughts is called Kohl ["Kohl is a surname but also a German word meaning rubbish], which at the same time characterises his sermons. The second is Hermann, no descendant of the Hermann, to whom a monument is now being erected which should survive history and Tacitus. The third is Ball, namely, a ball for Krummacher to play with. All three are highly orthodox and imitate the worst aspects of Krummacher in their sermons. The Lutheran pastors in Elberfeld are Sander and H lsmann, who used to be deadly enemies, when the former was still in Wichlinghausen and became involved in the famous quarrel with H lsmann in Dahle, now in Lennep, the brother of his present colleague. In their present position, they behave with courtesy to each other, but the pietists try to revive the dissension between them by constantly accusing H lsmann of all kinds of misdemeanours against Sander. The third in this company is D ring, whose absent-mindedness is most odd; he is incapable of uttering three sentences with a connected train of thought, but he can make three parts of a sermon into four by repeating one of them word for word without being at all aware of it. Probatum est. His poems will be dealt with later. The Barmen preachers differ little from one another; all are strictly orthodox, with a greater or lesser admixture of pietism. Only Stier in Wichlinghausen is worthy of some attention. It is said that Jean Paul knew him as a boy and discovered excellent talents in him. Stier held office of pastor in Frankleben near Halle, and during this period he published several writings in prose and verse, an improved version of the Lutheran catechism, a substitute for it, and a small book as an aid to its study for dull-witted teachers, and also a booklet on the lack of hymn books in the province of Saxony, which was particularly praised by the Evangelische Kirch-Zeitung and did at least contain more rational views on church songs than those which can be heard in blessed Wuppertal, although it also has many unfounded judgments. His poems are extremely boring; he also distinguished himself by making some of Schiller s pagan poems acceptable to the orthodox. For example, lines from Die G tter Griechenlands he revised as follows: Really very ingenious, truly mystical indeed! For six months now Stier has been in Wichlinghausen in place of Sander, but so far he has not enriched Barmen literature. Langenberg, a little place near Elberfeld, by its whole character still belongs to Wuppertal. The same industry as there, the same spirit of pietism. Emil Krummacher, brother of Friedrich Wilhelm, has his post there; he is not such a strict believer in predestination as his brother, but imitates him very much, as the following passage from his last Christmas sermon shows: Something should now he said about the mission-house, but the book Harfenkl nge, by an ex-missionary [J. Ch. F. Winkler], which has already been mentioned on the pages of this journal [Telegraph f r Deutschland] is sufficient testimony to the spirit that prevails there. Incidentally, the inspector of this mission-house, Dr. Richter, is a learned man, an eminent orientalist and naturalist, and has also published an Erkl rte Hausbibel. Such are the activities of the pietists in Wuppertal; it is difficult to imagine that such things can still take place in our day; however, it looks as though even this rock of old obscurantism will not be able to withstand the surging flood of time any longer; the sand will be washed away and the rock will collapse with a great fall. It goes without saying that in an area so full of pietist activities this spirit, spreading in all directions, pervades and corrupts every single aspect of life. It exerts its chief influence on the education system, above all on the elementary schools. Part of them are wholly controlled by the pietists; these are the church schools, of which each community has one. The other elementary schools, over which the civil administration has greater influence, enjoy more freedom, although they, too, are under the supervision of the clerical school inspectors. Here too the retarding effect of mysticism is very obvious; for whereas the church schools still drum nothing but the catechism into their pupils, apart from reading, writing and arithmetic, as of old under the Elector Karl Theodor of blessed memory, in the other schools the rudiments of some sciences are taught, and also a little French, with the result that after leaving school many of the pupils try to continue their education. These schools are rapidly developing and since the Prussian Government came to office, they have advanced far ahead of the church schools, behind which they used to lag considerably. The church schools, however, have a much greater attendance because they are far cheaper, and many parents still send their children to them partly out of an attachment to religion, partly because they consider that intellectual progress of the children gives worldliness the upper hand. Wuppertal maintains three high schools: the municipal school in Barmen, the modern secondary school in Elberfeld, and the grammar school in the same city. The Barmen municipal school, which is very poorly financed and therefore very badly staffed, nevertheless does everything in its power. It is wholly in the hands of a limited, niggardly governing body which in most cases also selects only pietists as teachers. The headmaster is also not averse to this trend, but is guided by firm principles in discharging his duties and manages very skilfully to keep every teacher in his place. Next to him comes Herr Johann Jakob Ewich, who can teach well from a good textbook and in history teaching is a zealous supporter of the N sselt system of anecdotes. He is the author of many pedagogical works of which the greatest, i.e., in size, is entitled Human, published in Wesel by Bagel, two volumes, 40 printed sheets, price 1 Reichstaler. They are all full of lofty ideas, pious wishes and impracticable proposals. It is said that in practice his teaching lags far behind his beautiful theory. Dr. Philipp Schifflin, the second senior teacher, is the most efficient teacher in the school. Probably no one in Germany has delved so deeply into the grammatical structure of modern French as he has. He took as his starting point, not the old Romance language, but the classical language of the last century, particularly that of Voltaire, and went on from there to the style of the most modern authors. The results of his research are contained in his Anleitung zur Erlernung der franz sischen Sprache, in drei Cursen, of which the first and second courses have already appeared in several editions, and the third will be out by Easter. Without doubt, next to Knebel s, this is the best textbook on the French language which we possess; it met with universal approval as soon as the first course appeared and already enjoys an almost unprecedented circulation throughout Germany and even as far as Hungary and the Baltic provinces of Russia. The remaining teachers are young graduates, some of whom have been excellently trained, while others are full of all sorts of jumbled knowledge. The best of these young teachers was Herr K ster, a friend of Freiligrath; an annual report contains his outline of poetics, from which he has totally excluded didactic poetry, and put the classes usually allotted to it under the epic or lyric ; this article testified to his insight and clarity. He was invited to D sseldorf, and since the members of the governing body knew him as being opposed to every kind of pietism, they very willingly released him. The very opposite of him is another teacher [Rudolf Riepe] who, when asked by a fourth-form pupil who Goethe was, replied: an atheist . The Elberfeld modern secondary school is very well financed and can therefore select better teachers and arrange a fuller curriculum. On the other hand, it is addicted to that horrible system of filling up exercise books which can make a pupil dull-witted in six months. Incidentally, the administration is little in evidence: the headmaster [P. K. N. Egen] is away half the year and proves his presence only by excessive severity. Linked with the modern secondary school is a trade school where the pupils spend half their lives scribbling away. Of the teachers one must mention Dr. Kruse who spent six weeks in England and wrote a little work on English pronunciation which is remarkable for being completely unusable; the pupils have a very bad reputation and were the cause of Diesterweg s complaints about the Elberfeld youth. The Elberfeld grammar school is in very straitened circumstances, but is recognised as one of the best in the Prussian state. It is the property of the Reformed community, but suffers little from the latter s mysticism, since the preachers are not interested in it and the school inspectors have no understanding of grammar school affairs; but it has to suffer all the more because of their stinginess. These gentlemen have not the slightest idea of the advantages of the Prussian grammar school education; they try to provide the modern secondary school with everything money and pupils and at the same time reproach the grammar school for being unable to meet its expenditure out of school fees. Negotiations are now taking place for the government, which is very concerned in the matter, to take over the grammar school. If this does not happen, it will have to close down in a few years time for lack of funds. The selection of teachers is now also in the hands of the school inspectors, people capable, it is true, of making very accurate entries in a ledger, but with no conception at all of Greek, Latin or mathematics. Their guiding principle in selection is as follows: it is better to choose a mediocre Reformist than an efficient Lutheran or, worse still, a Catholic. But as there are far more Lutherans than Reformists among the Prussian philologists, they have hardly ever been able to apply this principle. Dr. Hantschke, a royal professor and temporary headmaster, comes from Luckau in Lausitz, writes poetry and prose in Ciceronian Latin and is also the author of a number of sermons, works on education and a textbook for the study of Hebrew. He would have been made permanent headmaster long ago if he were not a Lutheran and if the school inspectorate were less miserly. Dr. Eichhoff, the second senior teacher, in conjunction with his junior colleague, Dr. Beltz, wrote a Latin grammar which, however, was not very well reviewed by F. Haase in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung. His best subject is Greek. Dr. Clausen, the third senior teacher, is, undoubtedly, the most capable man in the entire school, with an expert knowledge in all spheres of learning, and outstanding in history and literature. His lectures have a rare charm; he is the only one who can arouse a feeling for poetry among the pupils, a feeling which would otherwise be bound to perish miserably among the philistines of Wuppertal. As far as I know, his only written work is a thesis in an annual report, Pindaros der Lyriker , which won him a high reputation among grammar school teachers in Prussia and beyond her borders. It did not, of course, reach the book market. These three schools were not founded until 1820; previously Elberfeld and Barmen had one Rektoratsschule each and numerous private institutions which could not provide an adequate education. Their influence can still be felt in the Barmen merchants of the older generation. Not a trace of education; anyone who plays whist and billiards, who can talk a little about politics and pay a pretty compliment is regarded as an educated man in Barmen and Elberfeld. The life these people lead is terrible, yet they are so satisfied with it; in the daytime they immerse themselves in their accounts with a passion and interest that is hard to believe; in the evening at an appointed hour they turn up at social gatherings where they play cards, talk politics and smoke, and then leave for home at the stroke of nine. So they live day in, day out, with never a change, and woe to him who interferes with their routine; he can be sure of most ungracious treatment in all the best houses. Fathers zealously bring up their sons along these lines, sons who show every promise of following in their fathers footsteps. The topics of conversation are pretty monotonous: Barmen people talk more about horses, Elberfeld people about dogs; and when things are at their height there may also be appraisals of fair ladies or chat about business matters, and that is all. Once every half a century they also talk about literature, by which they mean Paul de Kock, Marryat, Tromlitz, Nestroy and their like. In politics they are all good Prussians, because they are under Prussian rule and a priori very much against liberalism, but all this is only for as long as it suits His Majesty to preserve the Napoleonic Code, for all patriotism would disappear with its abolition. No one knows anything about the literary significance of Young Germany; it is regarded as a secret alliance, something like demagogues, under the chairmanship of Messrs. Heine, Gutzkow, and Mundt. Some of the upper-class youth have probably read a little Heine, perhaps the Reisebilder, omitting the poems in it, or the Denunziant [H. Heine, Salon, Preface to Vol. 3], but they have only a hazy notion of the rest from the mouths of pastors or officials. Freiligrath is known personally to most of them and has the reputation of being a good fellow. When he came to Barmen he was deluged with visits from these green noblemen (as he calls the young merchants); however, he very soon realised what they were like and kept away from them; but they pursued him, praised his poems and his wine, and did their utmost to get on close terms with a man who had something in print, because for these people a poet is nothing, but an author whose works have been printed is everything. Gradually Freiligrath ceased to associate with these people and now meets only a few, since K ster left Barmen. Freiligrath s employers in their precarious situation have always behaved in a decent and friendly manner towards him; surprisingly he is an extremely accurate and diligent office worker. It would be quite superfluous to speak of his poetic achievements after Dingelstedt in the Jahrbuch der Literatur and Carri re in the Berlin Jahrb cher have given such an accurate assessment of him. It seems to me, however, that neither of them has paid sufficient attention to the fact that however far afield his thoughts may roam, he is still extremely attached to his homeland. This can be seen from his frequent allusions to German folk-tales, e.g., the Unkenk nigin (p. 54), Snewittchen (p. 87), and others to which (p. 157) an entire poem (Im Walde) is devoted, from his imitation of Uhland (the Edelfalk, p. 82, Die Schreinergesellen, p. 85; the first of the Zwei Feldherrngr ber also reminds one of Uhland, but only to his advantage), then Die Auswanderer and, above all, his incomparable Prinz Eugen. One must pay more attention to these few points in his poetry the farther Freiligrath strays in the opposite direction. A deep insight into the state of his feelings is afforded by Der ausgewanderte Dichter, particularly the excerpts published in the Morgenblatt ; here he already realises that he cannot feel at home in distant parts unless he has his roots in true German poetry. Journalism occupies the most important place in Wuppertal literature proper. At the top is the Elberfelder Zeitung edited by Dr. Martin Runkel, which under his perspicacious guidance won for itself a considerable and well-deserved reputation. He took over the editorship when two newspapers, the Allgemeine and the Provinzialzeitung, were merged; the newspaper came into being under somewhat unfavourable auspices; the Barmer Zeitung competed with it, but thanks to his efforts to get his own correspondents and to his leading articles Runkel gradually made the Elberfelder Zeitung one of the main newspapers in the Prussian state. True, in Elberfeld, where only a few people read the leading articles, the newspaper met with little recognition, but it received a much greater welcome elsewhere, which the decline of the Preussische Staats-Zeitung may have helped to bring about. The literary supplement, the Intelligenzblatt, does not rise above the usual level. The Barmer Zeitung, the publisher, editors and censors of which have frequently changed, is at present under the guidance of H. P ttmann, who from time to time writes reviews in the Abend-Zeitung. He would very much like to improve the newspaper, but his hands are tied by the well-justified parsimony of the publisher. Nor does the feature page with some of his poems, reviews or extracts from larger writings provide a remedy. The newspaper s companion, the Wuppertaler Lesekreis, derives its material almost exclusively from Lewald s Europa. In addition, there is also the Elberfeld T glicher Anzeiger along with the Fremdenblatt a product of the Dorfzeitung, which is unrivalled for its heart-rending poems and bad jokes and the Barmer Wochenblatt, an old nightcap, with pietist asses ears sticking out constantly from its literary lion s skin. Of the other types of literature, the prose is of no value at all; if one takes away the theological or, rather, pietist works and a few booklets on the history of Barmen and Elberfeld, written very superficially, there is nothing left. But poetry is much cultivated in the blessed valley and a fair number of poets have taken up residence there. Wilhelm Langewiesche, a bookseller in Barmen and Iserlohn, writes under the name of W. Jemand [Jemand means someone"]; his main work is a didactic tragedy Der ewige Jude which is, of course, inferior to Mosen s treatment of the same subject. As a publisher, he is more important than his Wuppertal rivals, which is very easy, incidentally, since the two of them, Hassel in Elberfeld and Steinhaus in Barmen, publish only genuinely pietist works. Freiligrath lives in his house. Karl August D ring, the preacher in Elberfeld, is the author of numerous prose and poetry works; to him Platen s words are applicable: You are a river in full spate which no one can swim to the end. [A. Platen, Der romantische Oedipus, Act III, Scene 4] He divides his poems into religious songs, odes and lyrics. Sometimes, by the middle of a poem he has forgotten the beginning and is carried away into most peculiar regions; from the Pacific islands with their missionaries to hell, and from the sighs of a contrite soul to the ice of the North Pole. Lieth, the headmaster of a girls school in Elberfeld, is the author of poems for children; most of them are written in a now outmoded fashion and cannot bear comparison with the poems of R ckert, G ll and Hey, yet there are a few nice things to be found among them. Friedrich Ludwig Willfing, indisputably the greatest Wuppertal poet, born in Barmen, is a man of unmistakable genius. Should you see a lanky individual, about forty-five years of age, wrapped in a long reddish-brown frock-coat half as old as its owner, above his shoulders a countenance that defies description, on his nose gold-rimmed spectacles through the lenses of which every glance from his lustrous eyes is refracted, his head crowned by a green cap, in his mouth a flower, in his hand a button which he has just twisted off his frock-coat this is the Horace of Barmen. Day in, day out he walks on the Hardtberg hoping to come across a new rhyme or a new beloved. Until his thirtieth year this indefatigable man worshipped Pallas Athena, then fell into the hands of Aphrodite, who presented him with nine Dulcineas, one after the other; these are his Muses. Speak not of Goethe, who found a poetic aspect in everything, or of Petrarch, who embodied every glance, every word of his beloved in a sonnet Willfing leaves them far behind. Who counts the grains of sand beneath his beloved s feet? The great W lfing. Who sings of Minchen (the Clio of the nine Muses), her stockings bespattered in a swampy meadow? No one but Willfing. His epigrams are masterpieces of the most eccentric, popular crudity. When his first wife died he wrote an announcement of her death which reduced all maidservants to tears and an even finer elegy: Wilhelmine the most beautiful of all names! Six weeks later he became betrothed again; and now he has a third wife. This ingenious man has new plans every day. When still in the full flowering of his poetic talent, he thought of becoming a button-maker, then a farmer, then a paper-merchant; finally he ended up in the haven of candle-making, so as to make his lamp shine in some way or other. His writings are like the sand on the sea-shore. Montanus Eremita, an anonymous Solingen writer, should be included here as a neighbour and friend. He is the most poetical historiographer of the Berg area; his verses are less absurd than tedious and prosaic. Here, too, belongs Johann Pol, a pastor in Heedfeld near Iserlohn, who has written a slim volume of poems. This reflects the spirit of the entire book. But Pol is also a wit, for he says: Poets are lamps, philosophers are the servants of truth. And what imagination is shown by the two opening lines of his ballad Attila an der Marne. He has also composed psalms, or rather combined fragments from the psalms of David. His greatest work is a song in praise of the quarrel between Hillsmann and Sander, written in a most riginal way, in epigrams. The whole thing centres round the idea that the rationalists dared Neither Voss nor Schlegel have ever ended a hexameter with such a perfect spondee. Pol is even better than D ring at grouping his poems: he divides them into religious chants and songs and miscellaneous poems . F. W. Krug, candidate of theology, author of Poetische Erstlinge und prosaische Reliquien, and translator of a number of Dutch and French sermons, has also written a touching short novel [F. W. Krug, K mpfe und Siege des jungen Wahlheim oder Lebersbilder aus dem Reiche des Wahren, Guten und Sch nen] the manner of Stilling in which, among other things, he presents new evidence supporting the Mosaic account of the creation. A delightful book. In conclusion, I must also mention a clever young man who has the idea that since Freiligrath can be a business clerk and a poet simultaneously, he should be able to as well. It is to be hoped that German literature will soon be enriched by some of his short novels, which will not be inferior to the best; the only shortcomings of which he can be accused are hackneyed treatment, ill-conceived design and careless style. I would willingly quote extracts from one of them, if decency did not forbid it, but soon perhaps a publisher will take pity on the great D. [D rholt, a clerk in Barmen] dare not give his full name lest his wounded modesty leads him to sue me for libel) and publish his short novels. He also wants to be a close friend of Freiligrath. This just about covers the literary manifestations of the world-famous valley to which, perhaps, should be added a few wine-inspired geniuses who from time to time try their hand at rhyming , and whom I can warmly recommend to Dr. Duller as characters for a new novel. This whole region is submerged in a sea of pietism and philistinism, from which rise no beautiful, flower-covered islands, but only dry, bare cliffs or long sandbanks, among which Freiligrath wanders like a seaman off course. | by Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1839/03/telegraph.htm |
Theodor Hildebrand | To The Bremen Courier by Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1839/04/27.htm |
To Herr Dr. Runkel in Elberfeld Elberfeld, May 6th You have violently attacked me and my Letters from Wuppertal in your newspaper and accused me of deliberate distortion, ignorance of the conditions, personal abuse and even untruths. It does not matter to me that you call me a Young German, for I neither accept the charges you level against Young Literature nor have the honour of belonging to it. Up to now I have felt nothing but respect for you as a man of letters and journalist; I have even expressed my opinion to this effect in the second article, where I deliberately refrained from mentioning your poems in the Rheinisches Odeon since I could not have praised them. Anyone can be accused of deliberate distortion, and this tends to be done wherever an account does not conform to the preconceived notions of the reader. Why do you not give a single example as evidence? As for ignorance of the conditions, I should have expected this reproach least of all did I not know what a meaningless expression this phrase has become, used everywhere for lack of anything better. I have possibly spent twice as much time as you in Wuppertal, have lived in Elberfeld and Barmen and have had the most favourable opportunity to observe closely the life of all social estates. Herr Runkel, I do not, as you accuse me of doing, make any claim to genius, but it would indeed require an extraordinarily dull intelligence not to acquire a knowledge of the conditions in such circumstances, especially if one makes the effort to do so. As for personal abuse a preacher or a teacher is just as much a public figure as a writer, and you would surely not call a description of his public actions personal abuse. Where have I spoken of private matters, or even of such as would require a mention of my name, where have I ridiculed such things? As for the alleged untruths, much as I would like to avoid coming to blows or even causing a sensation, I find myself compelled, in order not to compromise the Telegraph or my anonymous honour, to challenge you to point out a single one of the multitude of untruths . To be honest, there are in fact two. Stier s adaptation is not printed word for word, and Herr Egen s travels are not that bad. But please, now be so kind as to complete the clover leaf! You say further that I have not shown a single bright side of the district. That is so; I have throughout acknowledged competence in individual cases (though I have not shown Herr Stier in his theological importance, which I truly regret), but in general I was unable to find any purely bright sides; and I await a description of the latter from you. Furthermore, it never occurred to me to say that the red Wupper becomes clear again in Barmen. That would be nonsense, or does the Wupper flow uphill? In conclusion I would ask you not to pass judgment before you have read the whole, and in future to quote Dante accurately or not at all; he does not say: qui si entra nell etemo dolore [Here is the gateway to eternal pain], but per me si va nell eterno dolore [Through me you pass into eternal pain; Dante, La Divina Commedia] (Inferno, III, 2). The author of the Letters from Wuppertal | Open Letter To Dr. Runkel by Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1839/05/09.htm |
In a recent sermon in Elberfeld on Joshua 10:12-13, where Joshua bids the sun stand still, Krummacher advanced the interesting thesis that pious Christians, the Elect, should not suppose from this passage that Joshua was here accommodating himself to the views of the people, but must believe that the earth stands still and the sun moves round it. In defence of this view he showed that it is expressed throughout the Bible. The fool s cap which the world will give them for that, they, the Elect, should cheerfully put in their pockets with the many others they have already received. We should be happy to receive a refutation of this sad anecdote, which comes to us from a reliable source. | F. W. Krummacher’s Sermon on Joshua by Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1839/05/telegraph.htm |
For some time there have been loud and bitter complaints about the deplorable power of scepticism; here and there one looked gloomily at the toppled edifice of the old faith, anxiously waiting for the clouds covering the sky of the future to break. With a similar feeling of melancholy I laid down the Lieder eines heimgegangenen Freundes; they are the songs of a dead man, a genuine Wuppertal Christian, recalling the happy time when one could still cherish a childlike belief in a doctrine whose contradictions can now be counted on the fingers, when one burned with pious zeal against religious liberalism, a zeal at which people now smile or blush. The very place of printing shows that these verses must not be judged by ordinary standards, that no brilliant thoughts, no unfettered soaring of a free spirit are to be found here; indeed, it would be unfair to expect anything but a product of pietism. The only proper standard that can be applied to these poems is provided by earlier Wuppertal literature, about which I have already vented my irritation at length to allow one of its products for once to be judged from a different standpoint. And here it is undeniable that this book reveals progress. The poems, which appear to come from a layman, although not an uneducated one, are in their thought at least on the level of those of the preachers D ring and Pol; at times even a faint hint of romanticism, as far as that can go together with the Calvinistic doctrine, is unmistakable. As regards form, they are undeniably the best that Wuppertal has produced so far; new or unusual rhymes are often used not without skill; the author even rises to the distich or the free ode, forms which are actually too elevated for him. [Friedrich Wilhelm] Krummacher s influence is unmistakable; his phrases and metaphors are used everywhere. But when the poet sings: this is no imitation, but Krummacher himself! Nevertheless one can find passages in these poems which are truly moving by their genuineness of feeling; but, alas, one can never forget that this feeling is for the most part morbid! And yet, even here one can see how fortifying and comforting a religion which has truly become a matter of the heart is, even in its saddest extremes. Dear reader, forgive me for presenting you with a book which can be of infinitely little interest to you; you were not born in Wuppertal, perchance you have never stood on its hills and seen the two towns [Barmen and Elberfeld] at your feet. But you too have a homeland and perhaps return to it with the same love as 1, however ordinary it looks, once you have vented your anger at its perversities. | From Elberfeld by Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1839/11/elberfeld.htm |
Is it not a great commendation for a book to be a popular book, a book for the German people? Yet this gives us the right to demand a great deal of such a book; it must satisfy all reasonable requirements and its value in every respect must be unquestionable. The popular book has the task of cheering, reviving and entertaining the peasant when he returns home in the evening tired from his hard day s work, making him forget his toil, transforming his stony field into a fragrant rose garden; it has the task of turning the craftsman s workshop and the wretched apprentice s miserable attic into a world of poetry, a golden palace, and showing him his sturdy sweetheart in the guise of a beautiful princess; but it also has the task, together with the Bible, of clarifying his moral sense, making him aware of his strength, his rights, his freedom, and arousing his courage and love for his country. If, generally speaking, the qualities which can fairly be demanded of a popular book are rich poetic content, robust humour, moral purity, and, for a German popular book, a strong, trusty German spirit, qualities which remain the same at all times, we are also entitled to demand that it should be in keeping with its age, or cease to be a book for the people. If we take a look in particular at the present time, at the struggle for freedom which produces all its manifestations the development of constitutionalism, the resistance to the pressure of the aristocracy, the fight of the intellect against pietism and of gaiety against the remnants of gloomy asceticism I fail to see how it can be wrong to demand that the popular book should help the uneducated n and show him the truth and reasonableness of these =s, although, of course, not by direct deduction; but on no account should it encourage servility and toadying to the aristocracy or pietism. It goes without saying, however, that customs of earlier times, which it would be absurd or even wrong to practise today, must have no place in a popular book. By these principles we should, and must, also judge those books which are now genuinely popular German books and are usually grouped together under this name. They are products in part of medieval German or Romance poetry, in part of popular superstition. Earlier despised and derided by the upper classes, they were, as we know, sought out by the romantics, adapted, even extolled. But romanticism looked at their poetic content alone, and how incapable it was of grasping their significance as popular books is shown by G rres work on them [J. G rres, Die teutschen Volksb cher]. G rres, as he has shown but lately, actually versifies all his judgments. Nevertheless, the usual view of these books still rests on his work, and Marbach even refers to it in the announcement of his own publication. The three new revised adaptations of these books, by Marbach in prose, and Simrock in prose and poetry two of which are again intended for the people call for another precise examination of the material adapted here from the point of view of its popular value. So long as opinions about the poetry of the Middle Ages vary so widely, the assessment of the poetic value of these books must be left to the individual reader; but naturally no one would deny that they really are genuinely poetic. Even if they cannot pass the test as popular books, their poetic content must be accorded full recognition; yes, in Schiller s words: many a poet may find yet one more reason to save for poetry by means of adaptation what proves impossible to preserve for the people. There is a very significant difference between the tales of German and Romance origin. The German tales, genuine folk stories, place the man in action in the foreground; the Romance give prominence to the woman, either as one who suffers (Genovefa), or as one who loves, passive towards passion even in her love. There are only two exceptions, Die Haimomkinder and Fortunat, both Romance but also folk legends; while Octavianus, Melusina, etc., are products of court poetry which only reached the people later in prose adaptations. Of the humorous tales only one, Salomon und Morolf, is not directly of Germanic origin, while Eulenspiegel, Die Schildb rger, etc., are indisputably ours. If we view all these books in their entirety and judge them by the principles stated at the beginning, it is clear that they satisfy these requirements only in the one respect that they have poetry and humour in rich measure and in a form which is easily understood in general even by the least educated, but in other respects they are far from adequate, some of them a complete contradiction, others only partially acceptable. Since they are the products of the Middle Ages, they naturally fail entirely in the special purpose which the present age might require them to fulfil. Thus in spite of the outward richness of this branch of literature and in spite of the declamations of Tieck and G rres, they still leave much to be desired; whether this gap is ever to be filled is another question which I will not take it upon myself to answer. To proceed now to individual cases, the most important one is undoubtedly the Geschichte vom geh rnten Siegfried. I like this book; it is a tale which leaves little to be desired; it has the most exuberant poetry written sometimes with the greatest naivety and sometimes with the most beautiful humorous pathos; there is sparkling wit who does not know the priceless episode of the fight between the two cowards? It has character, a bold, fresh, youthful spirit which every young wandering craftsman can take as an example, even though he no longer has to fight dragons and giants. And once the misprints are corrected, of which the (Cologne) edition in front of me has more than a fair share, and the punctuation is put right, Schwab s and Marbach s adaptations will not be able to compare with this genuinely popular style. The people have also shown themselves grateful for it; I have not come across any other popular book as often as this one. Herzog Heinrich der L we. Unfortunately I have not been able to get hold of an old copy of this book; the new edition printed in Einbeck seems to have replaced it entirely. It starts with the genealogy of the House of Brunswick going back to the year 1735; then follows a historical biography of Herzog Heinrich and the popular legend. It also contains a tale which tells the same story about Godfrey of Bouillon as the popular legend of Heinrich der L we, the story of the slave Andronicus ascribed to a Palestinian abbot called Gerasimi with the end substantially altered, and a poem of the new romantic school of which I cannot remember the author, in which the story of the lion is told once more. Thus the legend on which the popular book is based disappears entirely under the trappings with which the munificence of the clever publisher has furnished it. The legend itself is very beautiful, but the rest is of no interest; what do Swabians care about the history of Brunswick? And what room is there for the wordy modern romance after the simple style of the popular book? But that has also disappeared; the adapter, a man of genius, whom I see as a parson or schoolmaster at the end of the last century, writes as follows: Restore the legend in its old language, add other genuine folk legends to make a complete book, send this out among the people, and it would keep the poetic sense alive; but in this form it does not deserve to circulate among the people. Herzog Ernst. The author of this book was no great poet, for he found all the poetical elements in oriental fairy-tales. The book is well written and very entertaining for the people; but that is all. Nobody will believe any longer in the reality of the fantasies which occur in it; it can therefore be left in the hands of the people without alteration. I now come to two legends which the German people created and developed, the most profound that the folk poetry of any people has to show. I mean the legends of Faust and of Der ewige Jude. They are inexhaustible; any period can adopt them without altering their essence; and even if the adaptations of the Faust legend after Goethe belong with the Iliads post Homerum, they still always reveal to us new aspects, not to mention the importance of the Ahasucrus legend for the poetry of later times. But how do these legends appear in the popular books! Not as products of the free imagination are they conceived, no, as children of a slavish superstition. The book about the Wandering Jew even demands a religious belief in its contents which it seeks to justify by the Bible and a lot of stale legends; it contains only the most superficial part of the legend itself, but preaches a very lengthy and tedious Christian sermon on the Jew Ahasuerus. The Faust legend is reduced to a common witches tale embellished with vulgar sorcerer s anecdotes; what little poetry is preserved in the popular comedy has almost completely disappeared. These two books are not only incapable of offering any poetical enjoyment, in their present shape they are bound to strengthen and renew old superstitions; or what else is to be expected of such devilish work? The awareness of the legend and its contents seems to be disappearing altogether among the people, too; Faust is thought to be no more than a common sorcerer and Ahasuerus the greatest villain since Judas Iscariot. But should it not be possible to rescue both these legends for the German people, to restore them to their original purity and to express their essence so clearly that the deep meaning does not remain entirely unintelligible even to the less educated? Marbach and Simrock have still to adapt these legends; may they exercise wise judgment in the process! We have before us yet another series of popular books, namely, the humorous ones, Eulenspiegel, Salomon und Morolf, Der Plaff vom Kalenberge, Die sieben Schwaben, and Die Schildb rger. This is a series such as few other nations have produced. The wit, the natural manner of both arrangement and workmanship, the good-natured humour which always accompanies the biting scorn so that it should not become too malicious, the strikingly comical situations could indeed put a great deal of our literature to shame. What author of the present day has sufficient inventiveness to create a book like Die Schildb rger? How prosaic Mundt s humour appears compared with that of Die sieben Schwaben! Of course, a quieter time was needed to produce such things than ours which, like a restless businessman, is always talking about the important questions it has to answer before it can think of anything else. As regards the form of these books, little needs changing, except for removing the odd flat joke and distortions of style. Several editions of Eulenspiegel, marked with the stamp of Prussian censorship, are not quite complete; there is a coarse joke missing right at the beginning which Marbach illustrates in a very good woodcut. In sharp contrast to these are the stories of Genovefa, Griseldis and Hirlanda, three books of Romance origin, each of which has a woman for heroine, and a suffering woman at that; they illustrate the attitude of the Middle Ages to religion, and very poetically too; only Genovefa and Hirlanda are too conventionally drawn. But, for heaven s sake, what are the German people to do with them today? One can well imagine the German people as Griseldis, of course, and the princes as Markgraf Walther; but then the comedy would have to end quite differently from the way it does in the popular book; both sides would resent the comparison here and there on good grounds. If Griseldis is to remain a popular book I see it as a petition to the High German Federal Assembly for the emancipation of women. But one knows, here and there, how this kind of romantic petition was received four years ago, which makes me wonder greatly that Marbach was not subsequently counted among the Young Germans. The people have acted Griseldis and Genovefa long enough, let them now play Siegfried and Reinald for a change; but the right way to get them to do so is surely not to praise these old stories of humiliation. The first half of the book Kaiser Octavianus belongs to the same class, while the second half is more like the love stories proper. The story of Helena is merely an imitation of Octavianus, or perhaps both are different versions of the same legend. The second half of Octavianus is an excellent popular book and one which can be ranked only with Siegfried; the characterisation of Florens and his foster-father Clemens is excellent, and so is that of Claudius; Tieck had it very easy here. But running right through is there not the idea that noble blood is better than common blood? And how often do we not find this idea among the people themselves! If this idea cannot be banished from Octavianus and I think it is impossible if I consider that it must first be eradicated where constitutional life is to arise, then let the book be as poetic as you like, censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. [I am of the opinion that Carthage must be destroyed] In contrast to the tearful tales of suffering and endurance I have mentioned are three others which celebrate love. They are Magelone. Melusina and Tristan. I Like Magelone best as a popular book; Melusina is again full of absurd monstrosities and fantastic exaggerations so that one could almost see it as a kind of Don Quixote tale, and I must ask again: what do the German people want with it? On top of that the story of Tristan and Isolde I will not dispute its poetic value because I love the wonderful rendering by Gottfried von Strassburg, even if one may find defects here and there in the narrative but there is no book that it is less desirable to put into the hands of the people than this. Of course, here again there is a close connection with a modern theme, the emancipation of women; a skilful poet would today hardly be able to exclude it from an adaptation of Tristan without falling into a contrived and tedious form of moralising poetry. But in a popular book where this question is out of place the entire narrative is reduced to an apology for adultery and whether that should be left in the hands of the people is highly questionable. In the meanwhile the book has almost disappeared and one only rarely comes across a copy. Die Haimonskinder and Fortunat, where we again see the man in the centre of the action, are another couple of true popular books. Here the merriest humour with which the son of Fortunat fights all his adventures, there the bold defiance, the unrestrained relish in opposition which in youthful vigour stands up to the absolute, tyrannical power of Charlemagne and is not afraid, even before the eyes of the prince, to take revenge with its own hand for insults it suffered. Such a youthful spirit that allows us to overlook many weaknesses must prevail in the popular book; but where is it to be found in Griseldis and its like? Last but not least, the Hundertj hrige Kalender, a work of genius, the super-clever Traumbuch, the unfailing Gl cksrad, and similar progeny of miserable superstition. Anyone who has even glanced at his book, knows with what wretched sophistries G rres made excuses for this rubbish. All these dreary books have been honoured with the Prussian censor s stamp. They are, of course, neither revolutionary, like B rne s letters [L. B rne, Briefe aus Paris], nor immoral, as people claim Wally [K. Gutzkow, Wally, die Zweiflerin] is. We can see how wrong are the charges that the Prussian censorship is exceedingly strict. I hardly need waste any more words on whether such rubbish should remain among the people. Nothing need be said of the rest of the popular books; the stories of Pontus, Fierabras, etc., have long been lost and so no longer deserve the name. But I believe I have shown, even in these few notes, how inadequate this literature appears, when judged according to the interest of the people and not the interest of poetry. What is necessary are adaptations of a strict selection which do not needlessly depart from the old style and are issued in attractive editions for the people. To eradicate forcibly any which cannot stand up to criticism would be neither easy nor advisable; only that which is pure superstition should be denied the stamp of the censor. The others are disappearing as it is; Griseldis is rare, Tristan almost unobtainable. In many areas, in Wuppertal, for example, it is not possible to find a single copy; in other places, Cologne, Bremen, etc., almost every shopkeeper has copies in his windows for the peasants who come into town. But surely the German people and the best of these books deserve intelligent adaptations? Not everybody is capable of producing such adaptations, of course; I know only two people with sufficient critical acumen and taste to make the selection, and skill to handle the old style; they are the brothers Grimm. But would they have the time and inclination for this work? Marbach s adaptation is quite unsuitable for the people. What can one hope for when he starts straight away with Griseldis? Not only does he lack all critical sense, but he cannot resist making quite unnecessary omissions; he has also made the style quite flat and insipid compare the popular version of the Geh rnter Siegfried and all the others with the adaptation. There is nothing but sentences torn apart, and changed word order for which the only justification was Herr Marbach s mania to appear original here since he lacked all other originality. What else could have driven him to alter the most beautiful passages of the popular book and furnish it with his unnecessary punctuation? For anyone who does not know the popular version, Marbach s tales are quite good; but as soon as one compares the two, one realises that Marbach s sole service has been to correct the misprints. His woodcuts vary greatly in value. Simrock s adaptation is not yet far enough advanced for judgment to be passed on it; but I trust him more than his rival. His woodcuts are also consistently better than Marbach s. These old popular books with their old-fashioned tone, their misprints and their poor woodcuts have for me an extraordinary, poetic charm; they transport me from our artificial modern conditions, confusions and fine distinctions into a world which is much closer to nature. But that is not what matters here; Tieck, of course, made this poetic charm his chief argument but what weight has the authority of Tieck, G rres and all other romantics when reason contradicts it and when it is a question of the German people? | German Volksb�cher by Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1839/11/telegraph.htm |
With these bombastic words Herr Beck approached the German poets ranks, demanding admission; in his eyes the proud awareness of his calling, about his lips an expression of modern world-weariness. Thus he stretched out his hand for the laurel wreath. Two years have passed since then; does the laurel appeasingly cover the mysterious folds of his brow? There was much boldness in his first collection of poems. Gepanzerte Lieder, a Neue Bibel, a Junges Pal stina the twenty-year-old poet jumped straight from the top form into the third heaven! That was a fire such as had not blazed for a long time, a fire which gave out much smoke because it came from wood that was too fresh and green. The Young Literature developed so rapidly and brilliantly that its adversaries perceived they stood to lose rather than gain by arrogant rejection or condemnation. It was high time to take a closer look at it and to attack its real weaknesses. Thus, the Young Literature was, of course, recognised as an equal. Soon quite a number of these weaknesses were found whether real or apparent does not concern us here., but the loudest claim was that the former Young Germany had wanted to dethrone lyric poetry. Heine, of course, fought against the Swabian; Wienbarg made bitter comments on the humdrum lyrics and their eternal monotony; Mundt rejected all lyrics as being out of tune with the times and prophesied a literary Messiah of prose. That was too much. We Germans have always been proud of our songs; if the Frenchman boasted of his hard-won charter and derided our censorship, we pointed proudly to philosophy from Kant to Hegel and to the line of songs from the Song of Ludwig to Nikolaus Lenau. Are we to be deprived of this lyrical treasure? Behold, there comes the lyrical poetry of the Young Literature with Franz Dingelstedt, Ernst von der Haide, Theodor Creizenach and Karl Beck. Beck s N chte appeared shortly before Freiligrath s poems. [F. Freiligrath, Gedichte] We know what a sensation both these collections of poems made. Two young lyrical poets had emerged with whom at that time none of the younger could be ranked. A comparative study of Beck and Freiligrath was made in the Elegante Zeitung [Zeitung f r die elegante Welt] by K hne in the manner familiar from the Charaktere. I would like to apply Wienbarg s remark about G. Pfizer to this criticism. The N chte are chaos. Everything lies in motley disorder. Images, often bold, like strange rock formations; seeds of a future life, but drowned in a sea of phrases; now and then a flower begins to bud, an island to take firm shape, a crystal layer to form. But still everything is in confusion and disorder. The words: fit not B rne but Beck himself. The image which Beck gives of B rne in his first attempt is terribly distorted and untrue; K hne s influence here is unmistakable. Apart from the fact that B rne would never have used such phrases, he also knew nothing of all the desperate world-weariness which Beck ascribes to him. Is that the clear-headed B rne, the strong, imperturbable character whose love warmed but did not burn, least of all himself? No, it is not B rne, but merely a vague ideal of a modern poet composed of Heine s coquetry and Mundt s flowery phrases; the Lord preserve us from its realisation! Frenzied and flashing images never raced in B rne s head; his locks never stood on end with curses against heaven; in his heart midnight never sounded, but always morning; his sky was never blood-red but always blue. Fortunately, B rne was never filled with such dreadful despair that he could have written Die achtzehnte Nacht. If Beck did not gabble so much about the Red of Life with which his B rne writes I should believe that he had never read the Franzosenfresser. [L. B rne, Menzel, der Franzosenfresser] Let Beck take the most melancholy passage of the Franzosenfresser and it is bright day compared with his affected night-of-storm despair. Is not B rne poetic enough in himself, must he first be spiced with this newfangled worldweariness? I say newfangled because I can never believe that this sort of thing is a part of genuinely modern poetry. B rne s greatness is precisely that he was above the miserable flowery phrases and cliquish catchwords of our days. Before a definite judgment of the N chte could be formed, Beck had already come forward with a new series of poems. Der fahrende Poet showed him to us from a different angle. The storm had blown itself out and order began to emerge out of chaos. One had not expected such excellent descriptions as those in the first and second songs; nor had one believed that Schiller and Goethe, who had fallen into the clutches of our pedantic aesthetics, could offer material for such a poetic unity as is to be found in the third song, nor that Beck s poetic reflection could hover in almost philistine calm over the Wartburg as now in fact it did. With Der fahrende Poet Beck had formally entered literature. Beck announced the Stille Lieder, and the journals reported that he was working on a tragedy, Verlorene Seelen. A year passed. Except for a few poems nothing was heard of Beck. The Stille Lieder remained unpublished and nothing definite could be learned of the Verlorene Seelen. Eventually, his Novellistische Skizzen appeared in the Elegante. An attempt at prose by such an author would command attention in any event. I doubt, however, whether this attempt satisfied even a single friend of Beck s Muse. The earlier poet could be recognised in a few metaphors; with careful cultivation the style could be developed quite nicely; but that is all one can say for this little tale. Neither in profundity of thought nor poetic imagination did it rise above the usual sphere of literature meant for entertainment; the invention was rather ordinary and indeed ugly, and the execution was commonplace. A friend told me during a concert that Beck s Stille Lieder had arrived. just then the adagio of a Beethoven symphony began. The songs will be like this, I thought; but I was mistaken, there was little Beethoven and a great deal of Bellini lamentation. I was shocked when I took the booklet in my hands. The very first song was so infinitely trivial, so cheaply mannered, only given a spurious originality by an affected turn of phrase. Only the enormous dreaming in these songs still recalls the N chte. That a lot of dreaming was done in the N chte could be excused; it could be overlooked in Der fahrende Poet; but now Herr Beck never comes out of his sleep at all. He is dreaming already on page 3; p. 4, p. 8, p. 9, p. 15, p. 16, p. 23, p. 31, p. 33, p. 34, p. 35, p. 40, etc., dreams everywhere. In addition there is a whole series of dream images. It would be ridiculous if it were not so sad. The hope of originality dwindled to a few new metres, and to make up for it there are suggestions of Heine and an infinitely childish naivety which runs most repulsively through almost all the songs. The first part, Lieder der Liebe. Ihr Tagebuch, suffers particularly. I would not have expected such weak, revolting pap from the blazing flame, the noble, strong spirit that Beck wants to be. Only two or three songs are tolerable. Sein Tagebuch is a little better; here there is occasionally a real song to make up for the frequent nonsense and drivel. The worst of the drivel in Sein Tagebuch is Eine Tr ne. We know what Beck produced earlier in tear poetry. There he let the suffering, that bloody, raw corsair, sail in the quiet sea of tears [K. Beck, N chte. Gepanzerte Lieder. From the poem Der Sultan] and grief, the dumb, cold fish , splash about in it. Now this is joined by: How stupid it is! The better part of the whole booklet is to be found in the dream images, and some of the songs there are at least heartfelt. Particularly Schlaf wohl! which, to judge by the date of its first publication in the Elegante, must belong to the earlier of these songs. The final poem is among the better ones, although somewhat verbose, and at the end there is again the tear the strong shield of the world spirit . [K. Beck, Stille Lieder] To conclude there are attempts at the ballad. The Zigeunerk nig, with an opening which smacks strongly of Freiligrath s descriptive manner, is weak compared with the vivid portrayal of gipsy life in Lenau, and the gushing phrases, which are meant to make us find the poem fresh and strong, only render it more repulsive. Das R slein is, however, a prettily reproduced moment. Das ungrische Wachthaus is in the same class as the Zigeunerk nig; the last ballad of this cycle is an example of how a poem can have flowing and sonorous verses and beautiful phrases without leaving much impression. The earlier Beck would have presented the sinister robber Janossyk more vividly in three striking images. And this Beck must have a final dream on the last page but one and so the booklet ends, but not the poem, the continuation of which is promised for the second slim volume. What does this mean? Are poems, like journals, to end with to be continued"? After several theatre managements had declared it impossible to produce, Verlorene Seelen was, we hear, destroyed by the author; he now appears to be working on another tragedy, Saul; at least, the Elegante has only published the first act and the [Allgemeine] TheaterChronik an extensive prospectus of it. This act has already been reviewed in these columns. Unfortunately I can only confirm what is said there. Beck, whose uncontrolled and uncertain fantasy makes him incapable of presenting characters in the round, who compels all his personages to use the same phrases, Beck, who showed in his interpretation of B rne how little he can understand a character, let alone create one, could not have hit upon a more unfortunate idea than to write a tragedy. Beck was forced unwittingly to borrow the exposition from a recently published model, to make his David and Merob speak in the tearful tone of Ihr Tagebuch, to present Saul s changes of mood with the crudeness of a comedy at a country fair. Hearing this Moab speak you begin to realise the significance of Abner as his model; is this Moab, this coarse, bloody disciple of Moloch, more like an animal than a man, supposed to be Saul s evil spirit"? A child of nature is not a beast, and Saul, who opposes the priests, does not for that reason find pleasure in human sacrifice. In addition, the dialogue is wooden beyond measure, the language feeble, and only a few tolerable images, which, however, cannot carry the weight of even one act of a tragedy, recall the expectations which Herr Beck no longer seems capable of fulfilling. | Karl Beck by Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1839/12/telegraph.htm |
[Bremen] Jan. 7, 1839 Dear Marie, I hope you have now had that tooth extracted or that it was not necessary. The riddle about the pond is very nice but you ought to be able to solve it yourself. Listen, composing is hard work; you have to pay attention to so many things the harmony of the chords and the right progression, and that gives a lot of trouble. I'll see if I can t send you something again next time. I am now working on another choral, in which the bass and soprano voices alternate. Have a look at this. The accompaniment is still missing, and I'll probably make some changes too. It is obvious that most of it, except the fourth line, has been stolen from the Hymn Book. The text is the well-known Latin Stabat mater dolorosa juxta crucem lacrymosa Dum pendebat filius. The Pastor [Georg Gottfried Treviranus] killed a pig in the wash-house at midday today. At first his wife would not have anything to do with the whole business, but he said he wanted to make a gift of it to her, so she had to take it. And the pig didn t scream at all. Once it was dead all the females in the family came in. But the old granny would not let anyone take her place stirring the blood and it looked quite strange. They will be making the sausage tomorrow, that is really the thing for her. You say you saw a monkey and that it was you. Do you know that on the wafer with which you sealed your little letter there was written: Je dis la v rit ? It also has a mirror drawn on it. Tell Mother that she should not write Treviranus , she can leave out the Herr Pastor from the address altogether, the postman knows where I live anyway, as I fetch the letters from the post every day; besides, he might be tempted not to bring my letters to the office but to me at the Treviranus and there I only get them a couple of hours later when I come home. Str cker wrote me that on the Sunday before New Year Hermann acted all sorts of things, including a waiter, etc. He must write to me about it. Str cker was full of praise for his skill, saying that Hermann played the part of the waiter as well as if he had worked in a restaurant for three years. Is he growing a lot? Tell Mother not to show my composition to Schornstein or he will say again that is the end of everything. You see, I learn everything that happens. Next time I am in Barmen again I shall become the consul for Bremen like the Old Man. [Heinrich Leupold] Addi s mi hermana Yours, Friedrich Please excuse all the mistakes I have made in the bass part. I am not used to writing music. In case you could not read the last line but one, I am writing it out again for you. | Letters: Letters of Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1839/letters/39_01_07.htm |
[Bremen, January 20, 1839] To Fritz Graeber Florida I The Spirit of Earth speaks: II The Seminole speaks: III The White Man speaks: Here is my contribution to the next little party. I saw that there had been one at our place again and I was very sorry that I didn t send anything in for it. Now in reply to your letter. Aha! Why don t you read the newspaper? If you did you would have seen what was and what was not printed about the business. It s not my fault if you make a fool of yourself. The paper only contained official reports issued by the Senate and they were really what was to be expected. Pl macher s comedy must be very good. I have written asking for it twice, but he has not uttered a word about it. As far as Jonghaus and his love are concerned, I have something to settle with him about that. You fellows always let yourselves be put off writing by this and that . Tell me, can t you write to me for half an hour each day after you get a letter from me? Then you'd be finished in three days. I have all these letters to write five of them and I write much closer than you do and still I have them finished in four or five days. Yes, it s terrible. You can have eight days, but on the ninth day after you receive my letter you must post your reply. There s no other way. If I have made other arrangements with Wurm I herewith change them. You have eight days, otherwise the penalties that Wurm is threatened with come into force no verses and you'll be kept waiting just as long as I am. Here is a woodcut, la Volksb cher, which shows you plainly how I'm on the look-out for you, that is, for your letters. I thought I would have got my letters off today (Sunday, Jan. 20) but it s striking half past four and the post goes at five today. So my plans have gone awry again. Well, it has its good side anyway for now I can shit in peace and then write to you in peace. I have not yet been able to start a letter to Peter Jonghaus. Damn, there s somebody sitting in the lavatory and I am bursting. It s remarkable that if you consider our greatest writers, they always seem to go in pairs, one complementing the other as, for example, Klopstock and Lessing, Goethe and Schiller, Tieck and Uhland. But now R ckert is quite on his own and I'm curious whether he is going to be joined by anybody or whether he'll die off first; it almost looks like it. As a love poet, he could be paired with Heine, but unfortunately the two of them are otherwise so heterogeneous that you can t possibly unite them. Klopstock and Wieland are at least contrasts, but R ckert and Heine have not the slightest other similarity and each stands absolutely on his own. The Berlin party of Young Germany are a fine lot indeed! They want to transform our tune into one of conditions and subtle relations , which is as much as to say: we write something for the whole world, and to fill up the pages we describe things that don t exist, and we call them conditions , or we dish up a hotchpotch and that goes under the name of subtle relations . This Theodor Mundt scribbles up something for the whole world about Demoiselle Taglioni, who dances Goethe , embellishes it with fine phrases from Goethe, Heine, Rahela and Stieglitz and talks the most priceless nonsense about Bettina b but all in so ultra-modern a fashion that it must he a delight for any empty-headed dandy or a young, vain, lascivious lady to read the like. This K hne, Mundt s agent in Leipzig, is editor of the Zeitung f r die elegante Welt and it now looks like a lady whose figure was built for a crinoline and who is now stuck into a modern dress so that at every step you can see her charming bandy legs through the clinging dress. It is exquisite! And this chap Heinrich Laube! He daubs without stopping about characters that don t exist, writes travel stories which are nothing of the sort, nonsense upon nonsense; it s terrible. I don t know what is going to happen to German literature. We have three men of talent: Karl Beck, Ferd. Freiligrath and Julius Mosen. The last is certainly a Jew and in his Ahasver, he makes the Wandering Jew defy Christianity on all accounts. Gutzkow, who is amongst the most reasonable of all, reproaches him because, he says, Ahasuerus is a mean character, a real haggling Jew ; Theodor Creizenach, likewise a juif, has now laid hold of Gutzkow in the Zeitung f r die elegante Weit in the most violent way, but Gutzkow stands too high above him. This Creizenach, a run-of-the-mill hack writer, praises Ahasuerus to high heavens as a crushed worm and abuses Christ as a self-wined, proud God Almighty; he also says that in the Volksbuch, it is true, Ahasuerus is nothing but a vulgar fellow, but that in the blotting-paper books of the fair pedlars Faust also is not much more than a common sorcerer, whereas Goethe has endowed him with the psychology of several centuries . This last is clear to be nonsense (if I'm not mistaken, that is quite a Latin construction), but I am concerned with it only because of the Volksb cher. Of course, if Theodor Creizenach damns them they must be very, very bad indeed, nevertheless I make bold to say that there is more depth and poetry in the Volksbuch Ahasuerus than in the whole of Th. Creizenach plus all his worthy companions. I am now at work on a number of epigrams and I'm sending you those I have finished. The periodicals 1. Telegraph [Telegraph f r Deutschland] You call yourself a quick writer, so who can doubt quick-written stuff is what your pages are filled with? 2. Morgenblatt [Morgenblatt f r gebildete Leser] If you read me through in the morning, by evening you'll have forgotten whether it was blank or printed pages you saw. 3. Abend-zeitung If you cannot sleep at night, just take in your hand this paper and lovely slumber will come to you soon. 4. Literatur-Blatt These leaves are the most critical in the whole literary forest. But how dry they are. The wind blows them down. I can t think of any more at the moment and so must stop now. As I have just noticed, I really must hurry up if I am to get the letters off tomorrow, malefactor that I am. We shall be having company any moment now, and tomorrow there will be an awful lot of running about and copying,, so that it will not be out of place to write very fast. I am now reading Kaiser und Papst by Duller, a novel in four volumes. Duller has an undeserved reputation. His Wittelsbach romances. many of which are included in H llstett s book, are terribly bad. He wanted to imitate a popular style but became familiar. His Loyola is an abominable mix-up of all the good and bad elements of a historical novel warmed up in the sauce of a bad style. His Leben Grabbes is horribly distorted and one-sided. The novel I am reading is better; some of the characters are well described, others at least not too badly, isolated situations are pretty well handled, and the people he has invented are interesting. But to judge by the first volume, he is quite lacking in any sense of proportion in the importance given to the secondary characters, and in any new, original views on history. It is nothing to him to kill off his best-drawn character at the end of the first volume, and besides he has a great preference for peculiar kinds of death. Thus, one of the characters dies of rage at the very moment when he is about to plunge his dagger into his enemy s breast, and this same enemy is standing on the edge of the crater of Etna, where he wants to poison himself, when a crevasse opens in the mountain and he is buried in a stream of lava. The volume ends after a description of the following scene: The waves of the ocean close over the sun s head, parting and all a very piquant, but thoroughly trite and silly ending. That must also be the end of my letter. Addio, adieu, adi s, adeus Yours, Friedrich Engels | Letters: Letters of Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1839/letters/39_01_20.htm |
[Bremen, February 19, 1839] Et Tu, Brute? Friderice Graeber, hoc est res quam nunquam de te credideriml Tu jocas ad cartas? passionaliter? 0 Tempores o moria! Res dig.nissima memoria! Unde est tua gloria? [And you too, Brutus? Friedrich Graeber, this is a thing I should never have passionately? O times, O customs! Thing most worthy of being remembered. Where is your honour?] Where is your honour and your Christianity? Est itum ad Diabolum! Quis est, qui te seduxit? Nonne verb,um meum fruxit (has borne fruit)? O fili mi, verte [Gone to the Devil! Who is it that has led you astray? Have my words borne no fruit? O my son, turn back.] otherwise I'll beat you with rod and switch, cartas abandona, fac multa bona, et vitam ag-as integram, partem recuperabis optimam! Vides amorem meum, ut spiritum faulenzendeum egi ad linguam latitmm et dic obstupatw: quinam fecit Angelum ita tollum, nonsensitatis vollum, Plenum et, plus ancora much: hoc fecit [Leave the cards, do much good, and if you live a pure life u will win back the best part. You see my love in that I have driven this spirit of idleness to Latin, and say in stupefaction: who then has made the angel so mad, so full of folly and other things? This has been done by...] excessive card-playing. Recollect yourself, you evil-doer, think what is the purpose of your existence! Robber, think of how you are sinning against everything sacred and profane! Cards! They are cut from the skin of the devil. 0 you terrible people. I think of you only with tears or gnashing of teeth. Ha, I am filled with inspiration. On the nineteenth day of the second month of 1839, on the day when midday is at twelve o'clock, a storm seized me and carried me afar and there I saw them playing cards, and then it was time to eat. To be continued. And behold, there arose from the Orient a dreadful thunderstorm, so that the windows rattled and the hailstones came beating down, but still they went on playing. Thereat a quarrel arose and the King of the Orient marched into battle against the Prince of the Occident and midnight echoed with the cries of the combatants. And the Prince of the Sea rose up against the lands in the Orient and a battle took place in front of his town, the like of which was never before seen by men. But they went on playing. And seven spirits came down from heaven. The spirit wore a long coat and his beard came down to his chest. He was called Faust. And the second spirit had a venerable fringe of grey hair round his bald head and he called out Woe, woe, woe! He was called Lear. And the third spirit was of great stature and enormous to behold and his name was Wallenstein. And the fourth spirit was like the children of Anak [Sons of Anak aboriginal giants reported in the Old Testament to have inhabited Southern Palestine] and he carried a cudgel like to the cedars of Lebanon. He was called Hercules. And the fifth was made of iron through and through and his name was written on his brow Siegfried and by his side strode a mighty warrior whose sword gleamed like lightning. He was the sixth and his name was Roland. And the seventh spirit carried a turban on the point of his sword and swung a banner over his head on which was written Mio Cid. And the seven spirits knocked on the door of the players, but they paid no heed. And behold, there arose from midnight a great brightness which spread over the whole earth like an eagle, and when it was gone I saw the players no more. But written in black letters on the door was Berlin [written in Hebrew] And I was struck dumb. If my letter to Wilhelm was not sufficient proof of my madness, I hope that it will not occur to any of you now to doubt it. If this is not the case, I am willing to give you even more convincing proof. I have just seen in the Telegraph a review of the poems of Winkler, the Barmen missionary. They are trounced terribly and a mass of extracts are given which have a distinct missionary flavour. If the paper comes to Barmen, that will be the end of Gutzkow s reputation there, which is already low. These extracts are really infinitely revolting Pol is an angel by comparison. Lord Jesus, heal the issue of blood of my sins (an allusion to the well-known story in the Gospel. [Luke 8:43]) and a lot more like this. I am despairing more and more about Barmen. It is finished as far as literary matters are concerned. What is printed there is, at best, piffle, with the exception of the sermons. Religious things are usually nonsense. Truly, it is not without justification that Barmen and Elberfeld are cried down as obscurantist and mystic. Bremen has the same reputation and resembles them in many ways. Philistinism linked with religious zealotry, with, moreover, in Bremen s case, a vile constitution, hinders any uplifting of the spirit, and one of the most outstanding hindrances is F. W. Krummacher. Blank is complaining so terribly about the Elberfeld preachers, especially Kohl and Hermann, that I should like to know whether he is right. He attacks them for their dryness more than anything else, with the sole exception of Krummacher. What the missionary writes about love is extremely comical. Look, I shall give you something like it. No it won t do. You can t go making satires on things like this without dragging in the most sacred things behind which these people hide themselves. I should like to see a marriage in which the man does not love his wife but Christ in his wife; and is it not an obvious question there whether he also sleeps with Christ in his wife? Where can you find nonsense like this in the Bible? In the Song of Songs it says How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights! [The Song of Solomon 7:6] But, to be sure, any defence whatever of sensuousness is attacked nowadays in spite of David, Solomon and God knows whom. I can get terribly annoyed over this kind of thing. In addition, these fellows pride themselves on having the true teaching and they damn anybody who does not so much doubt what is in the Bible, as interpret it in a different way from them. It is a pretty business. If anyone should dare to say that this or that verse is an interpolation, then they'll soon go for you. Gustav Schwab is the finest chap in the world, and even orthodox, but the mystics do not think anything of him because he is not always playing them religious songs in the style of: You say I am a Christian, and in one of his poems hints at a possible understanding between rationalists and Mystics. As far as religious poetry is concerned, it is at an end for the time being until someone comes along who can give it a new impetus. With both Catholics and Protestants everything goes on in the same old humdrum way. The Catholics compose hymns about the Virgin Mary, the Protestants sing the old songs with the most prosaic words in the world. These horrible abstractions sanctification, conversion, justification and lord knows what loci communes [platitudes] and hackneyed flourishes. Out of anger at present-day religious poetry, out of very piety, that is, one might well go over to the devil. Is our time so shabby that it is impossible for anyone to set religious poetry on to new paths? Incidentally, I think that the most contemporary kind is that which I have used in my Sturm and Florida, concerning which I ask you for the most detailed review on pain of not-receiving-any-more-poems. It is inexcusable of Wurm to hold on to the letters. Yours, Friedrich Engels | Letters: Letters of Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1839/letters/39_02_19.htm |
Bremen, March 11 1839 Dear Hermann, I request Your Honour not to plague me in future with beginnings of letters such as you learned from Herr Riepe and only permit myself for the moment to remark that it is winter with us every morning and summer every midday. For in the morning the temperature is minus five degrees, while it is plus ten degrees at midday. I continue to practise my singing and composing regularly. Here is a sample of the latter: You can sing The Blind Man to that melody or you can leave it. March 12. I'm very glad that you will soon be getting your dog. What is the breed of the mother and what does the animal look like? His Antiquity, Herr Leupold, is now arriving at the office and I will have to strike a more serious tone, as the great Shakespeare says. A new newspaper has just come out called the Bremer Stadtbote, [Courier] edited by Albertus Meyer, who is a very great blockhead. He used lure on the happiness of peoples, child education, and other topics, and when he wanted to get his lectures printed the worthy authorities would not agree, saying it would be far too nonsensical. He has the nature of a china merchant and has been in conflict with the Unterhaltungsblatte ever since his first issue. The way they go for each other would make you die laughing. Continuation in letter to Marie. Your loving brother Friedrich Engels | Letters: Letters of Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1839/letters/39_03_11.htm |
Bremen, March 12, 1839 Dear Marie, (Continuation of my letter to Hermann.) The Stadtbote is full of absolute nonsense and I am writing poems about it at the office which ridicule it by always praising it to the skies, just incoherent twaddle, and I send it to the paper signed Th. Hildebrandt and they print it in all innocence. I have got one in my desk at this very moment which I am going to send in. It runs like this: Book Wisdom So it goes, on and on, all mockery. Usually, when I am not quite sure what to send, I get hold of the Bote and scrape something together from that. The other day I sat Karl Leupold at my desk and dictated to him a rude letter to the Bote, which they received and printed with the most fantastically stupid comments. But I must go out now. So I remain Your loving brother Friedrich | Letters: Letters of Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1839/letters/39_03_12.htm |
[Bremen] April 8 (nisi erro [if I am not mistaken]), 1839 My dearest Fritz, This letter yes, you think you are going to be greatly amused by it, but no, not so much. You, who not only by making me wait so long, but by desecrating the holiest mysteries which ever remained hidden from the human genius, have clouded my visions, angered and enraged me, must suffer a special punishment. You shall be bored, and how? With an essay. And about what? About that much-talked-about sheep contemporary literature. What did we have before 1830? Theodor Hell and his associates, Willibald Alexis, an aged Goethe and an aged Tieck, c'est tout. Then, like a thunderclap, came the July revolution, the most splendid expression of the people s will since the war of liberation. Goethe dies, Tieck goes to seed more and more, Hell goes to sleep, Wolfgang Menzel goes on writing stodgy criticism, but a new spirit arises in literature with Gr n and Lenau above all among the poets. R ckert acquires a new verve, Immermann acquires importance, Platen the same, but that is not enough. Heine and B rne were already fully formed characters before the July revolution, but only now are they acquiring importance and upon them is arising a new generation, which turns to its account the lives and literatures of all peoples, Gutzkow leading. In 1830, Gutzkow was still a student and worked first of all for Menzel on the Literatur-Blatt, but not for long; they did not agree in their views. Menzel turned churlish; Gutzkow wrote the notorious Wally (die Zweiflerin), and Menzel made a terrible uproar about it, accusing Gutzkow of himself holding the views expressed by Wally in the novel, and actually succeeded in getting the harmless book banned. Gutzkow was joined by the admittedly unimportant Mundt, who in order to make money started all kinds of undertakings, publishing other people s articles cum suibus [Along with his own] Beurmann, a shrewd chap and fine observer, soon joined them, and then Ludolf Wienbarg and F. Gustav K hne, and for these five writers (nisi erro, anno 1835) Wienbarg invented the name Junges Deutschland. Opposing them was Menzel, who would have done better to stay at home, since it was for that very reason that Gutzkow demolished him, and then the Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung, which sees idolatry in every allegory and original sin in every expression of sensuousness (perhaps Hengstenberg was so named on the principle of lucus a non lucendo, [Grove from not being light; ancient Roman etymologists derived words often by contrast and not by resemblance] i.e., perhaps he is gelded, castrated, a eunuch? [A play on the name Hengstenberg, Hengst meaning stallion"]). These noble people accused Young Germany of wanting the emancipation of women and the restoration of the flesh and wanting as a side-line to overthrow a couple of kingdoms and become Pope and Emperor in one person. Of all these charges, only the one concerning the emancipation of women (in the Goethean sense) had any grounds, and it could only be brought against Gutzkow, who later disavowed the idea (as high-spirited, youthful over-haste). Through their standing by one another, their aims became more and more sharply defined; it was the ideas of the time which came to consciousness in them. These ideas of the century (so K hne and Mundt said) are not anything demagogic or anti-Christian as they are made out to be, but are based on the natural right of every man and extend to everything in the present conditions which conflicts with it. Thus these ideas include: above all, participation by the people in the administration of the state, that is, constitutional matters; further, emancipation of the Jews, abolition of all religious compulsion, of all hereditary aristocracy, etc. Who can have anything against that? The Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung and Menzel have it on their consciences that they have so cried down the honour of Young Germany. As early as 1836-37, among these writers, who were bound together by unity of purpose, but not by any special association, the idea was clear and definite; by the high quality of their writing they won for themselves the recognition of the other, mostly wretched, writers and attracted all the young talents to themselves. Their poets are Anastasius Gr n and Karl Beck; their critics are, first and foremost, Gutzkow, K hne, Laube and, among the younger ones, Ludwig Wihl, Levin Sch cking and others; they also try their hand at the novel, drama, etc. Recently, however, differences have arisen between Gutzkow and Mundt along with K hne and Laube. Both have supporters Gutzkow the younger people like Wihl, Sch cking and others, Mundt only a few of the younger ones. Beurmann is keeping fairly neutral, so is the young, very talented Dingelstedt, but they incline very much towards Gutzkow. As a result of the quarrel Mundt has lost all his credit, and that of K hne has fallen considerably because he is so contemptible that he denigrates everything Gutzkow writes. Gutzkow, on the other hand, behaves very nobly and dwells only on the great love between Mundt and K hne, who engage in mutual praise. Gutzkow s latest article in the Jahrbuch der Literatur shows that he is a quite extraordinarily honourable fellow. We have very few active writers apart from Young Germany. The Swabian school has been passive ever since 1820. The Austrians Zedlitz and Grffiparzer are of little interest because they write in such a strange fashion (Zedlitz Spanish style, Grillparzer antique); among the lyric poets Lenau inclines towards Young Germany despite his ecclesiastical material, Frankl is an agreeable Uhland in miniature, K. E. Ebert is quite Bohemianised. The Saxons Hell, Heller, Herlosssohn, Morvell, Wachsmann, Tromlitz oh my God, they lack wit; the Marteau lot and the Berliners (to whom you do not belong) are vile, the Rhinelanders Lewald is by far the best writer of entertainment literature; his Europa is readable, but the reviews in it are terrible Hub, Schnezler and Co. are not worth much, Freiligrath will yet turn to Young Germany one day, you'll see, Duller too, if he does not go to the dogs before then, and R ckert stands there like an old father and stretches out his hands in benediction over everyone. April 9. So there is the moving essay. What shall 1, poor devil, do now? Go on swotting on my own? Don t feel like it. Turn loyal? The devil if I wills Stick to Saxon mediocrity ugittugitt (oh God, oh God local expression of disgust). So I must become a Young German, or rather, I am one already, body and soul, I cannot sleep at night, all because of the ideas of the century. When I am at the post-office and look at the Prussian coat of arms, I am seized with the spirit of freedom. Every time I look at a newspaper I hunt for advances of freedom. They get into my poems and mock at the obscurantists in monk s cowls and in ermine. But with their fine phrases world-weariness, world-historic, the anguish of the Jews, etc. I will have no truck, for they are already outdated. And I'm telling you, Fritz, when you become a pastor you can be as orthodox as you like, but if ever you become a pietist who rails against Young Germany and regards the Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung as his oracle, then, truly, I'm telling you you'll have me to deal with. You must become a pastor in Gemarke a and drive out the damned, consumptive, sit-by-the-fire pietism which Krummacher has brought to such a bloom. Of course they will call you a heretic, but let one of them come and prove by the Bible or by reason that you are wrong. Meanwhile, Blank is a wicked rationalist and throws the whole of Christianity overboard, what will it lead to? Well, I have never been a pietist. I have been a mystic for a while, but those are tempi passati. I am now an honest, and in comparison with others very liberal, super-naturalist. How long I shall remain such I don t know, but I hope to remain one, even though inclining now more, now less towards rationalism. All this will have to be settled. Adios, Friderice, Write more quickly and write a lot. Tuus. Do h st de m dubbelt. [There you have me doubled] Friedrich Engels Friedrich Engels | Letters: Letters of Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1839/letters/39_04_08.htm |
Bremen, April 10, 1839 Dear Marie, Pardon me for not writing to you for so long. Now I'll tell you something nice. On Good Friday, the local Burgomaster, His Magnificence Dr. Groening, died and the election of a new one took place a week ago. The Right Honourable Senator Dr. J. D. Noltenius got the appointment and last Friday there was a big procession for his installation. First came the eight gentlemen servants, two of whom are at the service of every Burgomaster, each wearing short porcelain-white breeches, fine hose and bright red frock-coats, swords at their sides, and tricorns on their heads. Following them came the Burgomasters with His Magnificence Dr. Smidt, the shrewdest of them all and as good as King of Bremen, well to the fore; then Herr Dr. Duntze, who was muffled up to his chin in fur and who always takes a thermometer with him to the meetings of the Senate. Then the senators, preachers and citizens, some 600-800 people, perhaps more, who all went into a house or several houses where they ate, that is, they were all given macaroons, cigars and wine, ate as much as they could hold and crammed their pockets full. Youngsters gathered before the doors and made a din, and when anyone came out they all shouted after him, h t st, h t st! [Has eaten, has eaten!] They also did this to Alderman Hase, who turned round majestically and said: I am Herr Alderman Hase. Then they shouted: Ollermann Hase h t st, Ollermann Hase h t st And you can imagine how this strut of the Bremen state set the struts of his own body in motion in order to save himself. Last Saturday a new senator was elected in Dr. Noltenius place; Dr. Mohr received the honour and his tuck-in took place on Monday. It is the custom on these occasions that one of the new senator s relatives has to drink the pig [das Schwein trinken], i. e., he has to drink himself under the table, which difficult task was carried out by Herr H. A. Heineken, a broker, to the satisfaction of all. For a great poet says: Marie: But Friedrich, how can you write such stupid stuff? There s neither rhyme nor reason in it. Friedrich: I can t help it I have to fill the page somehow aha, I've just remembered something. Last Sunday I went out riding with Neviandt and Roth, and Neviandt brought along a little Englishman, the size of Anna. We were hardly outside the town before the Englishman got hold of a whip and walloped the horse, so that it lashed out with forelegs and hind-legs. He remains sitting on it calmly, the animal jumps about in all directions, but he isn t thrown. Then he dismounts to pick up his whip, which he had dropped, and, oh, magnificent stupidity, leaves the horse all by itself, and the horse wastes no time to think before doing a bunk. He runs after it, Neviandt dismounts and goes after him, but returns unsuccessful, John and the horse are gone. We ride to Horn, have a drop, and have scarcely started back before Mr. John comes galloping up pleine carri re [At full speed] The horse had been stopped on the way, he had mounted, ridden it back to the stable and got himself a new whip. So we turn round. Neviandt and I have rather wild horses and as we begin to trot a little Mr. John shoots past me at a mad gallop. My horse gets a fancy and goes off in high style. I twigged what it was up to, calmly let it run and tried to slow it down now and again, but when I'd just got it out of its mad rush, John shot past me and it was worse than ever. Waving his hat he kept shouting: My horse runs better than yours, hurrah! Finally his horse puffed up in front of a cart and behold, my Norma also stopped. If only the silly horses knew that their riders enjoy it when they rush off like that. I wasn t in the least afraid and managed quite well. Adieu. Yours, Friedrich | Letters: Letters of Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1839/letters/39_04_10.htm |
[Bremen, about April 23-May 1, 1839] Fritz Graeber, I am very busy at present with philosophy and critical theology. When you get to be eighteen years of age and become acquainted with Strauss, the rationalists and the Kirchen-Zeitung then you must either read everything without thinking or begin to doubt your Wuppertal faith. I cannot understand how the orthodox preachers can be so orthodox since there are some quite obvious contradictions in the Bible. How can you square the two genealogies of Joseph, Mary s husband, the different accounts of the institution of the Eucharist ( this is my blood ; this is the new testament in my blood [Mark 14:24; Luke 22:20]), of the men possessed by the devil (one says simply that the devil left him, the other that he entered into the swine), the statement that the mother of Jesus went out to look for her son, whom she believed to be mad, although she had conceived him miraculously, etc., with the authenticity, the literal authenticity of the Evangelists? And the discrepancy in the Our Father , in the sequence of the miracles, John s peculiarly deep interpretation, through which, however, the form of the narrative is obviously obscured what about that? Christi ipsissima verba [Christ s very own words] of which the orthodox boast come out differently in every gospel. Not to speak of the Old Testament. But nobody tells you this in dear old Barmen; there one is taught according to quite different principles. And on what does the old orthodoxy base itself? On nothing but the old routine. Where does the Bible demand literal belief in its teachings, in its accounts? Where does a single apostle declare that everything he says is directly inspired? This is not surrendering reason in obedience to Christ, as the orthodox people affirm; no, it is a killing of the divine in man to replace it with the dead letter. I am therefore just as good a super-naturalist as I was before, but I have cast off orthodoxy. Thus I cannot now or ever believe that a rationalist who seeks with all his heart to do as much good as possible, should be eternally damned. That is at odds with the Bible itself, for it is written that no one is damned on account of original sin but only because of his own sins. But if a person resists original sin with all his might and does what he can, then his actual sins are only a necessary consequence of original sin and therefore they cannot damn him. April 24. Ha, ha, ha! Do you know who wrote the article in the Telegraph? The author is the writer of these lines, but I advise you not to say anything about it, I could get into a hell of a lot of trouble. I know about Kohl, Ball and Hermann almost exclusively from reviews by W. Blank and Str cker, which I copied almost word for word. But that Kohl talks nonsense and Hermann is a feeble pietist, I know from my own ears. D. is D rholt, office boy at Wittenstein s in Unterbarmen. For the rest I am pleased with myself for not having said anything in the article that I cannot prove. There is only one thing which annoys me: I haven t presented Stier in as important a light as I ought to have done. He is not to be disregarded as a theologian. Aren t you astonished at my knowledge of the characters, especially of Krummacher and D ring (what I said about his sermon I heard from P. Jonghaus), and of literature? The remarks about Freiligrath must have been really good, otherwise Gutzkow would have cut them out. But the style is atrocious. By the way, the article seems to have caused a sensation. I put all five of you under obligation on your word of honour not to tell anyone that I am the author. Understood? As far as abuse is concerned, I heaped most of it on you and Wilhelm because I had the letters to you right in front of me when the urge to abuse somebody overcame me. F. Pl macher especially must not get to know that I wrote the article. What a lad that Ball is though! He is to preach on Good Friday, does not feel like studying and so learns by heart a sermon he finds in the Menschenfreund and gives that. Krummacher is in church, the sermon seems familiar to him, and it finally occurs to him that he had preached that sermon himself on Good Friday 1832. Other people, who have read the sermon, also recognise it. Ball is called upon to account for it and must confess. Signum est, Ballum non tantum abhorrere a Krummachero, ut Tu quidem dixisti. [This is an indication that Ball has not such an aversion for Krummacher as you indeed said] I am very much obliged to you for the detailed review of Fawt. The treatment of this piece certainly bears the stamp of that wretch Raupach. This low cur pokes his nose into everything and ruins not only Schiller by using his images and ideas over and over again in his tragedies, but also Goethe by maltreating him. I doubt very much if my poems will have a big sale; more likely they'll have a stinking one, since they are going for waste paper and bumf. I could not read what you wrote in red ink, so shall send you neither 5 silver groschen nor cigars. This time you will get either the canzone or part of the comedy which I have begun but not finished. Now I must go to my singing lesson. Adieu. April 27 Fragments of a Tragicomedy Horned Siegfried I The Palace of King Sieghard Council Meeting Sieghard Councillor Sieghard Siegfried Councillor Siegfried (Exit.) II Master Smith (Exit Siegfried with Apprentice.) Master Smith Siegfried (returning) Master Siegfried Master Siegfried Master Siegfried Theodor Hell Siegfried Theodor Hell Master Siegfried (Throws him down.) Master (Siegfried is sent into the forest, slays the dragon and, on returning, the Master;scatters the journeymen in all directions, and goes away.) III In the Forest Siegfried (Enter Leo and Michelet.) Leo Michelet Leo Michelet Leo Michelet Leo Michelet Siegfried Leo Michelet Siegfried Leo Michelet Siegfried Leo Siegfried (Exeunt Leo and Michelet in different directions.) Siegfried That is as far as I've got. I have left out the bits of narration and only copied out the introduction and the satires. This is the last piece. Now it is the turn of the King of Bavaria a to be dealt with but here it comes to a standstill. The thing lacks complexity and rounding off. Please ask Wurm to see about the poems for the Musenalmanach I must finish now, the post is going. Yours, Friedrich Engels May 1, 39 | Letters: Letters of Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1839/letters/39_04_23.htm |
[Bremen] April 28, 1839 Dear Marie, You too are only going to get a little from me today so that I can get on to my comedy which I want to send you. It is quite true that the gentlemen ate six crates of macaroons. You can believe it or not, just as you like, but there were about 600 people. Serves you right that you've got nettle-rash. Your fingers are always itching because you want to do something silly. Now you've got something to itch about. You are an old itching machine, and always will be. And I advise you not to leave any empty spaces in your letter, otherwise I'll fill them with caricatures so as not to get out of practice. Dios, my dear Marie. Friedrich This scrawl is called stenography. The Dressing-up. Comedy in I act, for Marie Scene 1 I could have gone on with it but time will not allow. The post goes in half an hour, so I'll close. Your brother Friedrich | Letters: Letters of Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1839/letters/39_04_28.htm |
[Bremen, about April 28-30, 1839] Guglielmo carissimo! My very dear Wilhelm, I found your letter amongst those of the others and its words were sweet to me. But I cannot accept as either authentic or competent the judgment and the sentence passed by the five students. For it is an act of kindness on my part when I enclose poems in my letters to you [in Greek]. Since you don t wish to criticise St. Hanor, Florida and Sturm, you don t deserve to get any more verses. Your assertion of intellectual weakness is in contradiction to your customary veracity. It will do no harm to liberty if my mind inclines towards Young Germany, for this is not a group of writers, like the romantic, demagogic and other schools, not a closed society; what they want and work for, is that the ideas of our century the emancipation of the Jews and of the slaves, general constitutionalism and other good ideas shall become part of the flesh and blood of the German people. Since these ideas are not far from the trend of my own mind, why should I hold aloof? For it is not as you say. [in Latin]: surrendering oneself to a tendency, sed: joining it; sequitur a continuation in my room, and, in writing a polyglottic letter, I will take now the English language, But no, my beautiful Italian, lovely and pure as the zephyr, with words like flowers from the loveliest of gardens, and Spanish, a language like the wind in the trees, and Portuguese, like the rustling of the sea on a shore of flowers and meadows, and French, like the quick murmur of a fountain, very amusing, and Dutch, like the smoke from a pipe of tobacco, very cosy [in mixture of French, Dutch, Spanish]: but our beloved German that is all at once. I wrote down these hexameters ex tempore, and I hope they'll make the nonsense on the previous page, out of which they came, more bearable to you. But discuss them as something extemporary. April 29. To proceed with your letter in consistent continuation, the weather is marvellous today so that you, posito caso aequalitatis temporalis, are probably and rightly cutting all your lectures today. I wish I were with you. I have probably already written to you that I have been venting my wit on the Bremer Stadtboteb under the name of Theodor Hildebrand; I have given it up now with the following letter. Dear Bremen Courier, Theodor Hildebrand You, too, should begin to write a little, either in verse or in prose, and then send things to the Berliner Conversationsblatt, if it still exists, or to the Gesellschafter. Later, you take it up more seriously, write short stories, which you get printed in magazines, then by themselves, you get a reputation, are acclaimed as a gifted, witty narrator. I see you all again, Heuser a great composer, Wurm writing profound studies on Goethe and the developments of the time, Fritz becoming a famous preacher, Jonghaus composing religious poems, you writing witty short stories and critical essays, and me becoming the town poet of Barmen to replace Lieutenant Simons of shabbily treated memory (in Cleve). As a further piece of poetry for you, there is also the song on the sheet for the Musenalmanach, which I don t feel like copying out again. Perhaps I'll write another one besides. Today (April 30), because of the magnificent weather, I sat in the garden from 7 in the morning to half past 8, smoked and read the Lusiade until I had to go to the office. There s no better way of reading than in a garden on a clear spring morning, with a pipe in your mouth, and the rays of the sun on your back. This afternoon I'll continue this pursuit with the Old German Tristan, and his sweet reflections on love. Tonight I'm going to the Ratsheller where our Herr Pastore is treating us to the Rhine wine which he has been given in duty bound by the new Burgomaster. In such stupendous weather I always get an immense longing for the Rhine and its vineyards, but what can I do about it? Write a couple of verses at most. I am willing to bet that W. Blank has written telling you that [I,] wrote the articles in the Telegraph and that s why you were all so angry about it. The scene is in Barmen and you can imagine what it is. I have just had a letter from W. Blank in which he says that the article is causing a frantic uproar in Elberfeld. Dr. Runkel attacks it in the Elberfelder Zeitung, accusing me of falsehoods. I want to let him be given a hint that he should point out to me just one single falsehood, which he cannot, because everything I wrote was based on proven data which I have from eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses. Blank sent me the paper, which I at once dispatched to Gutzkow with the request to go on keeping my name secret. Krummacher declared recently in a sermon that the earth stands still and the sun rotates around it, and the fellow dares to trumpet this to the world on this April 21, 1839, and then he says that pietism does not lead the world back to the Middle Ages. It is scandalous. He should be expelled, or one day he will yet become Pope before you know, and then may a saffron-yellow thunderstorm strike him dead. Dios lo sabe, God knows what will become of Wuppertal. Adios. Yours, expecting a speedy reply or not sending any more poems, Friedrich Engels | Letters: Letters of Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1839/letters/39_04_30.htm |
Bremen, May 23, 1839 Dear Marie, Now I ride out every Sunday in the country with R. Roth. Last Monday we went to Vegesack and Blumenthal and just when we wanted to have a look at the famous Bremer Schweiz (this is a very small strip of land with small sand-hills), an enormous pall of haze came down like a cloud and in five minutes it was almost quite dark, so that we were unable to enjoy the so-called beautiful view. But on Whit Monday it is really lively in these parts. Everybody goes out of town and it is dead quiet in Bremen, but at the town gates you see procession after procession of carriages, riders and walkers. And such a dust, it is terrible. For the roads are covered with sand to a depth of half a yard and of course it all goes up into the air. A broker called Jan Krusbecker has just arrived and I'll draw him for you. He looks exactly like this. He has eyes like rockets and an always half-melancholy, half-smiling air. Adieu. Your brother Friedrich | Letters: Letters of Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1839/letters/39_05_23.htm |
Among the poetic offspring of the Restoration period, whose powers were not crippled by the electric shocks of the year 1830 and whose fame only became established in the present literary epoch, there are three who are distinguished by a characteristic similarity: Immermann, Chamisso, and Platen. All three possess unusual individuality, considerable character, and an intellectual power which at least outweighs their poetic talent. In Chamisso, it is sometimes imagination and feeling that predominate, and at other times calculating intellect; especially in the terza rimas the surface is altogether cold and rationalistic, but underneath one hears the beating of a noble heart; in Immermann, these two qualities oppose each other and constitute the dualism which he himself acknowledges and the extreme features of which his strong personality can bend together but not unite; lastly, in Platen, poetic power has abandoned its independence and finds itself at ease under the domination of the more powerful intellect. If Platen s imagination had not been able to rely on his intellect and his magnificent character, he would not have become so famous. Hence he represented the intellectual in poetry, the form; hence also his wish to end his career with a great work of art was not granted. He was well aware that such a great work was essential to make his fame lasting, but he felt also that his powers were still inadequate for it and he put his hopes on the future and his preparatory work; meanwhile, time passed, he did not get beyond the preparatory work and finally died. Platen s imagination followed timorously the bold strides of his intellect, and when it was a matter of a work of genius, when his imagination should have ventured on a bold leap that the intellect could not accomplish, it had to shrink back. That was the source of Platen s error in considering the products of his intellect to be poetry. His poetic creative powers sufficed for anacreontic ghazals and sometimes flashed like a meteor in his comedies; but let us admit merely that most of what was characteristic of Platen is the product of the intellect, and will always be recognised as such. People will tire of his excessively affected ghazals and his rhetorical odes; they will find the polemics of his comedies for the most part unjustified, but they will have to pay full respect to the wit of his dialogue and the loftiness of his parabases, and see the justification of his one-sidedness in the greatness of his character. Platen s literary standing in public opinion will change; he will go farther from Goethe, but will come closer to B rne. That his views, too, make him more akin to B rne is evident not only from a host of allusions in his comedies but already from several poems in his collected works, of which I shall mention only the ode to Charles X. A number of songs inspired by the Polish struggle for freedom were not included in this collection, although they were bound to be of great interest for a characterisation of Platen. They have now been issued by another publishing firm as a supplement to the collected works. I find my view of Platen confirmed by them. Thought and character here have to be the substitute for poetry to a greater extent and more noticeably than anywhere else. For that reason Platen seldom feels at home in the simple style of the song; there have to be lengthy, extended verses, each of which can embody a thought, or artificial ode metres, the serious, measured course of which seems almost to demand a rhetorical content. With the art of verse, thoughts also come to Platen and that is the strongest proof of the intellectual origin of his poems. He who demands something else from Platen will not find satisfaction in these Polish songs, but he who takes up this booklet with these expectations will find himself richly compensated for the lack of poetic fragrance by an abundance of exalted, powerful thoughts that have sprung from a most noble character, and by a magnificent passionateness , as the preface aptly says. It is a pity that these poems were not published a few months earlier, when German national consciousness rose against the imperial Russian European pentarchy ; they would have been the best reply to it. Perhaps the pentarchist, too, would have found in them many a motto for his work. [Allusion to K. Goldmann s book Die europ ische Pentarchie] | Platen by Frederick Engels | https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1840/02/platen.htm |
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