Marx-Engels Correspondence 1852
Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 205;
First published: in full in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.
Dear Cluss,
So necessary have your weekly letters become to me that I am far from satisfied with your change of method and, out of vexation at your silence, have likewise remained silent.
You'll have had my letter about Brüningk. We must — et nous sommes dans le vrai — repay the shameless Gottfried in kind. According to Imandt’s last report of the London guarantors’ meeting, extracts of which appeared in the Wecker, Techow (now departed for Australia) rose and said: ‘...those in particular who had enjoyed Brüningk’s hospitality should be ashamed of themselves for spreading calumnies about Mrs von Brüningk.’ Kinkel, of the unashamedly unruffled brow, protested his innocence, although Imandt could have proved that he was lying. Willich sat as though nailed to his seat.
As regards the second matter, that of remuneration, I can do nothing further since my informant, Biskamp (whom I would beg you not to name) has settled in France and I have no correspondence with him. However, salary or no salary, this much is certain:
1. that Kinkel and Willich spent £200 and failed adequately to account for it to the London guarantors’ congress;
2. Willich, on the pretext of meeting the cost of correspondence, remunerated himself for as long as he could;
3. that when Kinkel — proof of his purity in money matters — arrived in Paris after his escape he immediately approached one of the leaders of the Slav-German etc. revolutionary committee there and informed him in confidence that it would be desirable if the German democrats in Paris were to give him a welcoming supper which he would then get the press to trumpet abroad. (As in fact later happened.) To the remark: where is the money coming from? Gottfried replied that it could be taken out of the revolutionary committee funds. To the further remark that there was no money in the exchequer but rather a considerable deficit, Gottfried opined that the member (Bangya) to whom he was speaking could advance it, he himself being so frightfully popular in Germany that money would come flowing in. Subsequently this same Kinkel got Bangya to advance him 500 fr. for his personal use on the account of the revolutionary committee. His reçu is still in existence. He has not repaid it to this very day.
I have seen the reçu. But Bangya insists on not being named, likewise Häfner, who was also present. These people are right. The object of Kinkel’s policy is by means of bare-faced denials (that the man is lying is proved by the business with me and with Dr Wiss, whom he forced to make a public statement by asserting that he had no connection with the ‘loan in his name’. See New-Yorker Deutsche Zeitung and Wiss’ own statement therein. Cite this last fact), his object, I say, is to compel me to show my hand and by and by to discover whence I draw the information with which to catch him out. This, he thinks, would draw my sting. Ça ne va pas.
You'll be able to follow in the Kölnische Zeitung the proceedings against our friends that opened on the 4th of this month in the Court of Assizes. The jury is damn bad. It consists of big landowners and big capitalists, viz: Regierungsrat von Münch-Bellinghausen, Häbling von Lanzenauer, Frelherr von Fürstenberg, von Bianca, von Tesseler, vom Rath; Joest (the biggest manufacturer — sugar — in Cologne); Herstadt (one of the leading bankers in Cologne), D. Leiden (big capitalist). Finally Leven (wine merchant) and Professor Kräusler.
Have my last two articles on the general election appeared in the Tribune? The first two caused a great stir here in England. Jones reproduced them.
Enclosed you will find:
1. Letter from Imandt.
2. Copy of an article from The Morning Advertiser of 6 October, in which the luckless Ruge-Ronge endeavour to assert themselves. The League here would now ask you to write by return a letter to The Morning Advertiser (signed Dr Smyth or something like that) in which you make fun of the German lone star which has neither lone nor star, and reassure The Morning Advertiser about the threat to America presented by this soap-bubble that has long since burst there. (Copy to be sent to us.)
3. A letter from Massol in Paris, which please return. Massol is one of the cleverest of the older Frenchmen (those of the forties), former St Simonist, Proudhonist, etc. The man and the book he alludes to are Proudhon and his book on Bonaparte.
It seems to me that you people should now go for Heinzen in such a way as to torture him by pointing out how, since ’47, this oaf has systematically ignored every attack relating to matters of principle (as, of late, that of Weydemeyer and subsequently your own), only to reappear a few months later as much of a charlatan as ever, quasi re bene gesta.
Your
K. M.
N. B. The morsel of erudition (striking in view of Heinzen’s well-known ignorance) which he reveals in treating of the historical development of marriage, was borrowed by the unhappy man from G. Jung, Geschichte der Frauen, Part 1, Frankfurt am Main 1850. Jung himself drew his material from: C. Meiners, Geschichte des weiblichen Geschlechts, 4 vols. Hanover 1788-1800, and from: J. A. de Ségur, Les femmes etc., 3 vols. Paris 1803, and sprinkled it with Hegelian-Young German sauce.
Meiners and Ségur drew on:
Alexander (W.), History of Women etc., 2 vols. London 1782, 3rd ed.
Thomas (de l'Ac. franç.), Essai sur le caractère etc. des femmes etc., Paris 1773.
For the manner in which the Hegelian school finally sums the thing up — that old buffoon Ruge, now apparently in his dotage, is too stupid to count — see:
Unger (J.), Die Ehe in ihrer welthistorischen Entwicklung. Vienna 1850.
This ‘bibliography’ will enable you not only to deprive the unhappy Heinzen of all desire to pass off as new discoveries a few platitudes filched from the socialists but also to provide the German-American public, if interested in the subject, with the sources where the material may be found.