MIA > Archive > Wilhelm Liebknecht
Written: In German for Illustrierte Neue Welt: Kalender für das Jahr 1897.[a]
Published in English: 1957.[b]
English Source: Reminiscences of Marx and Engels. Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957, Moscow, USSR. pp. 137-149.
Translated by: Unknown (name not provided).
Public Domain: This work is free of any copyright restrictions.
Transcription and Markup: Bill Wright for marxists.org, June 2023.
Note: The ellipses (. . .) in the text suggest that this translation has been shortened from the German-language original.
The explanatory notes are by the editors of the 1957 Soviet book.
Frederick Engels had a clear bright head, free from any romantic or sentimental haze, that did not see men and things through coloured glasses or a misty atmosphere but always in clear bright air, saw brightly and clearly, with clear bright eyes, not remaining on the surface but seeing to the bottom of things, piercing them through and through. Those clear bright eyes, that clairvoyance in the true and healthy sense of the word, that perspicacity that Mother Nature gives but few people at birth, was an essential feature of Engels and I was immediately struck by it when we met for the first time. . . .
It was late in summer 1849 by the blue Lake of Geneva, where we had set up several emigrant colonies after the failure of the Reich Constitution campaign. . . . Before that I had the opportunity of personally making the acquaintance of a number of “great men” of all kinds like Ruge, Heinzen, Julius Fröbel, Struve and various other leaders of the people in the Baden and Saxony “revolutions,” but the closer my acquaintance with them became the more their halo faded and the smaller they seemed to me.
The more hazy the air, the bigger men and things seem. Frederick Engels had the quality that made the haze disappear before his clear-sighted eyes and men and things look like men and things are.
That piercing glance and the penetrating judgement resulting from it made me uncomfortable at first, and occasionally even hurt me. It was true that I had not been better impressed by the heroes of the Reich Constitution campaign than Engels, but I thought he underestimated the whole movement, which contained many valuable forces and much self-sacrificing enthusiasm. At the same time, the remains of “South-German placidity” — although I do not come from Southern Germany — that I still had at the time and that was thoroughly knocked out of me later in England, did not prevent us from agreeing in our general opinion of persons and things, although not always immediately. Neither was I long in noting that Engels, whose book on the British working-class movement I had read long before, and whose wealth and variety of knowledge personal association with him had taught me to admire, always had solid and definite grounds for his opinion. I looked up to him, he had already achieved much and was five years older than me — the equivalent of a whole century at that age.
I soon noticed, too, that he was efficient in military matters. In the course of the conversation I learned that the articles that Neue Rheinische Zeitung had published on the revolutionary war in Hungary and that were attributed to a high-ranking officer in the Hungarian army because they always proved to be correct, were written by Engels. And yet, as he himself told me, laughing, he had no other material than all the other newspapers had. This came almost exclusively from the Austrian Government, which lied in the most brazen-faced way. It did the same with Hungary as the Spanish Government now with Cuba[1] — it always won. But Engels here made use of his clairvoyance. He took no heed of phrase-mongering. He already had Röntgen’s X-rays in his head, and they, as we know, suffer no refraction and do not make a U out of an X; by means of them he saw through what was unessential for the establishment of the truth and did not allow any haze or mirage to lead him astray but stuck to what was substantial — to facts. No matter with what scorn of death the Austrian Government issued its Münchhausen proclamations it had to mention certain facts: the names of the places where the clashes took place, where the troops were at the beginning and at the end of the battle, the time of the clashes, the troop movements, etc. And out of these tiny bits and pieces “unser Fritz” with his clear bright eyes put together like Cuvier the real picture of the events in the fighting area. With a good map of the theatre of operations one could conclude with mathematical accuracy from the dates and places that the victorious Austrians were being pushed farther and farther back while the defeated Hungarians continued to go farther and farther forward. The calculation was so correct, too, that the day after the Austrian army had inflicted a decisive defeat on the Hungarians on paper it was thrown out of Hungary in complete disarray. . . .
Engels, by the way, seemed born to be a soldier: he had clear sight, quickness of perception and appreciation of the smallest circumstance, rapid decision and imperturbable coolness. Later he wrote a number of excellent essays on military questions and, though incognito, gained recognition by first-class military experts who had no idea that the anonymous author of the pamphlets was one of the most notorious rebels. . . .
In London we jokingly called him the General, and if there had been another revolution in his lifetime we would have had in Engels our Carnot, the organizer of armies and victories, the military brain.
Engels himself soon wrote about the Reich Constitution campaign in Neue Rheinische Zeitung[2] which was published from London and did not live to have many issues. From it I take the following:
After Marx and Engels had been to Karlsruhe and formed an opinion of the Brentano revolutionary government, they went to Pfalz to make acquaintance with the provisional government and the movement there. In Speyer they met Willich, who was in command of a volunteer corps, and went with him to Kaiserslautern, where they found the provisional government headed by D’Ester.
Here they found the situation such that there could be no question of the official participation of the Communists in the movement, which was as definitely petty-bourgeois here as in Baden. After a few days in Kaiserslautern the two friends went to Bingen. On the way they were stopped by the Hessian troops and arrested with a few other friends on suspicion of having taken part in the rising. They were taken first to Darmstadt and then to Frankfort where they were released.
Shortly afterwards Marx went by order of the Democratic Central Committee to Paris, where a decisive event was about to take place, to represent the German revolutionary party with the French Social-Democrats. Engels returned to Pfalz, to Kaiserslautern, to wait for developments and to join the movement as a soldier if necessary.
In Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue Engels qualifies the popular movement in Pfalz with sparkling humour.
“Whoever has seen Pfalz once,” he writes,
“can understand that a movement in this land, so rich in vineyards and exhilarated with wine, was inevitably an extremely cheerful one. The dull, pedantic, old-Bavarian beer-drinking officials were at last thrown out and replaced by gay Pfalz wine-bibbers. At last the would-be profound police nuisances, which the otherwise so tedious Fliegende Blatter[3] had so amusingly ridiculed and which had been more irksome than anything else to the carefree Pfalz people, were got rid of. The abolition of police regulations on taverns was the first revolutionary act of the Pfalz people. The whole of the province was transformed into an immense wine tavern and the quantity of strong drinks consumed during those six weeks ‘in the name of the Pfalz people’ defied all accounting. Although there was not such great active participation in the movement as in Baden, although there were many reactionary districts, the whole people was unanimous in the wine-bibbing and the most reactionary Philistines and peasants were infected by the general gaiety. . . .
“All the outward manifestation of the Pfalz movement was merry, cordial and unconstrained. Whereas in Baden every newly appointed Unterlieutenant in the regular and the people’s army laced himself up in a heavy uniform and paraded with silver epaulettes which he later hid in his pockets when the days of fighting came, the people in Pfalz were much more reasonable. In the heat of the first days of June worsted coats, waistcoats and ties disappeared and gave place to a light blouse. All the old uncongenial constraint seemed to have vanished with the old bureaucracy. People dressed in a free and easy way with a view to convenience, and with the difference in clothing every other difference in social relations instantly disappeared. All classes of society met in the same drinking houses and a socialist dreamer might have seen the dawn of universal brotherhood in that unconstrained intercourse.
“The provisional government followed the example of the province. It consisted almost exclusively of genial wine-drinkers whom nothing astonished more than the fact that they were suddenly to form the provisional government of their native land which Bacchus had so favoured. And yet these jolly regents behaved much better than their Baden neighbours. . . . In good will and sober reason the Pfalz Government was far above that of Baden.”[4]
One of the chief reproaches that can be made to the Pfalz Government is that, feeling its own powerlessness, it let itself become too much infected with the general carefreeness and preferred to rely on outward coincidences rather than put energetically into operation the admittedly limited capacity of the land to defend itself.
The extent of this carefreeness is seen from the fact that no concern was shown at the Prussian army massing on the frontier, that nobody at all knew what was going on there. The government in Kaiserslautern read only two newspapers, Frankfurter Journal and Karlsruher Zeitung, and the gentlemen of the government were one day extremely surprised when Engels gave them more accurate news on the concentration land positions of the Prussian army on the frontier, taken from a several-days-old issue of Kölnische Zeitung. . . .
Much was done to persuade the young Engels to accept a leading position in the movement. He himself wrote in this connection:
“Naturally, I was offered a number of civil and military appointments which I would not have hesitated a minute to accept in a proletarian movement. In the circumstances I refused them all. The only thing that I agreed to do was to write a few ‘stirring’ articles for a small paper that the Pfalz Government spread in huge numbers in Pfalz. I knew I should not have done it but in the end I accepted the task on the insistence of D’Ester and other members of the government in order at least to show my goodwill. As I naturally did not mince my words, the second article was soon objected to as being too ‘stirring.’ Without another word I withdrew my article and tore it up in D’Ester’s presence, and that was the end of the matter.”[5]
The military organization of the Pfalz movement suffered particularly from lack of arms and capable officers. Nothing could be got from abroad or even, as already said, from rebellious Baden. But nothing was done either to see that the arms that there were in the province got into the right hands. Scythe blades were forged, but even those primitive weapons did not find their way to the hands of the rebels, while the militia, which consisted of nothing but philistines, kept their good percussion muskets.
The officer corps, with very few exceptions, was described by Engels as unsatisfactory and inefficient. The exceptions included Techow. He was a Prussian first lieutenant. When the Berlin arsenal was stormed, he and a comrade surrendered it to the people. He was sentenced to fifteen years’ detention in a fortress and escaped from Magdeburg. Another was Willich, who, with a small volunteer unit, carried out the observation and siege of the Landau and Germersheim forts.
Engels, a sharp critic and pitiless ironist, was naturally a thorn in the side of the philistines of the revolution; once they even had him arrested. But after 24 hours the provisional government was obliged to release him with apologies.
It would take us too far if we wanted to give a detailed relation of the battles which followed. The Prussian and Reich troops who were attacking — about 30,000 men against five or six thousand badly officered and badly trained revolutionary soldiers — soon forced the Pfalz army to retreat across the Rhine into Baden and join the Baden forces. But here, too, 60,000 Prussians and Bavarians were fighting against 13,000 rebels, who, moreover, had a government in which the leading posts had been secured by traitors and weaklings.
Engels took part in three battles and in the decisive engagement at Murg, and a long time afterwards all those who saw him in battle still spoke of his coolness and scorn of all danger.
Engels wrote the following on the participation of the Communists,[6] the then exponents of the ideas of socialism, in the struggle for the constitution:
“Memorials have been raised by all sides in the press, in democratic unions, in verse and in prose, to the more or less educated victims of the Baden rebellion. But nobody speaks of the hundreds and thousands of workers who fought till the end, fell on the battle-fields, rotted alive in Rastatt dungeons or have now to suffer the bitterest of sufferings in exile abroad, alone among all the emigrants. The exploitation of the workers is a too long-established and too customary thing for our official democrats to consider the workers as anything but raw material to be stirred up, exploited, and blown up as mere cannon-fodder. Our democrats are far too ignorant and too bourgeois to understand the revolutionary position of the proletariat and the future of the working class. That is why they so hate those really proletarian characters who are too proud to flatter them, too sensible to let themselves be made use of by them, and yet always rise in arms when it is a question of overthrowing an existing power and who, in every revolutionary movement, are the direct representatives of the Party of the proletariat. But if it is not in the interests of the so-called democrats to recognize such workers, it is the duty of the Party of the proletariat to honour them according to their deserts. One of the best of those workers was Joseph Moll of Cologne.
“Moll was a watchmaker. He had left Germany years before and taken part in all open and secret revolutionary societies in France, Belgium and England. He helped to found the German Workers’ Society in London in 1840. He returned to Germany after the February Revolution and with his friend Schapper he soon took over the direction of the Cologne Workers’ Society.[7] He emigrated to London after the street troubles in Cologne in September 1848 but soon returned to Germany under an assumed name, carried out propaganda work in different districts and undertook missions the danger of which terrified everybody else. I met him again in Kaiserslautern. There, too, he undertook missions to Prussia for which he would have been immediately shot had he been found out. On his return from his second mission he succeeded in getting through all the enemy lines as far as Rastatt, where he immediately entered the Besanҫon Workers’ Company of our Corps. Three days later he was killed. In him I lost an old friend and the Party one of its most indefatigable, fearless, and most reliable soldiers.
“The Party of the proletariat was fairly well represented in the Baden-Pfalz army, especially in volunteer corps like ours, the Emigrant Legion, and so forth, and it can with assurance challenge all other parties to address the slightest reproach to any of its members. The most resolute Communists were the most courageous soldiers.”[8]
The 90,000 Prussian and Reich troops naturally defeated the 15,000 men of the revolutionary army, but with anything but glory. They managed to dispose of the handful of rebels only by violating the neutrality of Württemberg in order to outflank them. The soldiers of Willich’s Volunteer Corps, in which Engels fought, were on the Swiss border on the morning of July 12. They discharged their weapons and were the last of the Baden-Pfalz army to cross the Swiss border.
Here is what Engels wrote about the outcome of the campaign:
“From the political point of view the Reich Constitution campaign was a failure from the start. So it was from the military point of view too. Its only chance of success lay outside Germany — a victory of the Republicans in Paris on June 13 — and June 13 was a failure.[9] After that the campaign could not be anything but a bloody comedy. And that is all it was. Stupidity and treachery ruined it completely. The military chiefs, with few exceptions, were traitors or inefficient, ignorant and cowardly place-hunters, and the few exceptions were invariably abandoned by the others as by the Brentano Government. . . . What applied to the officers was true of the soldiers too. . . . The whole ‘revolution’ ended in a real comedy and the only consolation was that the six times stronger enemy had six times less courage.
“But this comedy had a tragic end owing to the counter-revolution’s thirst for blood. The very fighters who time and again were seized with a panicky fear on the march or on the field of battle died heroic deaths in the vaults of Rastatt. Not one of them begged for mercy. . . .”
So the comedy was not quite so comical; and the very fact that the rising was doomed from the start by circumstances gives it the halo of a tragedy. But it was not the failure of June 13, 1849, that sealed the fate of the Reich Constitution campaign. Incidentally, the Reich Constitution was of ridiculously little or no importance for nine-tenths of the participants. All we volunteers, and the soldiers too, sang:
For the Republic our lives to give
Is a noble and glorious fate
Worthy of our striving.
And clumsy as the verses of our Girondin song were, they were sung with all the more earnestness. . . .
June 13 itself was foredoomed to a ridiculous failure. Just like the whole of the German Revolution, it was the flare-up of a fire the main fuel of which was already burnt out. The only difference was that in Paris the fuel was consumed in the blaze of a conflagration while in Germany most of it smouldered quietly away.
The blazing conflagration was the June battle in 1848. There the bourgeoisie and the proletariat parted for ever, the dream of harmony vanished in blood, and the bourgeoisie, which, like the princes and other rulers, had been international long before the workers, became henceforth reactionary, threw away its “youthful follies” of ideals together with the muskets of the revolution and left both to the proletariat. . . .
With the June battle the last possibility of joint action in the revolution by the bourgeoisie and the workers disappeared. The French Radicals, who, on June 13, 1849, wanted to remove from the scene the “Elected of December 10”[10] and in his person the threatening emperor, had calculated without the workers. The proletariat was not there when it came to blows. Twelve months before the bourgeoisie had drained away the best of the proletariat’s blood and one cannot get over such a bleeding within a year. . . .
The conditions for victory failed in the German Reich Constitution campaign as on June 13 in France.
But I have already spoken too much about those times. My theme is my excuse. This episode in the life of Engels is comparatively little known. And as Engels, just like Marx, is often reproached — by democrats and democratic “revolutionaries” — with being a man of advice but not of deeds, it seemed to me appropriate to show all the ridiculousness of that ridiculous reproach by bringing out their activity in the rising of the people in 1849.
Why at all this distinction between advice and deeds, between theory and practice? Is not the Communist Manifesto a deed? Is not Capital a deed? Is not Marx and Engels’s scientific work eminently practical?
After a short stay in Switzerland with Engels I met him in the following year in London whither he had at first proceeded. After that I was in constant touch with him. He did actually leave London, where I lived, in 1850 for his father’s business in Manchester, for like other Rhine manufacturers, his father had an English branch office; but he paid us frequent visits, sometimes rather long ones, in London. He also wrote almost daily to Marx, who regularly communicated as much of his letters as was not strictly private to us, i.e., the more trusted members of the frequently changing “Marx clique.” It is true that I never had such close relations with Engels as with Marx, in whose house I was an almost daily guest, almost a member of his family, for twelve years.
Marx’s death brought me nearer to Engels, who now had the double task of replacing Marx and of executing his will.
Only now did he, who so far, to use his own words, had been second fiddle, show all he was capable of. He showed that he could play first fiddle too. The energy that he had been obliged for a score of years to devote mostly to business now went entirely to that double task. He completed Capital, as far as was possible, developed astonishing activity in scientific work of his own and owing to his extraordinary capacity for work still found time for a voluminous international correspondence. And Engels’s letters were often treatises, guides and directions in politics and economics.
He helped everywhere he was needed; he stirred up all around him. As adviser, exhorter, warner, he took part until shortly before his death like an active soldier in the battles of the great international working-class movement which was carrying out the motto that he and his friend Marx, scenting the morning breeze of the February Revolution, had proclaimed to the workers at the beginning of 1848:
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
They have united.
And no power in the world can bar the road to the united proletariat of the world.
On November 28, 1890, we celebrated Engels’s seventieth birthday in London. He was as fresh, witty and ready for the fight as ever in his merriest, warmest youth. And when three years later he called out to the Berlin workers in Konkordia Hall:[11] “Comrades, I am convinced that you will do your duty in the future too!” there was not one among the thousands listening to him with enthusiasm and contemplating him with love and gratitude who did not ask in astonishment, “Can that young man be 73 already?”
Not quite two years later, on August 6, 1895, on my return from the big trade-union festival in Bremen, I found the sad telegram on my desk in the editorial office of Vorwärts:
“General died yesterday night 10:30. No struggle, unconscious since noon. Please inform Soldat, Singer.”
“Soldat” (soldier) meant me.
Since the spring we, that is three persons in Germany,[12] had known that the “General” was suffering from an incurable cancerous infection of the throat. But although the stroke was not unexpected, it was a hard one, a terrible one.
So he was laid low, that titanic mind who together with Marx laid the foundations of scientific socialism and taught the tactics of socialism, who at the early age of 24 wrote the classical work The Condition of the Working Class in England, the co-author of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx’s alter ego who helped him to call to life the International Working Men’s Association, the author of Anti-Dühring, that encyclopaedia of science of crystal transparency accessible to anybody who can think, the author of The Origin of the Family and so many other works, essays and newspaper articles, the friend, the adviser, the leader and the fighter — he was dead.
But his spirit lives wherever class-conscious proletarians live and fight.
[1] The allusion is to the failure of the Spanish Government to suppress the popular rising which flared up in 1895 on the Island of Cuba, then a Spanish colony.
[2] Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ekonomische Revue — a monthly journal published by Marx and Engels from January to October 1850. It was printed in Hamburg.
[3] Fliegende Blatter (Flying Leaves) — a German bourgeois satiric journal.
[4] F. Engels, “The German Campaign for a Reich Constitution.” 3. Pfalz.
[5] Ibid.
[6] The members of the Communist League are meant.
[7] The Cologne Workers’ Society was founded in April 1848 and lasted until June 1849. Marx was elected its president in October 1848.
[8] F. Engels, “The German Campaign for a Reich Constitution.” 4. Die for the Republic.
[9] On June 13, 1849, the French petty-bourgeois Republicans in Paris made an abortive sally against the bourgeois counter-revolution.
[10] Louis Bonaparte, elected president on December 10, 1848, subsequently proclaimed himself Emperor of the French under the name of Napoleon III.
[11] Engels made a speech at a Social-Democrat meeting in Berlin on September 22, 1893.
[12] W. Liebknecht, A. Bebel and P. Singer.
[a] The German source being a “Kalender” suggests that this work was finished and possibly published before January 1st 1897, although I can’t declare this with confidence.
[b] While all of the translations included in the 1957 book appear to be original, many of the works were first published in English long before that date — for example, the first English translation of Liebknecht’s Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs was published in 1901. It is therefore plausible that Liebknecht’s Reminiscences of Engels could have also appeared in English before 1957, although I can find no specific evidence suggesting this.
Last updated on 11 July 2023