Letter to Karl Marx, May 27, 1851

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 27 May 1851


First published in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 1, Stuttgart, 1913
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 38, pp. 361-362


TO MARX IN LONDON

[Manchester,] Tuesday [27 May 1851]

D. M.,

I shall be coming to London on Saturday if nothing intervenes.[1]

My fears for the people in Cologne have all too soon been realised; the arrests of red Becker[2] and Roser on charges of high treason and attempts to subvert the state system, and the attempted arrest of silent Heinrich[3] are clearly not unconnected with the business of the League.[4] Fortunately no papers whatever, according to the Frankfurter Journal,[5] were found on the two who were arrested-whether any were found on Burgers is not specified.[6] No doubt Heinrich will be coming to London, to make up the complement of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.[7] The affair could take an unpleasant turn if the fellows have acted foolishly.

Your

F. E.

  1. ↑ Engels visited Marx in London presumably on 31 May 1851 and stayed for two weeks, till about 15 June.
  2. ↑ Hermann Becker
  3. ↑ Heinrich Bürgers
  4. ↑ the Communist League
  5. ↑ 'Cologne, 20 May', Frankfurter Journal, No. 123, 23 May 1851.
  6. ↑ For details on the arrest of Hermann Becker and Heinrich Bürgers see next note. Peter Nothjung was arrested in Leipzig on 10 May 1851 during his tour of Northern Germany as emissary of the Cologne Central Authority of the Communist League. Marx was informed of this by Hermann Haupt in a letter from Hamburg of 22 May 1851. Haupt for his part referred to information sent to him by Heinrich Burgers in Berlin. The police discovered on Nothjung a mandate of the Central Authority, the March 1850 Address of the Central Authority and the new Rules of the Communist League. In the same letter Haupt wrote about the arrest of Hermann Becker and Peter Röser in Cologne on 19 May 1851. Documents compromising Heinrich Bürgers were found on them. At the time Bürgers was away, having gone to Hamburg and then on to Berlin. The police did not find anything incriminating when they searched his apartment in Cologne on 19 May. Bürgers was arrested in Dresden on 23 May 1851 according to a report in the Kölnische Zeitung on 27 May, to which Freiligrath drew Marx's attention. Arrests of the League's Central Authority members in Germany were followed by police repression against participants in the working-class movement.
  7. ↑ Despite this conjecture Freiligrath moved from Cologne to London in the second half of May 1851. Of the other members of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung editorial board (not counting Heinrich Bürgers, who was only so in name), Marx and Ferdinand Wolff were already in London; Wilhelm Wolff and Ernst Dronke were expected and Engels planned to go to London in the second half of May, and as emerges from his letters he did arrive there at the end of the month. Georg Weerth, then in England, also intended to go to London but did not do so until July.