Letter to Adolf Cluss, after September 5, 1852

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 5 September 1852


First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, Second Russian Edition, Vol. 28, Moscow, 1962. Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 39


MARX TO ADOLF CLUSS[1]

IN WASHINGTON

[London, after 5 September 1852]

... Enclosed copy of a manuscript from Paris by Hafner[2]

(sometime editor of the Constitution, the only tolerable newspaper in Vienna). This man once allowed himself to be misused to bluster against me in the Hamburger Nachrichten in the interests of Kinkel. The manuscript was not addressed to me but to an acquaintance of mine in Paris,[3] through whose 'indiscretion' it came into my hands, probably not wholly without the author's prior knowledge. Hence, you can make use of the document if opportunity arises, but only in such a way as to omit everything that might betray its origin, or rather directly indicate it. Though he may have a hump both fore and aft, little Hafner writes and thinks better and has a great deal more to him than many a straight-limbed revolutionary philistine...

  1. ↑ The only part of this letter that has survived is an extract quoted by Cluss in his letter to Weydemeyer of 28 September 1852
  2. ↑ In a memorandum entitled 'Drei Jahre in Paris', L. Hafner, a German petty-bourgeois refugee, gave his opinion of the German émigrés in Paris in 1849-51
  3. ↑ Zerffi