Letter to Karl Marx, May 19, 1870

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 19 May 1870


The extant part of the letter was first published abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 4, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Abt. III, Bd. 4, Berlin, 1931
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 43


ENGELS TO MARX

IN LONDON

Manchester, 19 May 1870

Dear Moor,

So Monday.[1] Had you come yesterday you could just as well have brought Jennychen with you; she could have slept with Tussy for the few days until Sunday, and she ought to see Manchester once before we leave here.

Bonaparte really is an incorrigible jackass. The blockhead has no conception of any sort of historic movement; all history is a JUMBLE of unconnected chance events, in which the little dodges of the old trickster play the decisive role—and what dodges! Always the same old recipe for every EMERGENCY. That he is once again organising his December 10 gang is [...][2]

Old Heinzen is really entertaining. For twenty years and even longer the same old tune, but literally, it's really moving. You only need to say: Communist, and up jumps Heinzen, like a frog in strychnine-tetanus leaps when you touch the table on which it is lying. Old Hatzfeldt's hand is unmistakable here, and the thing was certainly made in America,[3] since nobody in Germany knows Heinzen's tune, the one you must whistle to make OLD Heinzen dance. The myths about Lassalle's attempted revolution, which we caused to fail in Cologne, are just too stupid.

The behaviour of the French workers is grand. The people are now active again and are in their element; there they are masters.

Best greetings.[4]

  1. ↑ 23 May
  2. ↑ The manuscript is damaged here.
  3. ↑ Marx sent Engels an anonymous article 'Das Treiben der deutschen Kommunis ten' from the American newspaper Der Pionier of 27 April 1870. The editor-in-chief of the newspaper, which was published in New York by German petty-bourgeois democratic émigrés, was Karl Heinzen. The author of the article, who was obviously concerned about the successes of the newly-founded Social-Democratic Workers' Party of Germany and its newspaper Der Volksstaat, made libellous statements about Marx, Engels, Liebknecht and Eccarius, contrasting communists and the 'German revolutionary democracy'. Specifically, with reference to Lassalle, the article stated that in 1849 he had made all the necessary preparations for an uprising in Cologne but that Marx, who had promised to do the same in Düsseldorf and certain other localities, had failed to do so thus letting Lassalle down.
    In this letter, Marx refers to Heinzen as Heineke, a character in the German song of the same name, which is a folk parody of the so-called grobian literature of the 16th century. Marx thus nicknamed Heinzen for the first time in 1847 in his work Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality, in which he likened Heinzen's journalism to specimens of this brand of literature (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 312-40).
  4. ↑ The signature is missing, the manuscript is damaged.