Letter to Eduard Bernstein, July 31, 1884

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 31 July 1884


First published in Die Briefe von Friedrich Engels an Eduard Bernstein, Berlin, 1925
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 47


ENGELS TO EDUARD BERNSTEIN

IN ZURICH

[London, July 1884][1]

[...][2] By way of self-sacrifice I looked through a few numbers of the Neue Welt. It was so deadly dull that it couldn't be done for long. As regards Mr Geiser, his 'erudition' is unassailable there. The very fact of a person's parading his erudition in a penny paper of this kind is proof enough that he has failed to take in anything at all. Even had he not invariably written cholera bamllus for bacillus, as though the word stemmed from bacca and not baculus. Besides, it's to be found in any Latin dictionary. The assertion that both materialism and ideal- ism are one-sided and must be synthesised in a higher entity[3] is a hoary one and ought not to worry you; again, that atheism merely expresses a negation is an argument we ourselves had already ad- vanced against the philosophers 40 years ago, only with the co- rollary that atheism, as the mere negation of, and referring only to, religion, would itself be nothing without it and is thus itself another religion. Typical of the-remaining erudition is an article by Bios on the Greek and German gods[4] in which alone I noted the following se- rious bloomers:

1. The Epistolae obscurorum virorum are said to be by Reuchlin. While they did originate from his entourage, he had less of a hand in them than Ulrich von Hütten.[5]

2. The Greek gods 'feast on nectar and quaff ambrosia'!

3. 'Mead', alias 'Meed',[6] he explains in brackets, is 'beer', when every child knows that it is, and always has been, made, not with malt, but with honey.

4. Bios does not even know the names of the German gods; [he][7] gives them now in early Nordic, now in German. Alongside the early Nordic Odin whose German name (early Saxon Wodan, Old High German Wuotan) he doesn't know, we find the Old High German Ziu. Odin is also said to have a wife called Freia; but in early Nordic she is called Frigg, Old High German Fricka, something even Rich- ard Wagner could have told him. There you have a little nosegay culled rapidly in the space of 10 minutes! Not even the meanest cur could be frightened by erudition of that sort. Just let them strut like peacocks in their penny paper; you only have to look behind their fans to see where the droppings come from!

Your

F. E.

Regards to Karl Kautsky.

  1. ↑ In Eduard Bernstein's correspondence published by the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, this excerpt from Engels' letter is dated: [Hastings, c. 5 July 1884?] (see Eduard Bernsteins Briefwechsel mit Friedrich Engels, herausgege ben von H. Hirsch, Assen, Van Gorcum, 1970, pp. 282-83). However, since the date and place of writing are doubted by the publishers themselves, the present edition has retained the traditional dating.
  2. ↑ The first part of the letter is missing.
  3. ↑ A reference to the article by Bruno Geiser, 'Das Innere der Erde', Die Neue Welt, Nos. 14 and 15, 1884.
  4. ↑ W. Bios, 'Die Götter in der Dichtung', Die Neue Welt, No. 10, 1884.
  5. ↑ Epistolae ohscurorum virorum (Letters of obscure men) — a collection of satirical let ters in two parts (Part I—1515, Part II—1517), probably written by members of a humanists' club in Erfurt who supported Reichlin. A major role in the second (and perhaps also the first) part of the Letters was played by Ulrich von Hütten. The letters were directed against Cologne-based theologians.
  6. ↑ In the original: 'Met', alias Meth.
  7. ↑ The manuscript is damaged here.