| Author(s) | Friedrich Engels |
|---|---|
| Written | 9 December 1890 |
ENGELS TO MOHRHENN
IN BARMEN
London, 9 December 1890 122 Regent's Park Road, N.W.
Dear Comrade Mohrhenn,
I really must thank you most warmly for the trouble you have taken over the photographs of my childhood home in the Bruch. They have given me enormous pleasure and have recalled many a youthful prank connected with the front doorstep and this or that room or window. Old Miss Demuth is right — the house in the Bruch, which in my time was No. 800, is the right one; behind it was our garden, between it and the Engels-Gang lay the bleachery and opposite that the houses belonging to my grandfather Caspar and his brother Benjamin Engels in which my uncles, Caspar and August, subsequently lived. I believe I can just remember Miss Demuth; I must have seen her once or twice at my cousin Caspar's house when we were both young. No doubt she can tell you about our original family home where my grandfather was born. It was up at the top of the Engels-Gang, where it joins the Bruch, opposite the path which leads up to the Böken and which was then nameless. It was a typical lower middle class, two-storied house; when I was young the ground floor was used for storage, while the upper floor was occupied by two of my grandparents' former maids, by then pensioned off, who were known as Drütschen and Mineken. They would often treat us children to spiced apples and bread. The house was demolished when the railway came.
Even in those days we used to say that the Bruch wasn't anything like as god-fearing as it used to be and not so many years ago my brother Rudolf was quite outspoken on the subject.[1] Pointing at the house opposite, where a man called Ottenbruch had once lived and which bore an inn sign, he said: 'See that place? Nowadays it's a favourite haunt for Social-Democrats!' Social-Democrats in the Bruch — that was, to be sure, a tremendous revolution as compared with 50 years before.
It would certainly be a far greater one, however, if our old house were to become a Social-Democratic press. But you would have to go about it very artfully. Unless it's been resold, the house now belongs to my brother Hermann, and he wouldn't be likely to sell it if he knew what purpose you meant to put it to. Well, I don't suppose anything will come of that just yet — it would be altogether too good to be true.
Well, good-bye. Soom day Ah'll coom to Barmen agean, an' then Ah'll coom an' see thi, an' then tha can tell me baht t'mucky tricks they played on thi wi' you Anti-Socialist Law o' theirn.[2]
Kindest regards,
Yours,
F. Engels