I n the meantime the secret finance committee of the "Émigrés" had elected an executive committee consisting of Kinkel, Willich and Reichenbach and it now resolved to take serious measures in connection with the German loan. As reported in the New York Schnellpost , the New-Yorker Deutsche Zeitung and the Baltimore Correspondent at the end of 1851, Student Schurz was sent on a mission to France, Belgium and Switzerland where he sought out all old, forgotten, dead and missing parliamentarians, Reichregents, deputies and other distinguished men, right down to the late lamented Raveaux, to get them to guarantee the loan. The forgotten wretches hastened to give their guarantee. For what else was the guarantee of the loan if not a mutual guarantee of government posts in partibus; and in the same way Messrs. Kinkel, Willich and Reichenbach obtained by this means guarantees of their future prospects. And these sorrowing bonhommes in Switzerland were so obsessed with "organisation"and the guarantee of future posts that they had long before worked out a plan by which government posts would be awarded according to seniority -- which produced a terrible scandal about who were to have Nos. 1, 2 and 3. Suffice it to say chat Student Schurz brought back the guarantee in his pocket and so they all went to work. Some days earlier Kinkel had, it is true, promised in another meeting with the "Agitators" that he would not go ahead with a loan without them. For that very reason he departed taking the signatures of the guarantors and carte blanche from Reichenbach and Willich -- ostensibly to find customers for his aesthetic lectures in the north of England, but in reality to go to Liverpool and embark for New York where he hoped to play Parzival and to discover the Holy Grail , the gold of the democratic parties.
And now begins that sweet-sounding, strange, magniloquent, fabulous, true and adventurous history of the great battles fought on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean between the Émigrés and the Agitators.
It was a war waged with renewed bitterness and with indefatigable zeal.
In it we witness Gottfried's crusade in the course of which he contends with Kossuth and after great labours and indescribable temptations he finally returns home with the Grail in the bag.
Or bei signori, io vi lascio al presente, E se voi tornerete in questo loco, Diro questa baffaglia dov'io lasso Ch'un altra nofu mai di tal fracasso.
(Boiardo, Bk I, Canto 26)
[And there, kind Sirs, I leave you for the present, If one day you return unto this place I'll give you further news of this great war So full of mighty deeds ne'er done before.]
END 1852: Heroes of the Exile -- notes HEROES OF THE EXILE by KARL MARXand FREDERICK ENGELSNOTES To return to the main text, click here [1]
[2] Klopstock's Messias.
[3] Siegwart: Eine Klostergeschichte by Miller appeared in 1776 and is typical of the sentimental trend in literature at the time.
[4] Goethe, Faust I. Faust's Study. Translated by Louis Macneice and E. L. Stahl.
[5] Ibid.
[6] A reference to the Confessions of a beautiful soul which occur in Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and which epitomise the cult of sentiment.
[7] Wagner was the naive assistant of Faust.
[8] Wolfram von Eschenbach and Gottfried von Strasbourg were the two chief exponents of the courtly epic in Germany.
Their principal works were Parzival (Wolfram) and Tristan (Gottfried).
[9] Platen (1796-1835) was a neo-classical poet who attacked both the Romantics and the Philistines; essentially second-rate he was himself the object of a notoriously violent satire by Heine.
[10] Chamisso, the well-known author of Peter Schlemihl also published the Deutscher Musenalmanach which appeared in Leipzig from 1833 to 1839. Albert Knapp was the editor of Christoterpe. Ein Taschenbuch für christliche Leser, Heidelberg 1833-53.
[11] The supreme Hindu deity Shiva was also known as Mahadeva. In the form used by Marx, Mahadoh, there is an echo of Goethe's poem Der Gott und die Bajadere.
[12] The conflict between duty and inclination is seen by the mature Schiller as central to tragedy.
[13] Christian Heinrich Spiess (1755-99), Heinrich Clauren (177I-1854), and Karl Gottlob Cramer (1758-1817) were all writers of popular novels or adventure stories.
[14] Heinrich von Ofterdingen by Novalis was a paradigmatic work of the German Romantic school. The hero -- modelled on a mediaeval poet of that name -- spends his life in a search for the "blue flower" which becomes a symbol of that infinite romantic longing for the ideal, poetic realm removed from that of reality.
[15] The concluding lines of Goethe's Zahme Xenien in which he makes fum of Pustkuchen's Wanderjahre , a work parasitic on his own Wilhem Meister and one which was for a while thought to be from his own pen. Goethe's own Italian Journey marks a decisive change in his career.
[16] Kotzebue was an immensely popular writer of superficial melodramas.
[17] Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind , Berlin 1832, pp. 392 ff.
[18] Schiller's Kabale und Liebe was one of the chief works of the German Storm and Stress yriod.
[19] Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740-1817)a sentimental, pietistic writer.
[20] Bettina von Arnim had managed to captivate the aging Goethe while she was herself scarcely more than a precocious child. Her publication of Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde brought her a certain notoriety.
[21] The critical movement, i.e. the Young Hegelians, Strauss, Bruno Bauer and Feuerbach.
[22] Tale by Clemens Brentano, one of the chief exponents of German Romanticism.
[23] The Göttinger Hain poets (Holty and Voss were the most important) were active from 1772 to 1774. Influenced by Klopstock and Bürger they played an important role in the formation of German literature before subsiding into philistinism.
[24] The reference is to the artisans'
