The Rheinische Zeitung ("Rhenish Newspaper") was a 19th-century German newspaper, edited most famously by Karl Marx. The paper was launched in January 1842 and terminated by Prussian state censorship in March 1843. The paper was eventually succeeded by a daily newspaper launched by Karl Marx on behalf of the Communist League in June 1848, called the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ("New Rhenish Newspaper").
The city of Cologne (Köln) has long been the most important urban center of the region of Germany known as Rhineland. During the decade of the 1830s a newspaper called the Kölnische Zeitung ("Cologne Newspaper") emerged as the voice of the Catholic political opposition based in that city. [1] The protestant Prussian government, based in Berlin, considered this newspaper and its 8,000 subscribers a thorn in its side, and looked favorably upon attempts by others to establish new newspapers to undercut the Kölnische Zeitung's dominant position. [2]
A series of papers had been launched in Cologne, each failing, with the powerful Kölnische Zeitung generally buying out its fledgling competitors. [3] One of this series of hapless rivals was a newspaper launched in Cologne in December 1839 called the Rheinische Allgemeine Zeitung ("Rhenish General Newspaper"). [3] The paper struggled for two years without successfully gaining a foothold and seemed headed for extinction. [3] When it was evident that the newspaper was becoming bankrupt soon, George Jung and Moses Hess convinced some leading rich liberals of the Rhineland, like Camphausen, Mevissen and Oppenheim to establish a company to buy out the newspaper. The sub-heading was "For politics, Commerce and Industry'. The shareholders initially chose Friedrich List as editor but were declined due to his health problems. Then the editorship was offered to Gustav Höfken, while Hess given the post of sub-editor. [4]
At the eleventh hour a group of prominent Cologne citizens decided to raise fresh working capital and to attempt to reestablish the paper on a new basis. [3] This new version of the old Rheinische Allgemeine Zeitung was to be known as the Rheinische Zeitung ("Rhenish News").
The Rheinische Zeitung was launched on 1 January 1842, with Moses Hess serving as an editor. [5] [6] The paper originally expressed a pro-government stance, but its political line soon shifted to better accord with popular sentiment among Rhinelanders, many of whom regarded the Prussian government in Berlin as an oppressive alien entity. [2]
Although living in Bonn at the time of the paper's launch, Karl Marx seems to have been aware of the project from its inception and he began contributing articles to its pages, which drew notice from among the paper's readers. [7] These articles would be the first of Marx's writings (beside his doctoral dissertation) to be published for the public. Previously fixated upon questions of abstract philosophy, Marx was first introduced to practical journalism in the course of writing for the Rheinische Zeitung. It was during this period, too, that Marx first came into contact Moses Hess and with French socialist ideas. [6] [5]
In the pages of the Rheinische Zeitung Marx had criticized the failings of the Rhineland Diet, seated at Düsseldorf, charging it with implementing class-based legislation which negatively impacted the rights and prosperity of common citizens in favor of a privileged stratum of landowners. [8] In long articles Marx was additionally critical of the Diet's failings to advance the cause of freedom of the press, as well as its refusal to publish its own proceedings. [9] Far from revolutionary at this juncture, Marx retained a faith that public debate in a free press would be sufficient to ameliorate the various evils facing society regardless of the Diet's weakness. [8]
The government was agitated by the Rheinische Zeitung but did not take the step of forcing its closure, hoping instead that the paper would die on its own. [10] This seemed a reasonable assessment, as by the middle of August 1842 the paper's subscriber list had dwindled to just 885. [10] However, on 15 October 1842, Marx was appointed to the editorial board and the Rheinische Zeitung began an apparent rise from the ashes gaining nearly 1,000 subscribers over the course of the next month. [10]
Marx analyzed the debate of the Rhineland Diet dealing with the alleged theft of wood by the peasantry—a topic which Marx later recalled "provided the first occasion for occupying myself in the economic questions." [11] Frederick Engels, who first established close personal relations with Karl Marx in 1844, later affirmed that it was Marx's journalism at the Rheinische Zeitung which led him "from pure politics to economic relationships and so to socialism." [12]
With the paper's fortunes on the rise, the Rheinische Zeitung continued to draw the government's ire, with the publication in January 1843 of a series of articles documenting the government's refusal to take seriously the complaints of the local peasantry. [14] A defiant tone of some published correspondence and growing sentiment for democracy among the populus further alienated the authorities. [14] On 21 January 1843 the Cabinet, with the King in attendance, decided that the Rheinische Zeitung should be suppressed. [14]
The intelligentsia of the Rhineland saw the suppression of the newspaper as a personal affront and a delegation was sent to Berlin in an attempt to forestall the paper's final closure. [15] Subscriptions had risen to more than 3,000—very few German papers of the day were larger and none more widely quoted. [16] Moreover, thousands of citizens signed petitions calling for the publication's continuation. [15]
Regardless of the appeals of the citizenry on behalf of the paper, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV refused to grant an audience to hear a personal appeal and the mass of public petitions gathered were pointedly ignored. [15]
In desperation shareholders in the paper demanded that the Rheinische Zeitung tone down its aggressive political line, a move which prompted Marx to submit his resignation as editor on 17 March 1843. [15] The local censor was enthusiastic about this change in the newspaper's staff, noting that a "really moderate though insignificant man" named Oppenheim had taken over the editorial chair and recommending that the decision to close the paper be reversed. [17]
In the view of historian David Fernbach, the suppression of the paper in March 1843 by the Prussian government shattered Marx's belief that the country could traverse the road from monarchy to constitutional democracy without revolutionary struggle. [8]
In the aftermath of the suppression of the original Rheinische Zeitung, Marx had left Germany altogether, landing in Paris where a new publishing proposal awaited him. [18] Marx would spend the next five years in France, Belgium, and England, waiting for a suitable moment to make a return to his native Rhineland.
Marx would return to Cologne during the first half of April 1848, amidst the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states and immediately began to make preparations to establish a new—and more radical—newspaper. [19] This publication, launched on June 1, would be known as the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ("New Rhenish News"). [20]
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Karl Marx was a German-born philosopher, economist, political theorist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894); the latter employs his theory of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, representing his greatest intellectual achievement. Marx's ideas and theories and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have exerted enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic, and political history.
The Communist Manifesto, originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party, is a political pamphlet written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London in 1848. The text is the first and most systematic attempt by Marx and Engels to codify for widespread consumption the core historical materialist idea that, as stated in the text's opening words, "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles", in which social classes are defined by the relationship of people to the means of production. Published against the backdrop of the Revolutions of 1848 and their subsequent repression across Europe, the Manifesto remains one of the world's most influential political documents.
Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, political theorist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman and Karl Marx's closest friend and collaborator.
The German revolutions of 1848–1849, the opening phase of which was also called the March Revolution, were initially part of the Revolutions of 1848 that broke out in many European countries. They were a series of loosely coordinated protests and rebellions in the states of the German Confederation, including the Austrian Empire. The revolutions, which stressed pan-Germanism, demonstrated popular discontent with the traditional, largely autocratic political structure of the thirty-nine independent states of the Confederation that inherited the German territory of the former Holy Roman Empire after its dismantlement as a result of the Napoleonic Wars. This process began in the mid-1840s.
The Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Organ der Demokratie was a German daily newspaper, published by Karl Marx in Cologne between 1 June 1848 and 19 May 1849. It is recognised by historians as one of the most important dailies of the Revolutions of 1848 in Germany. The paper was regarded by its editors and readers as the successor of an earlier Cologne newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung, also edited for a time by Karl Marx, which had been suppressed by state censorship over five years earlier.
Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany is a book by Friedrich Engels, with contributions by Karl Marx. Originally a series of articles in the New York Daily Tribune published from 1851 to 1852 under Marx's byline, the material was first published in book form under the editorship of Eleanor Marx Aveling in 1896. It was not until 1913 that Engels' authorship was publicly known although some new editions continued to appear incorrectly listing Marx as the author as late as 1971.
Edgar Bauer was a German political philosopher and a member of the Young Hegelians. He was the younger brother of Bruno Bauer. According to Lawrence S. Stepelevich, Edgar Bauer was the most anarchistic of the Young Hegelians, and "...it is possible to discern, in the early writings of Edgar Bauer, the theoretical justification of political terrorism." German anarchists such as Max Nettlau and Gustav Landauer credited Edgar Bauer with founding the anarchist tradition in Germany. In the mid-1840s, Marx' and Engels' critique of the Bauer brothers marked the beginning of their collaboration and an important stage in the development of Marxist thought. Edgar Bauer participated in the Revolution of 1848. Subsequently he became a conservative.
Karl Peter Heinzen was a revolutionary author who resided mainly in Germany and the United States. He was one of the German Forty-Eighters. He advocated terrorist violence against ruling dynasties and uninvolved civilian populations as a means to an end.
The Rhenish Railway Company was along with the Cologne-Minden Railway Company (CME) and the Bergisch-Märkische Railway Company (BME) one of the railway companies that in the mid-19th century built the first railways in the Ruhr and large parts of today's North Rhine-Westphalia.
August Hermann Ewerbeck, known by his middle name of Hermann, was a pioneer socialist political activist, writer, and translator. A physician by vocation and a German by birth, Ewerbeck is best remembered as an early political associate of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as a leader of the Parisian communities of the utopian socialist organization, League of the Just, and as the translator of the French writings of Étienne Cabet and Ludwig Feuerbach into German.
Karl Theodor Ferdinand Grün, also known by his alias Ernst von der Haide, was a German journalist, philosopher, political theorist and socialist politician. He played a prominent role in radical political movements leading up to the Revolution of 1848 and participated in the revolution. He was an associate of Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Feuerbach, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin and other radical political figures of the era.
Joseph Arnold Weydemeyer was a military officer in the Kingdom of Prussia and the United States as well as a journalist, politician and Marxist revolutionary.
The Poverty of Philosophy is a book by Karl Marx published in Paris and Brussels in 1847, where he lived in exile from 1843 until 1849. It was originally written in French as a critique of the economic and philosophical arguments of French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon set forth in his 1846 book The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty.
Moses (Moritz) Hess was a German-Jewish philosopher, early communist and Zionist thinker. His socialist theories led to disagreements with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He is considered a pioneer of Labor Zionism.
Classical Marxism is the body of economic, philosophical, and sociological theories expounded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their works, as contrasted with orthodox Marxism, Marxism–Leninism, and autonomist Marxism which emerged after their deaths. The core concepts of classical Marxism include alienation, base and superstructure, class consciousness, class struggle, exploitation, historical materialism, ideology, revolution; and the forces, means, modes, and relations of production. Marx's political praxis, including his attempt to organize a professional revolutionary body in the First International, often served as an area of debate for subsequent theorists.
European Triarchy was a book by Moses Hess published in Leipzig 1841.
The Communist League was an international political party established on 1 June 1847 in London, England. The organisation was formed through the merger of the League of the Just, headed by Karl Schapper, and the Communist Correspondence Committee of Brussels, Belgium, in which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were the dominant personalities. The Communist League is regarded as the first Marxist political party and it was on behalf of this group that Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto late in 1847. The Communist League was formally disbanded in November 1852, following the Cologne Communist Trial.
The Karl Marx Library is a topically-organized series of original translations and biographical commentaries edited by historian and Karl Marx scholar Saul K. Padover (1905-1981) and published by academic publisher McGraw-Hill Books. Originally projected as a 13 volume series at the time of its launch in 1971, ultimately only 7 volumes found print prior to Padover's death, supplemented by a biography and an unnumbered volume of selected correspondence.
Franz Laurenz Joseph Maria Cantador or Franz Lorenz Joseph Maria Cantador was the commander of the Düsseldorf vigilance committee during the German revolutions of 1848–1849 and later was an officer leading a regiment in the Union Army during the American Civil War.
Adolf Friedrich Rutenberg was a German geography teacher, Young Hegelian and journalist. He was a close friend of German philosophers Karl Marx and Max Stirner. He was alongside Bruno Bauer as one of two reported mourners at Stirner's graveside.
