Published as a correspondence dated Berlin, April 10, 1860, under the heading “Public Feeling in Berlin” (“From Our Own Correspondent”), unsigned, in the New-York Daily Tribune, No. 5932, April 28, 1860, pp. 8-9; attributed to Karl Marx by MEGA² (I/18). Text from the original newspaper (Library of Congress, Chronicling America); a letter lost in the printing is supplied in square brackets, and the misprint “pit-tiful” has been corrected. Traducción al español.
Berlin, April 10, 1860.
If an intelligent foreigner who had visited Berlin but two months ago and then left it were now to return to the “metropolis of intelligence,” the thorough change in the physiognomy, tone and temper, “meiner lieben Berliner” (of my beloved Berliners) could not fail to strike his mental eye. Still, some months ago small talk obtained in all the ranks of the metropolitan society. People congratulated each other, in subdued accents, on the nightmare of a decennial reaction having at last ceased to crush their brains—that the worst was over. This silly theme was sounded to all keys, and the unavoidable afterthought that the change had been brought about not by any vigorous and healthy effort on the part of the Prussian subjects, but rather by the sickly affection of the Prussian king’s head; that the change was therefore the work of nature, not the deed of man. This uncomfortable afterthought falsified even the first joys of the new era triumphantly announced by the dully-deadly pens of the Berlin daily press. Such was the pusillanimity prevailing that, not to frighten the Prince Regent out of his new-fangled liberalism, all the candidates in the general election to the Second Chamber were put to this simple test: Did they profess confidence in the Hohenzollern Cabinet installed by the Prince Regent? Were their names in no way obnoxious to the mild liberalism of the new Government? Instead of men to take up the grievances of the country, there were wanted bottle holders with ready-cut votes for the Cabinet. That the new Cabinet actually did not touch the bureaucratic and police shackles forged by its predecessors, while its very professions of faith were characterized by weak duplicity, shy reserve, and equivocal reticence—these facts were hoodwinked; and it was furthermore proclaimed a patriotic duty to hoodwink them. All the opposition papers, whether styling themselves Constitutional or Democratic, turned downright Ministerial. After the peace of Villafranca, when Herr von Schleinitz, the Prussian Minister of Foreign Affairs, published a sort of Blue Book on the Italian war—when his dispatches, true patterns of weak-minded verbosity, showed him up the worthy successor of the men who, in the last century, had concluded the peace of Basle, and, in this century, had prepared the catastrophe of Jena—when we saw him humbly receiving lessons of constitutionalism on the part of Little Johnny, the British Jack-of-all-Trades, crouching in the dust before Prince Gorchakoff, exchanging billets-doux with the Man of December, superciliously frowning upon his Austrian colleague, to be finally kicked by all his correspondents—even then the Prussian press and our Berlin Liberals worked themselves into real fits of enthusiasm with respect to the superhuman wisdom evinced by the Prussian Government, which, not content with doing nothing itself, had contrived to preclude Germany from all action. Soon after there took place at Breslau a meeting between the Russian Czar and Gorchakoff on the one side, and the Prince Regent with his Ministerial satellites on the other. A new deed of enfeoffment of Prussia to her Muscovite neighbor was duly signed—the first, but necessary result this of the peace of Villafranca. Even in 1844 such an event would have aroused a [s]torm of opposition throughout the country. Now it was extolled as an earnest of far-seeing statecraft. The nihilism of the Prince Regent’s Foreign Policy coupled with the continuance of the old reactionary system of mingled feudalism and bureaucratism, which was forsaken in name only, seemed to our friends, the Berlin Liberals, and the Prussian press of all colors, save the special organs of the old Camarilla, sufficient reasons to claim the imperial crown of little Germany (that is to say, Germany minus German Austria), for the representative of the Prussian dynasty. It is difficult to find in the records of history a similar piece of judicial blindness, but we remember that after the battle of Austerlitz, Prussia also crowed for some days on her own dunghill, quasi re bene gesta. After the termination of the Italian war, it was a spectacle as pitiful as it was disgusting to hear the Prussian press, with the Berlin papers at its head, instead of venturing upon the faintest criticism of the stupid diplomacy of her native rulers; instead of boldly challenging the “liberal” Ministry to bridge at last, in internal affairs, the broad chasm between the nominal and the real; instead of denouncing the silent but obstinate encroachments on civil liberty dared upon by the host of Manteuffel’s officials, still snugly ensconced in their old strongholds; instead of all that, to hear them sing panegyrics on the splendor of renovated Prussia; to see them dart their pointless shafts at humbled Austria; to see them stretch their unnerved hands at the German Imperial crown, and, to the utter astonishment of all Europe, demean themselves like maniacs in a fool’s paradise. Altogether, it seemed as if the great international drama now enacted on the European stage, did only concern our Berlin friends as spectators who, from the gallery or pit, have to applaud or hoot, but not to act.
All this has been changed now as by a magician’s wand. Berlin is at this moment, with the exception perhaps of Palermo and Vienna, the most revolutionary town in Europe. The fermentation pervades all ranks, and seems more intense than in the days of March, 1848. How has this phenomenon been brought about, and so suddenly, too? By combination of events at the top of which range Louis Bonaparte’s last exploits on the one hand, and the new army reforms proposed by the liberal Government on the other. Then, of course, the state of confidence and of willful self-delusion could not last forever. The incidents, furthermore, by which the Ministry has been forced to dismiss Stieber, the Police Director, the low criminal, who, together with his master, the late Hinkeldey, had swayed supreme power in Prussia ever since 1852; and last not least, the publication of Humboldt’s correspondence with Varnhagen von Ense have done the rest. The fool’s paradise has vanished before the breath from beyond the grave.