Marx’s and Engels’s most exciting moments were during the feverish months of the 1848 revolutions, but when the revolutions were crushed, they retreated to Britain. Engels helped run his family companies and paid Marx’s expenses. In their long correspondence, Marx called himself “the Moor” (for his swarthiness) while Engels was “the General.” While Engels lived with two sisters, who in turn were his mistresses, Marx was married to a well-connected and long-suffering Prussian baroness, Jenny von Westphalen. Jenny, while living in increasing poverty in Soho and Primrose Hill in London, bore him seven children, four of whom died young. Meanwhile, Marx was having adulterous affairs with their housekeeper, Helene Demuth, with whom he had a son.
Engels was jovial, social, and pleasure-loving; Marx was brooding, selfish, and intolerant but also enjoyed gossip and dancing. Both men were wildly jealous of their fellow socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle, who was in many ways what they wished to be: a political star, bon vivant, brilliant showman, and brazen lover who founded his own organization and was supported financially by his mistress, Countess von Hatzfeldt. Lassalle was so charismatic and influential that the reactionary minister-president Otto von Bismarck consulted him secretly.
Lassalle recognized Marx’s talent and originality, helping him to get his work published, but both Marx and Engels maliciously repaid the favor with an endless stream of racist epithets, from “stupid Yid” to “Jewboy” and the even more racist “nigger.” The first letter quoted here reveals their weirdly anti-Semitic and racist analysis of Lassalle. Two years later, Lassalle embarked on an affair with a young woman engaged to a Wallachian prince whom he foolishly challenged to a duel. Lassalle was killed. Marx and Engels were astonished by the rise and fall of this flamboyant meteor—and above all by Engels’s reflections on Lassalle’s intellectual and sexual power are particularly striking: “she didn’t want his beautiful mind but his Jewish cock.”
Marx to Engels
LONDON, 30 JULY 1862
Dear Engels,
From the enclosed scraps you’ll see up to a point how I am bothered. The landlord meanwhile has been pacified, he has to get £25. The piano man, who is paid in instalments for the piano, was to have received £6 on the last day of June, and is a very rude lout. I have tax demands for £6 in the house. That school muck of about £10 I have fortunately paid since I’m doing all I can to spare the children direct humiliation. I’ve paid the butcher £6 (and this was my total quarterly income from Presse!) but the blighter is pestering me again, not to mention the baker, the teagrocer, the greengrocer and whatever the names of those devils are.
That Jewish nigger Lassalle, who is fortunately leaving at the end of this week, has happily again lost 5,000 Taler in a mis-speculation. The blighter would sooner fling his money into the mud than lend it to a “friend,” even if interest as well as capital were guaranteed him. At the same time he proceeds from the view that he has to live as a Jewish baron or baronized (probably by the Countess) Jew. Would you believe it that the blighter, who is aware of the business with America, etc., i.e. is aware of the crisis in which I find myself, had the impertinence to ask me if I wanted to hand one of my daughters over to the Hatzfeldt woman as “companion” and whether he himself should obtain for me Gerstenberg’s [sic] protection! The fellow cost me a lot of time and, so the oaf suggested, since at the moment I had “no business” but was engaged merely on “theoretical work,” I might just as well kill time with him! In order to observe a certain social propriety vis-à-vis the fellow my wife had to take anything that was not actually screwed down to the pawnshop!
If I weren’t in this hideous position, and if the parvenu’s slapping of his money-bag did not irritate me so, I would have been royally amused. Since I saw him a year ago he has become totally mad. His stay in Zurich (with Rüstow, Herwegh, etc.) and his subsequent journey, and finally his “Herr Julian Schmidt,” etc., have completely gone to his head. He is now by general agreement not only the greatest scholar, the most profound thinker, the most inspired researcher, etc., but also Don Juan and a revolutionary Cardinal Richelieu. And with it that unceasing babbling in his squeaking falsetto voice, his unaesthetically demonstrative movement, his didactic tone!…
…Lasalle was most furious about me and wife for poking fun at his plans, poking fun at him as an “enlightened Bonapartist,” etc. He screamed, raved, jumped about and in the end utterly convinced himself that I am too “abstract” to understand politics.
…As I said, in different circumstances (and if he had not got into the way of my work) the blighter would have royally amused me.
Add to this the immoderate beast-like eating and the randy lust of this “idealist.”
It is now perfectly clear to me that, as testified also by his cranial formation and hair growth, he is descended from the negroes who joined Moses’s exodus from Egypt (unless his paternal mother or grandmother was crossed with a nigger). Well, this combination of Jewish and Germanic stock with the negroid base substance is bound to yield a strange product. The fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like….
Yours, K. M.
LONDON, 2 SEPTEMBER 1864
Dear Frederick,
Yesterday afternoon I received the letter from Freiligrath copied below, from which you will see that Lassalle was critically wounded in a duel in Geneva. I went to see Freiligrath the same evening. But he had not received any later telegrams….
Yours, K. M.
Engels to Marx
MANCHESTER, 4 SEPTEMBER 1864
Dear Moor,
Your telegram arrived yesterday, even before I opened your letter since all kinds of business immediately took up my time. You may as well imagine the news surprised me. Whatever else Lassalle may have been, as a person, as a literary man, as a scholar—politically he was certainly one of the most significant fellows in Germany. To us at present he was a very uncertain friend, in future a fairly certain enemy, but be that as it may—it does hit one hard to see Germany finishing off all reasonably good people of the extremist party. What jubilation will reign now among the manufacturers and among those progressive pigs. Lassalle after all was the only chap in Germany itself of whom they were afraid.
But what a strange way to lose one’s life: to fall seriously in love with the daughter of a Bavarian envoy—that would-be Don Juan—to want to marry her, to clash with a retired rival, who moreover is a Wallachian cheat, and to be shot dead by him. That could only happen to Lassalle, given his strange mixture of frivolity and sentimentality, Jewishness and cavalier posturing that was his and his alone. How could a political man like him shoot it out with a Wallachian adventurer!…
Yours, F. E.
Marx to Engels
LONDON, 7 SEPTEMBER 1864
Dear Frederick,
Lassalle’s disaster has been damnably on my mind these days. When all is said and done, he was one of the old stock and the enemy of our enemies. Besides, the thing came as such a surprise that it is hard to believe that such a boisterous, stirring, pushing person is now dead as a door-nail and has to keep utterly silent. As for the ostensible occasion for his death, you are quite right. It is another of the many tactless actions he has committed in his life. With all that I am sorry that during the past few years our relationship was troubled, albeit through his fault….
Yours, K. M.
Engels to Marx
MANCHESTER, 7 NOVEMBER 1864
Dear Moor,
…Evidently Lassalle’s undoing was that he did not immediately fling Helene von Dönniges on to the bed in the guest-house and have a good go at her; she didn’t want his beautiful mind but his Jewish cock. It’s simply one more affair that could only have happened to Lassalle. That he forced the Wallachian to duel is doubly crazy….
Yours, F. E.
Franklin D. Roosevelt to Winston Churchill
, 11 September 1939
The first letter of the friendship that would hold the West.
On 3 September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany, which had invaded Poland. The Second World War had begun. Churchill returned to the cabinet as first lord of the Admiralty, the job he had held in 1914, the start of the First World War. A few days later, he received this letter from the US president Franklin Roosevelt who had served in a similar job—assistant secretary of the Navy, during the same war. They had met in passing twenty years earlier, and in 1933 when Roosevelt won the presidential election Churchill had sent him a copy of his biography of the Duke of Marlborough, but he had not acknowledged it. Now he does so—and opens up a secret channel with Churchill. Although Roosevelt mentions Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in this letter, it is a formality since both men know how inept Chamberlain has been in appeasing Hitler. Roosevelt is betting that Churchill is the coming man. When he became prime minister eight months later, their alliance would be decisive.
My dear Churchill,
It is because you and I occupied similar positions in the [first] world war that I want you to know how glad I am that you are back again in the Admiralty. Your problems are, I realize, complicated by new factors, but the essential is not very different. What I want you and the Prime Minister to know is that I shall at all times welcome it if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about. You can always send sealed letters through your pouch or my pouch.
I am glad you did the Marlborough volumes before this thing started—and I much enjoyed reading them.
With my sincere regards,
Faithfully yours,
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Adolf Hitler to Benito Mussolini, 21 June 1941
A letter from Hitler to his closest friend in international affairs at the height of his power. It is written the night before he invades Soviet Russia, the hubristic act that ultimately led to the downfall of the Third Reich. Hitler had once admired Benito Mussolini, Fascist dictator of Italy since 1922, basing many of his tactics, even the creation of his own Nazi party, on Italian Fascism. But by 1941 Hitler saw him as a preposterous blowhard, while the Italian Duce regarded Hitler as a coarse and dangerous tyrant. But Hitler was now the senior partner. The letter is filled with half-truths: he has actually been planning the Russian invasion for many months (hiding it from Mussolini); and his swaggering delusions and brutal miscalculations are starkly revealed in the extraordinary way he boasts of a decision that would launch the most barbarous war in human history and cost the lives of over thirty million people. This is the way he sees the world when he believes no one can stop him.
21 JUNE 1941
Duce!
I am writing this letter to you at a moment when months of anxious deliberation and continuous nerve-racking waiting are ending in the hardest decision of my life. I believe—after seeing the latest Russian situation map and after appraisal of numerous other reports—that I cannot take the responsibility for waiting longer, and above all, I believe that there is no other way of obviating this danger—unless it be further waiting, which, however, would necessarily lead to disaster in this or the next year at the latest.
The situation: England has lost this war. With the right of the drowning person, she grasps at every straw which, in her imagination, might serve as a sheet anchor. Nevertheless, some of her hopes are naturally not without a certain logic. England has thus far always conducted her wars with help from the Continent. The destruction of France—fact, the elimination of all west-European positions—directing the glances of the British warmongers continually to the place from which they tried to start the war: to Soviet Russia.
Both countries, Soviet Russia and England, are equally interested in a Europe fallen into ruin, rendered prostrate by a long war. Behind these two countries stands the North American Union goading them on and watchfully waiting. Since the liquidation of Poland, there is evident in Soviet Russia a consistent trend, which, even if cleverly and cautiously, is nevertheless reverting firmly to the old Bolshevist tendency to expansion of the Soviet State. The prolongation of the war necessary for this purpose is to be achieved by tying up German forces in the East, so that—particularly in the air—the German Command can no longer vouch for a large-scale attack in the West. I declared to you only recently, Duce, that it was precisely the success of the experiment in Crete that demonstrated how necessary it is to make use of every single airplane in the much greater project against England. It may well happen that in this decisive battle we would win with a superiority of only a few squadrons. I shall not hesitate a moment to undertake such a responsibility if, aside from all other conditions, I at least possess the one certainty that I will not then suddenly be attacked or even threatened from the East. The concentration of Russian forces—I had General Jodl submit the most recent map to your Attaché here, General Maras—is tremendous. Really, all available Russian forces are at our border. Moreover, since the approach of warm weather, work has been proceeding on numerous defenses. If circumstances should give me cause to employ the German air force against England, there is a danger that Russia will then begin its strategy of extortion in the South and North, to which I would have to yield in silence, simply from a feeling of air inferiority. It would, above all, not then be possible for me without adequate support from an air force, to attack the Russian fortifications with the divisions stationed in the East. If I do not wish to expose myself to this danger, then perhaps the whole year of 1941 will go by without any change in the general situation. On the contrary. England will be all the less ready for peace, for it will be able to pin its hopes on the Russian partner. Indeed, this hope must naturally even grow with the progress in preparedness of the Russian armed forces. And behind this is the mass delivery of war material from America which they hope to get in 1942.
Aside from this, Duce, it is not even certain whether I shall have this time, for with so gigantic a concentration of forces on both sides—for I also was compelled to place more and more armored units on the eastern border, also to call Finland’s and Romania’s attention to the danger—there is the possibility that the shooting will start spontaneously at any moment. A withdrawal on my part would, however, entail a serious loss of prestige for us. This would be particularly unpleasant in its possible effect on Japan. I have, therefore, after constantly racking my brains, finally reached the decision to cut the noose before it can be drawn tight. I believe, Duce, that I am hereby rendering probably the best possible service to our joint conduct of the war this year. For my overall view is now as follows:
France is, as ever, not to be trusted. Absolute surety that North Africa will not suddenly desert does not exist.
North Africa itself, insofar as your colonies, Duce, are concerned, is probably out of danger until autumn. I assume that the British, in their last attack, wanted to relieve Tobruk. I do not believe they will soon be in a position to repeat this.
Spain is irresolute and—I am afraid—will take sides only when the outcome of the war is decided.
In Syria, French resistance can hardly be maintained permanently either with or without our help.
An attack on Egypt before autumn is out of the question altogether. I consider it necessary, however, taking into account the whole situation, to give thought to the development of an operational unit in Tripoli itself which can, if necessary, also be launched against the West. Of course, Duce, the strictest silence must be maintained with regard to these ideas, for otherwise we cannot expect France to continue to grant permission to use its ports for the transportation of arms and munitions.
Whether or not America enters the war is a matter of indifference, inasmuch as she supports our opponent with all the power she is able to mobilize.
The situation in England itself is bad; the provision of food and raw materials i
s growing steadily more difficult. The martial spirit to make war, after all, lives only on hopes. These hopes are based solely on two assumptions: Russia and America. We have no chance of eliminating America. But it does lie in our power to exclude Russia. The elimination of Russia means, at the same time, a tremendous relief for Japan in East Asia, and thereby the possibility of a much stronger threat to American activities through Japanese intervention.
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Written in History Page 13
