Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  What Engels the keen physiologist didn't realize was that he was already suffering from an aggressive cancer of the oesophagus and larynx which Freyberger had finally detected in early March 1895 and had then shared his diagnosis with the Austrian medic and socialist Victor Adler. Being doctors, they naturally thought it best to keep their patient in the dark and so the ensuing weeks see a heartrending correspondence as Engels latches on to every false dawn of returning health. ‘Thank you for your letter – there is some improvement but, in accordance with the principles of dialectics, the positive and the negative aspects are both showing a cumulative tendency,’ he joked in a suitably scientistic vein to Eduard Bernstein in early July 1895. ‘I am stronger, eat more and with a better appetite and look very well, or so I am told; thus my general condition has improved.’ He was already having trouble swallowing, but on the other hand, ‘I have found out several weak sides of my capricious appetite and take lait de poule [egg-nog] with brandy, custards with stewed fruits, oysters up to nine a day etc.’89 However, by 21 July his condition had become extremely grave. Sam Moore, his old friend from Manchester days, met Ludwig Freyberger off the train from Eastbourne and reported back to Tussy. ‘I am sorry to say that his report is anything but cheering; he says that the disease has attained such a hold that, considering the General's age, his state is precarious. Apart from the diseased glands of the neck there is danger either from weakness of the heart or from pneumonia – and in either of these two cases the end would be sudden.’90 With his health rapidly deteriorating, Engels was evacuated from Eastbourne back to London. ‘Tomorrow we return,’ he wrote to Laura who was waiting for him at Regent's Park Road. ‘There seems to be at last a crisis approaching in my potato field on my neck, so that the swellings may be opened and relief secured. At last! So there is hope of this long lane coming to a turning.’ He then went on, in his last known letter, to ridicule both the SDF and ILP for their poor showing in the recent general election, before signing off in vintage Engels fashion, ‘Here's your good health in a bumper of lait de poule fortified by a dose of cognac vieux.’91

  Despite the bonhomie, Engels sensed his mortality looming and chose to add a late codicil to his 1893 will. As would be expected of the man, both documents were businesslike, pragmatic and extraordinarily generous to the loving clique who surrounded him. His estate was to be divided into eight parts with three parts for Laura Lafargue, three parts for Tussy and the remaining two parts for Louise Freyberger. With the estate valued at £20,378 after death duties, this worked out at a very lucrative £5,000 each for Tussy and Laura (after subtracting one third for Jenny Marx Longuet's children) and almost £5,100 for Louise.* Tussy, Laura and Jenny's children were also to receive any continuing royalties from the sales of Das Kapital. Pumps was left £2,230 (with which she emigrated to the United States), Ludwig Freyberger £210 for medical assistance, and Louise the rights to the lease on Regent's Park Road as well as the household effects. Meanwhile, all loans to Pumps and Percy, Laura and Paul Lafargue, and Edward Aveling were expunged. Most importantly of all, Engels acceded to the wishes of the Marx daughters when it came to their father's papers: not only were all his manuscripts and family letters to be given to Tussy as literary executor, he now commanded that all letters to Marx were to be handed over to her. His own letters from known correspondents were to be returned to them with the rest passed to his literary executors, August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein. In addition, he allocated a further £1,000 to Bebel and Paul Singer as an election fighting fund for helping SPD candidates. The Party, Pumps, Louise, Marx's daughters and his old friend's ideological bequest were all painstakingly taken care of. His blood brother, Hermann, was handed back an oil painting of their father.

  The reading of the will wasn't long in coming. By early August the once Herculean General could take nourishment only in fluid forms, was drifting in and out of consciousness and had lost the power of speech. Bebel visited him and found he could still ‘make bad jokes on his writing board’.92 He could also chalk out, in these dying days, the identity of Freddy Demuth's true father to a distraught Tussy and so exculpate himself from that particular misdemeanour. Soon after 10 p.m. on 5 August 1895 Louise Freyberger briefly left his side to change for night-duty. When she came back, ‘all was over’.93 After suffering ‘broncho-pneumonia’ for the previous two days, Engels died alone in his bed. ‘So he was laid low,’ Wilhelm Liebknecht lamented,

  that titanic mind who together with Marx laid the foundations of scientific socialism and taught the tactics of socialism, who at the early age of 24 wrote the classical work Condition of the Working Class, the co-author of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx's alter ego who helped him to call to life the International Working Men's Association, the author of Anti-Dühring, that encyclopaedia of science of crystal transparency accessible to anybody who can think, the author of The Origin of the Family and so many other works, essays and newspaper articles, the friend, the adviser, the leader and the fighter – he was dead.94

  The funeral was not as Engels would have wished. Instead of an intimate, private gathering of mourners for an unpublicized cremation, word of the gathering spread and near eighty people crammed into the rooms of the Necropolis Company at the Westminster Bridge Road station of London and South Western Railway. In addition to the Avelings, Lafargues, Roshers, Longuet children, Freybergers and some Engels cousins, from the SPD came Liebknecht, Singer, Kautsky, Lessner and Bernstein; for the Austrians, August Bebel; for the Russians, Vera Zasulich; and the admired Will Thorne from the Socialist League. There were wreaths from the Belgian, Italian, Dutch, Bulgarian and French Socialist parties and speeches from amongst others Engels's nephew, Gustav Schlechtendahl, and Samuel Moore. After some secular valedictions, the train bearing Engels's body eased out of London heading along a single track to the Woking crematorium.

  *

  MEMORIAL NOTICE.

  Frederick Engels, the life-long friend of Carl Marx and the most conspicuous figure in the international Socialist movement since the death of Marx, died on Monday night at his residence in London.

  The Manchester Guardian (7 August 1895) quietly notes Friedrich Engels's passing.

  ‘To the west of Eastbourne the cliffs along the coast gradually rise until they form the great chalky headland of Beachy Head, nearly six hundred feet in height. Overgrown with grass on the top, it slopes gently at first, and then suddenly falls steeply to the water, while down below it exhibits all manner of recesses and outlying masses.’ It was to this quintessentially English setting, ‘on a very rough day in autumn’, that Eduard Bernstein travelled together with Tussy, Aveling and Friedrich Lessner. These four rough-hewn socialists – an incongruous quartet in genteel Eastbourne – hired a small boat and started to row steadily out into the English Channel. ‘About five or six miles off Beachy Head,’ they turned to face the dramatic shoreline of the South Downs and then, following the clear dictates of his will, cast the urn and ashes of Friedrich Engels into the sea. In death as in life there was nothing to detract from the glory of Marx: no Highgate headstone or family tomb, no public memorial for Engels the man of such attractive contradiction and limitless sacrifice. After his brief, final years as first fiddle, Engels had returned to the orchestra.95

  1. Friedrich and Elise Engels: a model of bourgeois parental rectitude.

  2. ‘Zion of the obscurantists’. Engels's home town of Barmen in the early 1800s.

  3. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel at the University of Berlin in 1828, sowing his dragon-seeds.

  4. ‘With one blow it pulverized the contradiction.’ Ludwig Feuerbach, author of The Essence of Christianity.

  5. ‘The wild black boar’, ‘the wicked nave’, ‘the Moor’: a young Karl Marx.

  6. ‘I am very busy at present with philosophy and critical theology.’ Self-portrait of Engels the questing intellectual, aged nineteen.

  7. ‘King Cotton’: design from the mill of John Marshall & Sons, depicting the civilizing wonders of the cotton
trade, c. 1821.

  8. Reels from the Ermen and Engels mill with their three towers trade mark.

  9. ‘The Juggernaut of Capital’: The Ermen and Engels mill in Weaste, alongside the Manchester to Liverpool railway line.

  10. Oswald the Montagnard. Portrait of Engels the romantic visionary, 1840.

  11. Face to face with the proletariat: child labour in the Victorian cotton industry.

  12. ‘And yet there is a great deal of money made here; good morning, sir.’ The wealth of mid-Victorian Manchester.

  13. Engels's other world: the Albert Club on Dover Street, Manchester, renowned for its smoking room, card rooms and billiard tables.

  14. ‘The quadrilateral desk in the small bow window’, Chetham's Library, Manchester, where Marx and Engels spent the summer of 1845 reading up on political economy.

  15. The 1848 Revolution: Dresden in revolt against the King of Saxony. Amongst the rioters were Michael Bakunin and Richard Wagner.

  16. Berlin's March revolution. ‘All that is missing is the guillotine,’ muttered Queen Elisabeth.

  17. ‘Composed of the first gentlemen in that aristocratic county’. A meet of the Cheshire Hounds, by Henry Calvert.

  18. ‘What Art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern; the distinctive faculty.’ Physicist James Joule (left) and chemist John Dalton face each other across the impressive entrance to Manchester Town Hall.

  19. Engels as the second father and the giver of good things. ‘The General’ with Marx and his daughters – (left to right) Laura, Eleanor, Jenny – on holiday in 1864.

  20. The much indulged Laura Marx.

  21. Lizzy Burns, the only Mrs Friedrich Engels – of ‘genuine Irish proletarian blood’ with ‘passionate feelings for her class’.

  22. Eleanor Marx, the beloved and doomed ‘Tussy’.

  23. ‘The Grand Lama of the Regent's Park Road’ in 1891.

  24. The Mecca of international socialism. Engels's study at No. 122 Regent's Park Road as it looks today.

  25. Hampstead Heath – ‘London's Chimborazo’ – Marx and Engels's favourite walking and family picnic spot.

  26. ‘Look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat.’ Barricade at the Faubourg Saint-Antoine during the Commune, 18 March 1871.

  27. A panorama of the fires in Paris during the Commune, May 1871.

  28. ‘The greatest event to have taken place in England since the last Reform Bills’. Striking dockers march through the London streets in 1889.

  29. Engels thought the dockers' political cohesion and proletarian class consciousness heralded ‘the beginning of a complete revolution in the East End’. Posing for a photograph, with float, 1889.

  30. The global reach of Friedrich Engels. A poster in Havana, Cuba, commemorating the 130th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, c. 1978.

  31. An icon of colonial resistance. Engels, alongside Marx and Lenin, on a war-torn mural in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1991.

  Epilogue

  Let us return to the city of Engels on the banks of the river Volga. Given its everyday, grisly modernity, it is easy to forget the town's remarkable origins in the reign of Catherine the Great during the mid-eighteenth century. As the European-born Empress of Russia, Catherine II had been determined to inject some Western culture into Russia's bloodstream, raise the country's economic productivity and populate the lawless Volga region with dependable, industrious settlers. This meant enticing thousands of German farmers, labourers and tradesmen to leave their Hessian towns and villages for the fertile plains of southern Russia. And, over the course of the 1760s, some 30,000 Germans were induced to choose a new life in colonies stretching over 200 miles up and down the Volga valley.1 One of the most popular destinations was around Saratov, where the soils were known to be especially fecund, and, on the other side of the river, the small settlement of Pokrovskaia, which grew as a lucrative trading and storage hub on the salt transportation routes. Through generations of grafting, the Volga Germans transformed their region into some of the most prosperous and peaceable lands in the Russian Empire. And in 1914 the unincorporated Pokrovskaia was officially christened Pokrovsk in honour of the Holy Blessed Virgin (after pokrov, a protective shroud or veil) and, following the 1917 Russian Revolution, it joined Saratov as a patriotic member of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Volga Germans.

  In 1931 the name was changed again under less consensual circumstances. For the Soviet regime was not gentle to the Volga republic. During the early 1920s, in the aftermath of the Russian civil war, military requisitioning and failed harvests, the region had suffered a devastating famine with grass, roots, bark, hides and straw all becoming staple ingredients in this once well-fed district. The population plummeted by nearly one third in the wake of rocketing mortality rates and mass emigration. But just as the soil started to recover and harvests revive, the Fifteenth Congress of the Communist Party began its 1927 session. Its outcome was General Secretary Joseph Stalin's butcherous peasant policy: to secure the industrial transformation of the Soviet economy, Stalin demanded the transfer of food supplies into the cities, a clampdown on rural grain hoarding, and the mass collectivization of agriculture. To deliver this agro-industrial revolution, he unleashed an unrelenting war against the counterrevolutionary kulak class – those rural small-holders eking out an existence a little above the average with perhaps half a dozen acres of land, some livestock and hired labour. ‘We have gone from a policy of restricting the exploiting proclivities of the kulaks to the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class,’ Stalin boasted in a 1929 speech to agricultural students.2 Penal taxation, demands for grain ‘contributions’ and forcible reallocation of land were then followed by the night-time knock of the secret police as the Gulags started to fill up. By 1930 nearly 80 per cent of the private holdings in the Volga region had been compulsorily integrated into local collectives, while almost half a million colonists from the Volga, Caucasus and South Russia were deported during the anti-kulak terror.

  But the economic gains of Stalin's Five-Year Plan were also evident. Saratov and Pokrovsk underwent rapid industrialization with the construction of railway repair depots, brickworks, bread-baking plants, glue factories and the beginnings of an aircraft assembly line. Shock brigades at the bone-processing plants and Stakhanovite workers at the railway junctions pledged themselves to struggle ever harder to meet Moscow's ‘productional-financial plan’. And it was to celebrate precisely such progress, as well as to commemorate the Volga's proud Germanic heritage, that the presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR decided in October 1931 to rename Pokrovsk in honour of Prussia's second greatest socialist, Engels (the nearby town of Ekaterinenstadt having already taken Marksstadt). The name of Pokrovsk, according to one official statement, ‘was yellowed and dried out like her mother – the fairy tale about the “Virgin Mary”.’ In this scientific, Soviet era, it was an embarrassing hangover from feudal and superstitious times, recalling ‘the atrocious period of Tsarist rule, which used national religion as a smokescreen for the egregious enslavement of the working masses’.3

  More than that, the prospect of renaming offered a further official chance for connecting the great strides of the Soviet Union with one of modern Marxism's founding fathers. For were not Stalin's policies – crushing the kulaks, Mensheviks and ‘bourgeois nationalists’; collectivizing the farms; rationalizing production; taking the ‘giant steps’ towards a modern, industrial future – being dutifully carried out in the name of Friedrich Engels? The Soviet propaganda machine had no doubt: Engels was a name, one Volga newspaper asserted, ‘worthy of what we have accomplished and will accomplish in the socialist reformation of agriculture based upon consolidated collectivization and the liquidation of kulakism as a class’.4 ‘The city of Engels, the centre of the first national republic of consolidated collectivization, the centre which with its industrial development has become the forge of mighty national proletarian cadres,’ as a different editori
al had it, ‘will take its place among the proletarian centres of the country of socialist development worthy of the name of Karl Marx's fellow combatant and friend.’5

  This prestigious title did not come without responsibilities. ‘It demands of us the tireless fulfilment of all of the tasks we face in building the socialist system. Our Volga-German Komsomol [party youth organization] must meet them by carrying out a veritable assault to fulfil and over fulfil the grain supply… to solve the socialist stock-breeding problem… to tirelessly liquidate illiteracy in time for the anniversary of the October Revolution.’ Such selfless industry could be the only correct response to the inspirational life of their new patron saint. For ‘Marx's victory was only possible thanks to Engels's great willingness to sacrifice himself… he stuck to “damned commerce” in order to earn enough to allow Marx to dedicate himself to his great life's work uninterrupted.’ The residents of Engels would strive to follow such a lofty example of socialist sacrifice. ‘To work, Komsomol! Show that we are worthy of transferring the name of this revolutionary, who accomplished so astoundingly much for the international proletariat, to the centre of our Volga-German Republic! Once upon a time, there was Pokrovsk – watch out: here's Engels!’6