Rheinische Zeitung

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Rheinische Zeitung

The Rheinische Zeitung for politics, trade and commerce was founded on January 1, 1842 in Cologne , Prussia , and banned by the state authorities on March 31, 1843 . The predecessor was the Rheinische Allgemeine Zeitung (founded in 1840), followed by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1848 and 1849 .

prehistory

“In its origins [the 'Rheinische Zeitung'] was not an opposition, rather a government paper. Since the confusion of the bishops in Cologne in the 1930s, the ' Kölnische Zeitung ', with eight thousand subscribers, has represented the claims of the ultramontane party, which was overpowering on the Rhine and made the government's gendarme policy difficult. (...) The monopoly of the 'Kölnische Zeitung' was so strong that its owner regularly succeeded in eliminating all competing papers that appeared by purchasing them, even if they were funded from Berlin. The same fate threatened the 'Rheinische Allgemeine Zeitung', which in December 1839 had received the necessary license from the censorship ministers to break the sole rule of the 'Kölnische Zeitung'. However, at the last moment, a society of wealthy citizens got together to raise capital in stocks to thoroughly transform the paper. The government favored the project and provisionally allowed the concession that it had granted to its predecessor to apply to the now 'Rheinische Zeitung'. "

- Franz Mehring : Karl Marx - history of his life

As a continuation of the Rheinische Allgemeine Zeitung , the first edition of the Rheinische Zeitung for politics, trade and industry appeared on January 1, 1842 . The publisher was the Cologne bookseller Joseph Engelbert Renard (1802–1863), while the editor and publisher of the Rheinische Allgemeine Zeitung , the doctor and journalist Bernhard Rave (1801–1889), was only of interest to the newspaper's new financiers because of his valuable concession . They accepted him into the editorial office so that the government would preserve the appearance of a newspaper that was friendly towards it.

The Rheinische Zeitung

The Rheinische Zeitung (RZ) was a pro-democracy , reformist publication of the emerging opposition Rhenish bourgeoisie against Prussian absolutism , specifically intended as an alternative to the most influential Cologne newspaper . Funded by Gustav von Mevissen and Ludolf Camphausen , among others , the content of the RZ was initially determined by personalities close to the Young Hegelians such as Moses Hess , Georg Jung , Dagobert Oppenheim , Adolf Friedrich Rutenberg and the educator Karl Moritz Fleischer .

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

In 1841 Karl Marx received an invitation to work for the RZ, which at the time had not yet published. An offer that Marx gladly accepted. If he originally wanted to move from Trier to Cologne at the end of March 1842 , he finally moved to Bonn first and began to write for the RZ there. On May 5, 1842, his first news article was published for the Rheinische Zeitung , the first report in his series of articles Debates on Freedom of the Press and the Publication of Land Estate Negotiations . In these articles Marx criticized the speeches of the members of the state parliament on the subject of freedom of the press. He quotes, for example, a speaker from the royal estate who was of the opinion that censorship was a lesser evil than the mischief of the press. Marx saw it differently: "A people who (...) deny the right to think and speak the truth to court fools, can only be a people of dependence and selflessness." In long articles, the young Marx propagated freedom of the press and also sharply criticized the speeches of the defenders of this freedom. Marx quoted such a speaker who wanted to assign freedom of the press to freedom of trade. Marx replies that these are two different types of freedom that cannot be subordinated to one another, otherwise one would “defend the freedom of the press (...) by killing it before the defense.” Marx's famous quote comes from this article: “The first freedom of the press is not to be a trade.” In 1842, however, these thoughts did not have the meaning they have today, because freedom of the press did not yet exist.

In autumn 1842 Marx moved to Cologne and took over the editorial management on October 15, 1842. All of his contributions, as well as those of the other employees, appeared anonymously, and he managed to keep his work as an editor a secret until the newspaper went down. Under Marx's chief editor, the RZ quickly formulated radical , revolutionary democratic ideas. She became one of the most important mouthpieces of the democratic movement in Germany.

On November 16, 1842, on the way to England, Friedrich Engels visited the office of the Rheinische Zeitung, where he met the new editor and later close work partner and friend Marx for the first time. From Manchester, where Engels worked in his father's company (Ermen & Engels), he sent several articles on English domestic politics and economic issues, including an article (December 20, 1842) entitled The Condition of the Working Class in England .

censorship

The Rheinische Zeitung appeared only with a provisional permission from Ernst von Bodelschwingh , the Upper President of the Rhine Province. When the government became suspicious after a few issues, the three Berlin censorship ministers did not send their final approval, which they had already written. One and a half months after the appearance of the first edition, the government rightly suspected that the important positions of the Rheinische Zeitung were only formally occupied by people of good political repute, but that in reality young Hegelians held the strings of the newspaper in their hands. Therefore, the censorship ministers demanded that the newspaper be banned. Von Bodelschwingh refused, however, because he wanted to show consideration for the newspaper's respected shareholders and assumed that a ban would spread too much dissatisfaction in the country. But the political line of the newspaper also worried him, which is why he warned the editorial staff and hired a new local censor who was supposed to exercise stricter censorship.

The Rheinische Zeitung was accused of wanting to replace Christianity with philosophy, of spreading the pernicious constitutional principles of the French and of opposing the monarchy. With articles about freedom of the press, the wood theft laws , but above all with reports on the fate of the Moselle farmers, the RZ increasingly came into conflict with the political leadership of the Rhine province. Double censorship was imposed and pressure was put on the newspaper's shareholders .

The censors had a particularly difficult time with the Rheinische Zeitung, because their journalists were linguistically and legally adept at hiding their message in seemingly harmless texts. Readers were used to reading between the lines because of the strict censorship. Sometimes the entire inland part fell victim to censorship. So the French article (the beginning of the foreign part) came first and it was necessary to use larger line spacing. The government didn't always like that, because the violence of the censors couldn't be too obvious either. The censor Saint-Paul, who was responsible for the Rheinische Zeitung for the last two months, stated that he practiced a special kind of censorship: so that the newspaper would make itself unpopular, he spared scientifically complicated treatises and criticism of the Catholics and of other newspapers from its censorship.

In August 1842 the government hoped that the Rheinische Zeitung would soon die, because it had a circulation of only 885 copies, while the Kölnische Zeitung had a circulation of 8300 copies. The Rheinische Zeitung achieved an unprecedented increase in circulation in Germany at the time: in January 1843 it had 3,400 subscribers. At first the government assumed that only a small number of educated people read the paper and then banned it because of its size and the impossibility of moderating it through censorship. Recently published reports about the plight of the Moselle farmers also contributed to the ban. Out of consideration for the newspaper's respected shareholders, it was only banned from April 1, 1843, although the decision had been made for some time. Marx left the newspaper on March 17, 1843. The fact that the newspaper had only appeared with provisional permission made it easier for the government to ban the newspaper. A few petitions against the ban were sent to Berlin in vain, the one from Cologne counting 911 signatures.

The legal basis of censorship was formed by the Karlsbad Decisions of 1819, which established preliminary censorship in order to have “preventive measures against misuse of the press”. The Rheinische Zeitung benefited from the censorship instruction of December 24, 1841, which eased censorship slightly for two years.

Important employees of the Rheinische Zeitung

After the end

The Neue Rheinische Zeitung (NRhZ) was published by Karl Marx in the years 1848 and 1849 in Cologne, the new edition of the Rh. Z. is.

In 1851, Marx, now living in London , planned to publish a selection of his articles with comments from the Rh. Z. about in Cologne, which was only partially successful. Marx's comments on these articles in the Rh. Z. were found again over a century later in the Cologne University Library and published in MEGA Department I, Volume 1, Berlin 1975.

Quote

“By the way, don't believe that we live in a political Eldorado on the Rhine . It takes the most consistent tenacity to get through a newspaper like the 'Rheinische'. "

- Karl Marx : About the censorship against the Rheinische Zeitung, in a letter to Arnold Ruge , July 9, 1842

literature

  • Karl Marx , letter to Arnold Ruge , July 9, 1842 ( reading (MEW Volume 27, pp. 405-407) )
  • Franz Mehring , Karl Marx - history of his life . Dietz, Berlin 1918 ( read in English )
  • Joseph Hansen : Rhenish letters and files on the history of the political movement 1830–1850. Vol. I (1830-45) . Essen 1919
  • Hermann König: The Rheinische Zeitung from 1842–43 in its attitude to the cultural policy of the Prussian state Coppenrath, Münster i. W.1927 ( Münster contributions to historical research. New part 39)
  • David Rjazanov : Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels . International Publishers, New York 1927 (also under the title Marx and Engels not only for beginners . Rotbuch, Berlin 1973). ( Reading (english))
  • Hans Stein: Karl Marx and the Rhenish pauperism of the Vormärz. A study on social policy by the Rheinische Zeitung from 1842/43 . In: Yearbook of the Cologne History Association . Vol. 14, Cologne 1932
  • Karl Buchheim: The Rheinische Zeitung from 1842, to the memory of the century . In: Kölnische Zeitung of January 2, 1942
  • Wilhelm Klutentreter: The Rheinische Zeitung from 1842/43. Dortmund 1966 ( Dortmund contributions to newspaper research . Ed. By Kurt Koszyk Vol. 10/1 and 10/2.).
  • Rheinische Zeitung for politics, trade and commerce. Unchanged reprint with an introduction and a bibliography of the publications by Karl Marx in the "Rheinische Zeitung" by Inge Taubert with the participation of Jörg Armer. 5 vols. Zentralantiquariat der DDR, Leipzig 1974.
  • Heinrich Billstein: Marx in Cologne. With a contribution by Karl Obermann . Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1983, pp. 10–117 ISBN 3-7609-0766-0
  • Manfred Schöncke: Unknown documents about Marx from the time of his second stay in Bonn 1841–1842 . Contributions to Marx-Engels research. New episode 2002, Hamburg 2002, pp. 278–286 ISBN 3-88619-689-5 contains an unknown article by Marx from the Rh. Z.

Web links

Commons : Rheinische Zeitung  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Rh. Z. Article

Remarks

  1. ↑ Wolfgang Mommsen: 1848. The unwanted revolution. Frankfurt 1998, p. 68.
  2. ↑ Marx: Explanation . (MEW Volume 1, p. 200)
  3. ↑ “With the 'Declaration' of March 17, 1843, Marx announced his resignation from the editorial office of the Rheinische Zeitung . Because of the rigorous censorship, but also because of the differences of opinion between him and the guarantors regarding possible concessions, Marx dropped out a few days before the publication of the last issue of the newspaper. ”( Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, Division I. Volume 1, Berlin 1975, p . 79 *).
  4. ↑ Karl Marx: Collected essays. 1st issue. Edited by Hermann Becker . Cologne 1851 (Reprint Carl Slienger, London 1970)