Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

COLOGNE^205

munist Manifesto of which the first 1000 copies had just arrived from

London; the other was a flysheet listing seventeen points elaborated by

Marx and Engels in the last half of March and entitled The Demands of

the Communist Party in Germany. Marx himself paid for the printing of the

Demands which were an attempt to adapt the proposals of the Communist

Manifesto to Germany. Only four of the ten points of the Manifesto were

included: a state bank, nationalisation of transport, progressive income

tax and free education. The right of inheritance was to be limited rather

than abolished, and there was no proposal for nationalising land - but

only the estates of the feudal princes.^9 The Demands were a plan of action

for a bourgeois (and not socialist) revolution; they were designed to appeal

to the petty bourgeoisie and peasants as well as to the workers, and were

very similar to programmes proposed by radical republicans.

II. POLITICS IN COLOGNE

Marx himself, armed with a passport valid for one year only, left Paris at
the beginning of April and travelled to Mainz. He was accompanied by
his family, Engels and Ernst Dronke (a young radical writer who had
recently been brought into the Communist League). They stopped two
days in Mainz where the Workers' Educational Association had shortly
before issued an appeal for the organisation and unification of workers'
unions throughout Germany. Marx arrived in Cologne on 10 April, and
settled in the north of the city.^10 About three months later he was followed
by Jenny and the children who had been waiting in Trier until he obtained
a residence permit. They all moved into lodgings situated in the narrow
streets of the Old City," almost next door to the future offices of the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

Cologne was an obvious base: it was the third biggest town in Prussia
with nearly 100,00 0 inhabitants and was situated in the most industrialised
region of Germany; Marx had many old contacts there and the Rhineland
laws were known to be more liberal than those of any other German
state. There was also a group of the Communist League there which in
mid-184 7 met twice weekly for singing, discussion and propaganda^12 -
though by the time of Marx's arrival in Cologne, Wolff reported it to be
'vegetating and disorganised'.^13 Its leading members had been Andreas
Gottschalk, gifted son of a Jewish butcher who practised as a doctor
among the poor of Cologne, and August Willich and Friedrich Anneke,
both ex-Prussian officers. Cologne had also been the first city to witness
mass action by the workers. On 3 March, two weeks before the outbreak
of the revolution in Berlin, a crowd of several thousand assembled on the