936 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHYhow glad 1 am that you are happy, that my letter exhilarated you, that
you long for me, that you live in well-papered rooms, that you have
drunk champagne in Cologne, that there are Hegel clubs there, that you
have dreamed and, in short, that you are my darling, my own dark little
savage.'^144 But the high life in Cologne turned out to be too much for
him as 'the life here is too noisy and good boisterous friends do not make
for better philosophy'.^145 So Marx returned to Bonn where he was able
to relax with Bauer. 'Marx has come back here,' his friend wrote: 'Lately
we went out into the open country to enjoy once again all the beautiful
views. The trip was marvellous. We were as gay as ever. In Godesberg
we hired a couple of donkeys and galloped on them like madmen around
the hill and through the village. Bonn society gazed at us as amazed as
ever. We halloed and the donkeys brayed.'^146 But their ways soon parted
for good when Bauer went to Berlin to try and get his dismissal rescinded.
Marx meanwhile continued with his journalism. At the end of April he
already had four articles to propose to Ruge. His visits to Cologne did
not only consist in drinking champagne: he was gradually becoming
involved in the city's liberal opposition movement, an involvement in
practical politics that eventually led to his breaking with the Young Hegel-
ians and taking over the editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung. In spite of
Jenny's warning against getting 'mixed up' in politics (an activity she
described as 'the riskiest thing there is'),^147 it was an almost inevitable
step for a young Rhineland intellectual of progressive views.
The political atmosphere in the Rhineland was quite different from
Berlin: Rhineland-Westphalia, annexed by France from 1795 to 1814 , had
had the benefit of economic, administrative and political reforms. What
had before been 108 small states were reorganised into four districts;
feudalism was abolished, and various administrative anomalies - as regards
the political, juridical and financial systems - were eliminated. The cor-
porations and customs barriers were done away with, much could be
exported to France and producers were protected against competition
from England. Expansion, led by the textile industry, was so rapid that
by 1810 the Prefect of the Ruhr plausibly claimed that it was the most
industrial region in Europe. The majority of progressive figures in Ger-
many of that time came from the Rhineland: the leaders of the liberal
opposition, and many future activists in the 1848 revolutions, and poets
such as Heine and Boerne.
One of the focal points of this political activity was the 'Cologne
Circle' the Rhineland's more down-to-earth equivalent of the Doctors'
(Hub which Marx joined as soon as he established himself in Bonn. In
many ways the central figure of the Cologne Circle was Georg Jung who
hud also been a member of the Berlin Doctors' Club. He quickly became