154
LEE BAXANDALL
manipulated. His treatment of the young Engels will serve as an example.
He holds that an unoriginal Engels borrowed his opinion of Karl Beck,
the poet, from an admired mentor, Karl Gutzkow, and when Gutzkow
changed his mind about Beck, Engels followed. Yet, as Demetz himself
states,
Engels
first published in Gutzkow's paper a revised opinion of
Beck, and Gutzkow then followed suit. Demetz argues similarly that
Engels would not have admired Ludwig Borne, had Gutzkow not praised
him. Yet the essay in which Gutzkow did so was published a year after
Engels' first and enthusiastic reading of Borne in 1838! And although
Engels himself praised BOrne for "style as well as [for] power and rich–
ness of ideas," Demetz dares say that Engels, uninterested in "genuine
literary discussions," cared for BOrne only as "a political hero" ! Let us
note that Demetz too praises BOrne's style as "flexible, pure, tense, and
of unsurpassed strength"; was this purity and strength unrelated to
Borne's political energy?
Demetz also cudgels Engels for studying Hegel while moving away
from Gutzkow, "the first and the last German writer" who might have
taught Engels some "respect for the essence of literature." His proof that
Engels lacked respect for the essence of literature? It is a hint by Engels,
in an early essay, that he would dare assign to oblivion writings which
conduced to a servile mentality. For good measure, Demetz also charges
Engels with hypothetical censorship, while passing over, without com–
ment, the good Gutzkow's quoted admission that he had
in fact
censored
Engels' contributions to his paper.
Meanwhile Demetz manages to subvert his own theory of cultural
autonomy, with a casual remark that French art of the early nineteenth
century, "following French foreign policy, had turned to North African
and Oriental themes."
He praises a poem by Ferdinand Freiligrath, "To Spain," which
portrays admiringly the courage of a reactionary fallen in battle. Such
verse, Demetz declares, exhibits autonomy. We learn pages later that
the author of the poem, who had been making out on a clerk's wages,
was soon thereafter rewarded for his "unpolitical" verses with a life
pension from the ruler of Prussia. And Freiligrath himself SOon renounced
the pension as a political encomium and bribe.
Demetz' silences are always telling. He omits all mention of the
poet George Weerth, and of Engels' important essay of 1883 terming
him "the first and most significant poet of the German proletariat."
Apparently the lifelong warm relations of Weerth with Marx and Engels,
the lack of any rupture or misunderstanding which might be exploited
or distorted, was enough reason to leave him out of a study of Marx's
and Engels' literary views and relations. In light of Demetz' imputation
