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London Pub Crawl with Karl Marx
Liebknecht, Wilhelm
http://solidarity-us.org/atc/194/marx3/Date Written: 2018-05-01 Publisher: Against the Current Year Published: 2018 Resource Type: Article Cx Number: CX23321 An account by Wilhelm Liebknecht of an incident which occured during a 'beer trip' -pub crawl- between Karl Marx, other Germans, and some Englishmen. Abstract: ---- Excerpts: There loud singing issued from a public house; we entered and learned that a club of Odd Fellows were celebrating a festival. We met some of the men belonging to the "party," and they at once invited us "foreigners" with truly English hospitality to go with them into one of the rooms. We followed them in the best of spirits, and the conversation naturally turned to politics - we had been easily recognised as Germany fugitives; and the Englishmen, good old-fashioned people, who wanted to amuse us a little, considered it their duty to revile thoroughly the German princes and the Russian nobles. By "Russian" they meant Prussian nobles. Russia and Prussia are frequently confounded in England, and not alone of account of their similarity of name. For a while, everything went smoothly. We had to drink many healths and to bring out and listen to many a toast. Then the unexpected suddenly happened… Edgar Bauer, hurt by some chance remark, turned the tables and ridiculed the English snobs. Marx launched an enthusiastic eulogy on German science and music - no other country, he said, would have been capable of producing such masters of music as Beethoven, Mozart, Handel and Haydn, and the Englishmen who had no music were in reality far below the Germans who had been prevented hitherto only by the miserable political and economic conditions from accomplishing any great practical work, but who would yet outclass all other nations. So fluently I have never heard him speak English. Subject Headings |