The Media Environment of Political Thought by Asaf Y. Shamis

Author:Asaf Y. Shamis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2012-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

The German Printing Underground

The second step in sketching the writing system Marx and Engels were working in would to be to trace its particular manifestations of all these developments in Germany of their time.

When in the late 1810s fast steam-driven presses first arrived in Germany, they soon engendered social and political unrest.

The number of newspapers and periodicals in Germany rose from 780 in 1833, to 1,836 in 1846.[16] A new generation of print products bypassed the existing orthodox German institutions. They aided in the gradual detachment of print language from the ideals of the “discourse network of 1800” and associated it with the harsh socioeconomic realities of the day. By the 1840s Germany had already developed one of the most extensive networks of subversive publications in Europe. It was through these increasingly popular print products that Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, Wolfgang Manzel, and others were able to tear print language from the idealist discourse and use it to deliver a sharp critique of existing social and political realities.

A decade before Marx and Engels allied philosophy with socioeconomic realities, a small group of poets named Young Germany (Junges Deutschland) were already employing mechanically duplicated words to challenge the demarcation line between “living” and “writing.”[17] As early as 1836, nine years before Marx and Engels formulated their initial materialist outlook, Heine noted: “The peculiarity, this unity, also appears among the writers of Young Germany, in our day, who likewise draw no sharp distinction between living and writing—who never separate politics from scholarship, art from science—and who are at once artists, tribunes and apostles.”[18] Fifty years after the passionate and dream-like Werther became one of the symbols of the idealist “discourse network of 1800,” the Young Germans went to the opposite pole by bringing literature into the everyday life of the reader in hope of engendering widespread political agitation.

Yet, since political authority in Germany at the time was entrenched in the alliance between idealist philosophy and Protestant theology, the capacity for provoking political change was not so much in the hands of poets as it was in the hands of philosophers. And indeed, from the late 1830s a jumbled brew of theologians, philosophers, and ex-academics that came under the name the Young Hegelians, became the most vocal group in the German printing underground.[19] Like the other cultural creations of the early industrialized age, the essence of the Young Hegelians’ Kritik was its rejection of the conventions that guided German philosophy in the preceding generations. Ruge, for example, called attention early on to the discrepancies between Hegel’s notion of the Prussian state as the culmination of human freedom, and the realities of the authoritative Prussian government. In the same vein, in his radical theology, Feuerbach asserted that God as posited by Hegel and Protestant theology is nothing but a mirror image of man. God did not create man but it was man who created God, Feuerbach famously argues in The Essence of Christianity.[20] By the same token, in The Ego and its Own (1845)

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