Marx in Neue Rheinische Zeitung November 1848

News from Vienna


Source: MECW Volume 7, p. 501;
Written: by Marx on November 5, 1848;
First published: in the second edition of Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 135, November 5, 1848.


Cologne, November 5. Letters and newspapers from Vienna failed to arrive. The newspapers from Breslau which we have received, the Allgemeine Oderzeitung, the Schlesische Zeitung and the Breslauer Zeitung, contain, properly speaking, nothing.

Several Berlin morning papers of November 3 carry the following news item, one newspaper having received it from Hietzing, the others from Vienna:

The city of Vienna is entirely occupied by imperial troops.”

The Kölnische Zeitung prints this report, which it received from Breslau [Kölnische Zeitung, Nov 5] and which “is described as reliable”, and it confirms this report by a “telegram” from Berlin, which “in itself” is of course reliable.

Let us leave aside the anonymous note from Breslau and proceed to the telegram printed in big letters in the Kölnische Zeitung. [Kölnische Zeitung, Nov 5]

The telegram was dispatched from Vienna at noon on November 1.

The letter to Dumont, if he received the news in writing, was sent at 8 a.m. on November 3, with the Berlin mail.

On the evening of November 3, this news was circulating merely as a rumour throughout Berlin, and the newspapers of November 4 published on the evening of November 3 deny it.

Hence we have no news from Vienna. Dumont, who reported the burning and capture of Vienna since October 6, could by way of exception have got hold of the right fact on one day in the month.