 He had almost concluded his university studies when the persecution of the Demagogues by the Federal Diet and the Austrian and Prussian governments, which had died down in the twenties, was resumed. A member of the Students' Association, he too was arrested in 1834, dragged from prison to prison for years while inquiries proceeded, and finally sentenced. For what? I do not think that he ever found it worth the trouble of saying. Suffice it to say that he was taken to the fortress at Silberberg. There he found comrades in suffering, Fritz Reuter among others. A few months before Wolff's death, the latter's Ut mine Festungstid came into his hands, and no sooner had he discovered the author to be his old fellow-sufferer than he sent news to him through the publisher. Reuter answered him straightaway in a long and very friendly letter, which I have here in front of me and which proves that on January 12, 1864, at least, the old Demagogue was certainly not the kind of man to knuckle under meekly: He went to Breslau and tried to make his way as a teacher. But he had reckoned without his host, and his host was the Prussian government. Interrupted in the middle of his studies by his arrest, he had not been able to complete the prescribed three years at the university, let alone take his examinations. And in Prussian China only someone who had done all this in accordance with the rules and regulations was considered to be a competent scholar. Anyone else, however learned he might be in his field, as Wolff was in classical philology, was outside the guild and prevented from making public use of his knowledge. There remained the prospect of struggling through as a private tutor. But a government permit was needed for that, and when Wolff applied for one it was denied him. The Demagogue would have had to starve to death or return to do statute labor in his native village if there had been no Poles in Prussia. A landowner from Posen took him on as a domestic tutor; he spent several years here, of which he always spoke with particular pleasure. Having returned to Breslau, after much tribulation and contention he finally obtained the permission of a highly esteemed royal government to give private lessons, and could now at least earn a modest living. Being a man of very few needs, he did not ask for more. This was when he resumed the struggle against the prevailing oppression, as far as this was possible under the dreadful conditions of the time. He had to restrict himself to bringing to public attention isolated instances of the despotism of civil servants, landowners and manufacturers, and even then encountered obstacles with the censors. But he refused to be diverted from his purpose. The newly established High Court of Censorship had no more regular and persistent client than Wolff, the private tutor from Breslau. Nothing afforded him greater pleasure than to dupe the censors, which, given the stupidity of most of them, was not all that difficult as soon as one became somewhat familiar with their weak spots. Thus it was he who scandalized pious spirits to the limit by discovering the following popular "song" of the repentant sinner in an old hymn book which was still in use in some places, and publishing it in the Silesian local newspapers: The press offense with which Wolff was charged at the end of 1845 or early 1846 was so trifling that none of us can now recall the exact circumstances." But the persecution attained such dimensions that Wolff, who had had quite enough of Prussian prisons and fortresses, evaded imminent arrest by leaving for Mecklenburg. [1886 noteby Engels: "According to Wermuth-Stieber: Die Communisten-Verschw rungen des 19. Jahrhunderts, II, P. 141, Wolff was sentenced to three months' confinement in a fortress by the Breslau Supreme Court in 1846 for "offenses against the press laws."] Here he found a safe refuge amongst friends until his unimpeded passage from Hamburg to London could be arranged. In London, where he participated for the first time in a public association -- the still existing German Communist Workers' Educational Society -- he did not remain long but then came, as we have already related, to Brussels. The February Revolution broke out and found an immediate response in Brussels. Every evening crowds of people gathered in the Great Market place in front of the City Hall, which was occupied by the civil guard and gendarmerie; the numerous public houses around the market place were packed. People were shouting, "Vive la R publique!", and singing the Marseillaise, pushing and shoving and. being shoved back. The government was apparently keeping as quiet as a mouse, but called up the reserves and men on leave in the provinces. It had the most respected Belgian republican, Mr. Jottrand, secretly informed that the King was prepared to abdicate should the people so wish, and that he could hear this from the King himself as soon as he liked. Jottrand was in fact told by Leopold that he was himself a republican at heart and would never stand in the way if Belgium should wish to constitute itself a republic; his only wish was that everything should take place properly and without bloodshed, and he hoped incidentally to receive a decent pension. The news was swiftly and secretly put out and had such a soothing effect that no attempt at insurrection was made. But scarcely were the reserves gathered together and the majority of troops concentrated around Brussels -- three or four days were enough in that tiny country -- when there was no more talk of abdication; suddenly one evening the gendarmerie went into action with the flats of their swords against the crowds in the market place, and arrests were made right, left and center. Among the first to be beaten and arrested was Wolff, who had been quietly proceeding home. Dragged into the City Hall, he was given a further beating by the raging and drunken city militia, and, after several days' imprisonment, dispatched over the border to France. He did not stay long in Paris. The March Revolution in Berlin and the preparations for the Frankfurt Parliament and the Berlin Assembly prompted him first to go to Silesia to campaign for radical elections there. As soon as we had started a newspaper, whether in Cologne or in Berlin, he wanted to join us. His general popularity and his powerful vernacular eloquence succeeded in getting radical candidates elected, particularly in the rural constituencies, who without him would not have stood a chance. In the meanwhile the Neue Rheinische Zeitung appeared on June 1 in Cologne, with Marx as editor-in-chief, and Wolff soon came to take over his duties on the editorial board. His inexhaustible energy, his scrupulous, unswerving conscientiousness had the drawback for him that the young people, of whom the entire editorial board consisted, sometimes took an extra break in the certitude that "Lupus" [Wolff's nickname, the Latin word for "wolf"] will see that the paper comes out", and I cannot claim to have been wholly innocent of this myself. Thus it was that in the early days of the paper Wolff had less to do with leading articles than with the day-to-day jobs. But he soon found a way of turning these, too, into an independent activity. Under the regular heading "Aus dem Reich" the news from the small states of Germany was assembled; the small-state and small-town narrow-mindedness and philistinism of both the rulers and the ruled were treated with incomparable humor. At the same time he gave his survey of current events in the Democratic Society" every week, which soon made him one of the most popular and effective speakers here too. The stupidity and cowardice of the bourgeoisie, which had been rising ever higher since the June battle in Paris, had again allowed reaction to summon up its strength. The camarillas of Vienna, Berlin, Munich, etc., were working hand in hand with the noble Imperial Regent and behind the scenes was Russian diplomacy, pulling the strings on which these puppets danced. Now, in September 1848, the moment for action was approaching for these gentlemen. Under direct and indirect Russian pressure (conveyed by Lord Palmerston) the first Schleswig-Holstein campaign was decided by the ignominious Malm ceasefire. The Frankfurt Parliament stooped so far as to ratify it, thus publicly and unquestionably renouncing the revolution. The Frankfurt uprising of September 18 was the response; it was put down. Almost simultaneously the crisis between the Constitutional Agreement Assembly and the Crown had broken out. On August 9, the Assembly had requested the government in an extremely mild, indeed timid resolution to be so good as to do something to prevent the reactionary officers from indulging in their shameless conduct so publicly and offensively. When it demanded in September that this resolution be put into effect, the response was the appointment of the openly reactionary Pfuel ministry with a general at its head (September 19) and the appointment of the notorious Wrangel as Supreme General of Brandenburg: two broad hints to the Berlin Agreers either to go down on their knees or to expect a rude dispersal. General excitement set in. In Cologne, too, public meetings were held and a Committee of Public Safety appointed. The government decided to deliver the first blow in Cologne. Consequently on the morning of September 25, a number of democrats were arrested, including the present Mayor, then generally known as "Red Becker." [Hermann Heinrich Becker] The excitement mounted. In the afternoon a public meeting was held on the Altenmarkt. Wolff presided. The civic militia were formed up on all sides, not objecting to the democratic movement but 'giving first priority to their own welfare. In response to an inquiry, they stated that they were there to protect the public. Suddenly people crowded into the market place with the cry: "The Prussians are coming!" Joseph Moll, also arrested the same morning but freed by the people, who was then speaking, shouted: "Citizens, do you intend to run away from the Prussians?" "No, no!" was the answer. "Then we must build barricades!" and they set to work at once. -- The outcome of the day of barricades in Cologne is well known. Provoked by a false alarm, without encountering any resistance, without any arms -- the civic militia went prudently home -- the whole movement came, quite bloodlessly, to nothing; the government achieved its purpose: Cologne was declared in a state of siege, the civic militia disarmed, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung banned and its editorial staff compelled to go abroad. Meanwhile the Berlin Assembly had been sent packing and Manteuffel's period of reaction had set in. One of the first measures of the new government was to reassure the feudal lords of the Eastern Provinces regarding their disputed right to unpaid peasant labor. After the March days the peasants of the Eastern Provinces had ceased to perform statute labor, and in places even forced the worthy lords to give them a written disclaimer concerning such labor. It was thus merely a matter of declaring this existing state of affairs legal, and the long oppressed peasant east of the Elbe would be a free man at last. But the Berlin Assembly, a full 59 years after August 4, 1789, when the French National Assembly had abolished all feudal burdens without compensation, had still not been able to summon up the courage to take the. same step. It somewhat eased the terms for the commutation of statute labor; but only a few of the most scandalous and infuriating feudal rights were to be abolished without compensation. Yet before this Bill was finally passed the Assembly was broken up, and Mr. Manteuffel declared that this Bill would not be passed into law by the government.' This destroyed the hopes of the Old Prussian peasants subject to statute labor, and the need now was to influence them by explaining to them the position they were facing. And Wolff was just the man for this. Not only was he the son of a bondsman and had himself been forced to do statute labor as a child; not only had he retained the full fervor of his hatred towards the feudal oppressors which this childhood had aroused in him; no one knew the feudal method of enslavement so well in all its details as he did, and this in the very province that provided a complete pattern-card of all its manifold forms -- Silesia. Thus Wolff opened the campaign against the feudal lords, which culminated in the Silesian Milliard and to which I refer below. It was a campaign which by right ought to have been waged by the bourgeoisie. It was, after all, precisely the struggle against feudalism that was the mission of this class in world history. But as we have seen, it failed to wage it, or only pretended to do so. Thanks to the social and political backwardness of Germany, the German bourgeoisie everywhere left its own political interests in the lurch, because the proletariat was already looming up behind it. The vague hopes and desires of the Parisian workers in February, but even more their four-day battle of desperation in June 1848, terrified not only the bourgeoisie of France but of all Europe. And in Germany even simple democratic demands, such as they had themselves long since carried out legally in Switzerland, seemed to the quaking bourgeois to be attacks on their property, their security, their lives, etc. As cowardly as ever, the German bourgeois sacrificed their common, i.e., political interests so that each might save his private interest, his capital. Rather a return to the old bureaucratic-feudal absolutism than a victory of the bourgeoisie as a class, than a modern bourgeois state attained in a revolutionary way and strengthening the revolutionary class, the proletariat! That was the German bourgeoisie's cry of anguish, in the midst of which reaction triumphed an along the line. Thus the party of the proletariat had to take up the struggle at the point where the bourgeoisie had absconded from the battlefield. And Wolff took up the struggle against feudalism in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. But not in such a way as to afford the bourgeois any joy; no, in truly revolutionary fashion, in such a manner that the bourgeoisie was just as appalled at these articles exhaling the spirit of the great French Revolution as the feudal lords and the government themselves." Few of the many inflammatory articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung had such an effect as these, eight in number, which appeared between March 22 and April 25. Orders for the newspaper from Silesia and the other Eastern Provinces increased at a furious rate; individual issues were requested and eventually, since the exceptional freedom of the press allowed us by Rhenish law was lacking in the other provinces, and there was no question of a reprint under their noble local law, someone came up with the idea of secretly reprinting in Silesia the entire eight issues as near to the original in appearance as possible and disseminating them in thousands of copies -- a procedure to which the editorial board was naturally the last to object. On May 19 the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed after the last issue had appeared printed in red. Apart from 23 pending press trials the Prussian police had so many other pretexts for seizing each individual member of the editorial board that they all left Cologne and Prussia immediately. Most of us went to Frankfurt, where the decisive point seemed near at hand. The victories of the Hungarians provoked the Russian invasion; the conflict between the governments and the Frankfurt Parliament on account of the Imperial Constitution had given rise to various insurrections, of which those in Dresden, Iserlohn and Elberfeld had been suppressed, while those in the Palatinate and in Baden were still in progress. Wolff had an old Breslau mandate in his pocket as the substitute for that old distorter of history, Stenzel; they had only got wailer Stenzel through by including the agitator Wolff as his substitute. Like all good Prussians, Stenzel had naturally obeyed the Prussian government's order of recall from Frankfurt. Wolff now took his place. The Frankfurt Parliament, having sunk through its own idling and stupidity from the position of the most powerful assembly that had ever convened in Germany to the most utter impotence, now evident to all the governments, even to the Imperial Government it had appointed itself and to the very Parliament itself, was at a loss what to do, caught between the governments which had massed their forces, and the people who had risen to defend the Imperial Constitution. There was still everything to be gained if only the Parliament and the leaders of the South German movement showed courage and determination. A parliamentary decision calling the armies of Baden and the Palatinate to Frankfurt to defend the Assembly would have sufficed. The Assembly would thereby have regained the confidence of the people at a stroke. The defection of the troops of Hesse and Darmstadt, and the accession of W rttemberg and Bavaria to the movement could then have been anticipated with certainty; the small states of central Germany would likewise have been brought in; Prussia would have had its hands full, and, in the face of such a mighty movement in Germany, Russia would have been compelled to retain in Poland part of the troops subsequently employed with success in Hungary. Thus Hungary could have been saved at Frankfurt, and moreover there was every likelihood that with the spread of a victorious revolution in Germany, the outbreak that was daily expected in Paris would not have dissolved into the uncontested defeat of the radical philistines which occurred on June 13, 1849. The prospects were as favorable as they could be. The advice to summon the guard of Baden and the Palatinate was given by all of us in Frankfurt, that to march to Frankfurt even without a summons, in Mannheim by Marx and myself. But neither the Baden leaders nor the Frankfurt parliamentarians had the courage, energy, intelligence or initiative. The very same day Wolff challenged Mr. Vogt to a duel with pistols through the deputy W rth from Sigmaringen, and when Mr. Vogt declined to shoot it out, threatened him with physical chastisement. Mr. Vogt, although physically a giant compared with Wolff, now fled under the protection of his sister, not showing his face anywhere except in her company. Wolff let the loudmouth go. Everyone knows how a few days after the scene, the Assembly itself recognized the correctness of Wolff's utterances by fleeing from its own Imperial Regent and his government to Stuttgart. Wolff too often pondered on the idea of emigrating to America, which the many friends of his who had gone there urged him to do. When the "harrying" became too much for him, he arrived, half-decided, in London in June 1851, where we gave him a place of abode for the time being. Here too the competition as a private tutor was very keen. Wolff was scarcely able to earn the paltriest living despite the greatest exertions. He did his utmost to keep his position a secret from his friends, as always when things were going badly for him. Nonetheless, he had been obliged by the end of 1853 to run up debts of about 37 sterling (750 marks), which weighed very heavily on him; he wrote in his diary the same summer: Suffice it to take a single instance to illustrate Wolff's conscientiousness. He set one of his pupils a sum in arithmetic from a textbook. He compared the answer with the one given in the so-called key, and found it wrong. But when the boy always arrived at the same answer after repeated attempts Wolff did the sum himself and discovered that the boy was right; the key contained a printer's error. At once Wolff sat down and worked through every sum in the book in order to make sure that there were no more such errors in the key: "That's never going to happen to me again!" This conscientiousness was, in fact, the cause of his death, not even 55 years old. In the spring of 1864 he started suffering from severe headaches due to overwork, which gradually resulted in almost total insomnia. His doctor had gone away; he refused to consult any other. All pleas for him to cancel or limit his lessons for a while were in vain; whatever he had taken on, he wanted to see through. Only when he simply could not endure it any more did he occasionally cancel his lessons. But it was too late. The headaches caused by saturation of the brain with blood went from bad to worse, the insomnia became ever more unremitting. A blood-vessel in the cerebrum burst, and after repeated cerebral hemorrhages death occurred on May 9, 1864. With him, Marx and I lost our most faithful friend, and the German revolution a man of irreplaceable worth.
A Wilhelm Wollf biography