Original article (in Croatian) was published on 14/5/2024; Author: Anja Vladisavljević
We discovered a quote similar to the one mentioned in the title within an article from October 1848, a revolutionary year, published in a newspaper edited by Marx.
At the beginning of this month, on the anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, Marx’s alleged statement about Croats began to spread again on social networks.
“Marx had an extremely negative opinion of the Croats, considering them a reactionary and monarchist element that will never be able to be improved through socialist thought, and whose place is in the dustbin of history. Karl Marx’s chauvinist hatred of Croats certainly features the most famous saying; “Croats should be drowned in the Danube and wiped off the face of the earth…” (Marx in Neue Rheinische Zeitung)”, this is part of the status that was published on May 5, 2024, on the Facebook page Kraljevina Hrvatska (archived here).
This is not the first time that Marx is credited with being the creator of the statement “Croats should be drowned in the Danube and wiped off the face of the earth”. This claim has been circulating for some time on right-wing web portals (1, 2, 3, 4), forums and social networks, so it is accepted in these circles as something that came directly from the nineteenth-century philosopher.
A follower of Faktograf recently brought to our attention the virality of one such recent post, questioning its accuracy. To verify the facts and provide context, we decided to examine the sources and consult experts familiar with Marx’s oeuvre.
What Was Actually Written in the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”?
Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820 – 1895) are the founders of Marxist philosophy and practice. This philosophy is based, among other things, on the study of the rise of capitalism, class analysis of society, and criticism of many established philosophies at the time. The works of Marx and Engels are available on various websites, and one of the most famous is the Marxist Internet Archive (MIA), which contains the writings of about a thousand Marxist authors and scholars of Marxism in over 80 languages. We did not find a quote from Marx on this website, in the form in which it is quoted among domestic users of the Internet and social networks.
In the post that we are analyzing, it is stated that Marx’s quote about the hatred of “Croats” and “throwing Croats into the Danube” was written in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a newspaper which is very important for the history of the labor movement of the 19th century, and was published in very turbulent months, from June 1848 to May 1849, after which it was banned. Engels was a member of the editorial board of the paper, and Marx was the editor-in-chief. And indeed, “Croats” are mentioned in several places in the newspaper.
In an article titled “The Latest News from Vienna, Berlin and Paris” (available in English and Serbian translation) published on November 4, 1848, signed (in some versions) by Marx, we found a quote that is often shared as a reduced and decontextualized version in the domestic digital environment.
In the article, the author provided an overview of the situation in the field, with a special focus on Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg Monarchy (which also included parts of today’s Croatia), where revolutionary and counter-revolutionary events alternated from spring to autumn of that year, so much so that the emperor was also leaving the capital.
In the midst of the uprising launched by the democrats on October 6, 1848, with the support of students, workers and craftsmen (due to the decision of the Austrian Empire to use force against the Hungarians), the crown tried to restore its authority. A major role was played in this by the supreme commander of the Austrian army Alfred Windischgrätz and the Croatian ban Josip Jelacic, who finally, after fierce fighting, occupied the city at the end of October. However, at the moment when the author was writing the “latest news” from Vienna, he was only guessing what was happening there.
“It does not appear from the news so far that they have already established themselves in Vienna itself. The entire surrender of Vienna is reduced to some high-treason proclamations of the Vienna Municipal Council. On the thirtieth of October, the vanguard of the Hungarian army attacked Windischgrätz and was reportedly repulsed. On the thirty-first of October, Windischgrätz started bombing Vienna again — without success”, reveals the Serbian translation of the article. Soon follows a section in which the author speculates on what is happening to the suppressors of the revolution and in which “Croats” are mentioned:
“The leadership in the whole world of the famous commander-in-chief Jelacic, whose name is so great that ‘the moon hides in the clouds frightened by the brightness of his saber’, to whom at every opportunity ‘the thunder of the cannons indicates the direction’ in which he should turn to the heels of the wind, leaves no room for doubt that the Hungarians and the Viennese drive those pests straight into the Danube and let that insolent strain pass through the scumbags, beggars, starvingn, sick of life, a pack of brawlers and vagrants, Croatian scum, vile peasant servants that their country spews out and pushes into certain destruction, on the path of adventure. Later reports will bring horrible details about the shameful deeds of the Croats and other knights of the “legal order and constitutional freedom.””
Apart from the fact that the author of the text did not explicitly, and in exactly those words, write that “Croats should be thrown into the Danube” (but that “Hungarians and Viennese” are “pursuing” them there), the quote itself that mentions “Croats” is singled out within the journalistic text because it is written in verse. The graphic separation of those sentences and the differences in style compared to the rest of the text, although it may not be decisive in the entire story, led us to think that it is a matter of quoting or adapting a quote from another author.
Our suspicion was confirmed by Michael Heinrich, a political scientist who published several books about Marx and whose Introduction to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy was also translated into Croatian. He explained to us how in “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”, this article appeared without the name of an author. In older editions, it was supposed that Marx (as editor of the newspaper) was the author. In MEGA-2 (I/8, p.63 and p. 742 ff.) this article is ascribed to Marx and Ferdinand Freiligrath (a German poet). “Especially the poem should come from Freiligrath. It is a variation of Shakespeare (Richard III, Act 5, Scene 3) which Freiligrath used already in an earlier article. While Shakespeare was speaking about the people of Bretagne, here it is substituted by the Croats”.
Indeed, several lines from the mentioned Shakespeare play match the lines featured in the newspaper article which has Marx, at least as an editor. In the address of the English king Richard III to his army, words like “scum” and “vagrants” were used for the Bretons.
However, regardless of where the inspiration for the choice of words came from, Henrich notes that Marx nevertheless approved of them: “However, even when the lines are from Freiligrath, Marx accepted these lines”.
He adds that we can find “certain very questionable statements” in Marx’s text, but we cannot draw conclusions about Marx’s entire personality from these statements.
Who Are the “Croats” in Marx’s Works?
Marx was not exclusively concerned with “Croats” and did not comprehend them as a nation in today’s sense of the word. This, along with the original quote, is confirmed by several experts we spoke to. Most of them believe that it was a much narrower group, military troops that were used to suppress the revolution of 1848. Most of them also make a distinction between Marx and Engels when it comes to descriptions and rhetoric related to the Slavic peoples, although it changes with Engels after the revolutions of 1848/49.
Historian and city representative of the Independent Democratic Serbian Party (SDSS) in the Zagreb Assembly, Nikola Vukobratovic, told Faktograf that, unlike Engels, Marx never mentioned the Croats as an ethnic group or people: “He mentions the Croats exclusively when, as a journalist, he writes about events in Austria and Hungary in 1848. At the same time, Croats are always and exclusively military units from the Croatian military territory, that is, Banija, Lika and Kordun, and probably from Slavonia as well. Those ‘Croats’ are at least half actually ‘Serbs’. As military units, these border guards of ours remained notorious as cruel and poorly disciplined soldiers prone to robbery. And that’s how other sources mention them.”
In the eighth volume of Marx’s and Engels’ works, in which their articles were written between March and November 1848, as explained in a footnote, Croats are referred to as “soldiers of the Austrian imperial army whose light cavalry was originally recruited in Croatia”.
Kevin B. Anderson, an American sociologist, in his book “Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies” focused on Marx’s writings on societies that were mostly peripheral to capitalism. He explained: “I have never seen that specific quote from Marx but there are lots of pejoratives about South Slavs in his and Engels’s writings until the late 1850s, when they began to shift.”
Heinrich explained the context to us in a more vivid way. “Talking about “the Croats”, “the Russians”, “the French”, etc. Such a talk can mean the government, the ruling class etc. When you say “the US-Americans invaded Vietnam or Iraq” then this phrase is strictly speaking wrong. It was not all US-Americans who invaded and it was also not all US-Americans who supported these invasions. The phrase is an abbreviation for “the government of the USA ordered the army of the USA to invade.””
“When you say “the Mexicans are lazy” and “the US-Americans have a lot of entrepreneurial spirit,” then it is a racist phrase. Such racist phrases you can find in the articles of Engels 1848-49, with Marx it is not so clear: when he talks about Croats saving the reactionary Austrian emperor he means the troops, however he also can mean the Croatian people in general who didn’t support the revolution. Marx’s case is not so clear as Engels’s case, but we cannot say that Marx was completely free from racist ascriptions.”
Sven-Eric Liedman, author of the book “A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx” explains: “It is clear that Marx often expressed himself in a very temperamental way, taking stance in different controversies. Often he also changed his mind in matters that were not quite central to his central work. Certainly, he knew relatively little about Croatia in his youth.”
Why Did Marx and Engels Write Harshly About the Slavs in 1848?
“For Marx and Engels the European revolutions in 1848 were a very decisive period in their life. They waited for such an event for years and when it came they were deeply involved: practically, intellectually and also emotionally. They praised who supported the revolution (the majority of the Polish people for example) and they condemned who didn’t support (like the majority of the Croats) or who didn’t take action against counter-revolutionary governments (like the majority of the Russians). And here they had a tendency to simplify and to generalize, what includes the danger of racist arguments. However, after 1848/49 such racist stereotypes against Slaws played a decreasing role.”
It is a complex of revolutions that took place in 1848/49 and shook large parts of the European continent and ended the “age of revolutions”, that is, a series of civil revolutions started with the American uprising in 1776. The biggest hotspots were Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Prague, Budapest and Milan. The bearers were discontented people from different social strata who were threatened by the old feudal class system or modern capitalist development. That era was also intertwined with various forms of reactionary activities that liquidated the revolution in certain European countries because “large parts of the citizenry out of fear of political anarchy and social revolution, or, as for example in Austria, numerous peasants, after thefulfilmentt of their demands, turned away from the revolution and welcomed the reaction as the restoration of order or accepted it without resistance” (History of the World, Part III, 2005).
In the Habsburg Monarchy, revolutionary movements affected, in addition to the northern Italian provinces, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Transylvania, and Croatia, and in these territories, along with the demands for social changes and the liberalization of society, there were also the demands of individual nations, as in the example of Czechs, Hungarians, Croats, Serbs in Vojvodina and others. In September and October 1848, the rivalry between Hungarians and Croats turned into open war, and the Habsburg court skilfully used ban Jelacic in suppressing the Hungarian revolution.
During the revolutions of 1848/49. Marx and Engels described most Slavic peoples (with some exceptions) as “unhistorical”, counter-revolutionary and doomed to extinction by nature. It was a very sensitive topic later for communists and marxists, and anti-communist individuals profited from it. However, this type of argumentation, that Marx and Engels were chauvinists, will be characterized by many as ahistorical.
“In the texts of Marx and Engels you can find a lot of terms and formulations which are a no-go today. In the last 20 or 30 years, in western countries (a part of) leftists and many feminists, queer people, people of colour became very sensitive regarding language. Such a sensitivity was completely absent not only in the times of Marx but also until the 1970s or perhaps until the 1980s. Insofar I see a difference in the use of such formulations in Marx’s times and today. Today you can know, that such formulations are politically dangerous and also hurting for many persons. If you use them, you don’t care about. In Marx’s times such phrases were “normal” among the intellectuals, Marx shared them and this means that in this aspect he was as stubborn as all the others.”
We can draw several conclusions from all of the above. If we start from the most literal level, the quote circulating on social networks is not taken correctly from the original. The sentence “Croats should be drowned in the Danube and wiped off the face of the earth” was constructed from several keywords that appear in the original article of Marx’s newspaper.
No matter how much Croatian nationalists consider it a recognition that one of the most hated philosophers in their circles wrote negatively about Croats, Marx’s remarks about them do not occupy a significant part of his oeuvre, nor are they woven into the idea of Marxist philosophy. Likewise, the term “Croat” that Marx deals with does not have the same meaning as it has today and does not refer to all Croats. As Heinrich explained, “Marx’s awful attitude was caused by the (assumed) support of the counter-revolution of the majority of Croatian people (I don’t know, if really the majority supported counter-revolution, but this was the view of Marx and Engels). However, after 1848/49 this attitude didn’t play an important role for the political statements of Marx. These lines tell us that Marx was a human being with errors and exaggerations, but they don’t fit to form a judgement about the whole person Marx or the whole work of Marx.”
