TOMORROW is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Georg Weerth, a German poet, writer and close collaborator of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Weerth met Engels in Manchester and became closely allied with Marx and the Chartist leaders. While in England he came to understand the misery of the working class as the flip side of enormous technical progress, and also that this class was destined to eventually overthrow capitalism.

In Weerth’s short story, The Flower Festival of English Workers, for the first time in German literature a new image of humanity emerges directly from the experience of the fighting proletariat — workers as class-conscious, fighting people with a developed aesthetic sense.

The story ends: “This is proof that workers, in addition to their political development, have preserved in their hearts a treasure of warm love for nature, a love which is the source of all poetry and which will one day enable them to propel a fresh literature, a new, mighty art into the world.”

Weerth captures the inherent power of the proletariat as an industrial, militant, as well as an aesthetic capacity, a power of the future.

In his poem Industry he alludes to the duality of capitalist industry which produces the weapons for workers’ liberation: “And they who forged the sword and chains,/Will use the sword to smash the chains!”

In They Sat on the Benches Weerth speaks of the reaction of English workers to the story of the Silesian weavers’ uprising of 1844: “From York and Lancashire / Their song was rough and throaty,/ They sat until late night / They listened to the tale / ‘Of Silesian weavers fight’.”

In February 1848, Weerth went to Cologne and worked for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, edited by Marx. The feuilleton genre became a tool for Weerth in the political struggle.

“After the revolution of March 1848, we all met up in Cologne to found the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Weerth took on the feuilleton [section],” wrote Engels in 1883 about his friend.

Weerth’s most famous political satire The Life and Deeds of the Famous Knight Schnapphahnski targets the Prussian squirearchy (Junkerism) and its counter-revolutionary machinations, based on one Lichnowski. Engels tells of his fate: “On September 18 1848 Schnapphahnski-Lichnowski rode out with the Prussian General von Auerswald (also a member of the assembly) to spy on peasant detachments on their way to join the fighters on the Frankfurt barricades. Both he and Auerswald were, deservedly, put to death by the peasants as spies.”

The Schnapphahnski novel ends: “We would perhaps still be laughing about it if the bullet-torn corpses of the proletarians of Paris, Vienna and Berlin did not grin at us.”

After the counter-revolution, Weerth resigned, and returned to commerce. He travelled to Cuba on business and while there wrote to Heinrich Heine, with extraordinary foresight, that Cuba “would be the field where the great conflicts of the new world would be fought out first.”

He died of yellow fever in Havana where he was buried. A gravestone inscription reads: “In memory of Georg Weerth who died in Havana on July 30 1856 aged 34. He was the first great poet representative of the German proletariat, comrade in arms and friend of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.”

So far, only one translation of Weerth’s work exists in English, the 1971 GDR Seven Seas publication: A Young Revolutionary in Nineteenth Century England, Selected Writings of Georg Weerth.