Skip to main content
Remembering Georg Weerth: Comrade in arms and friend of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
GW

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.

Liberation webinar, 30 November2024, 6pm (UK)
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
CDF
Opinion / 3 September 2024
3 September 2024
As Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th anniversary is celebrated in Berlin and New York, JENNY FARRELL urges viewers of the German Romantic painter to understand its true historical context, and beware its co-option by the far-right
Friedrich
Opinion / 19 August 2024
19 August 2024
As Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th anniversary is celebrated in Berlin and New York, JENNY FARRELL urges viewers of the German Romantic painter to understand its true historical context, and beware his co-option by the far right
Baldwin
Opinion / 30 July 2024
30 July 2024
JENNY FARRELL traces the critical role that the CPUSA played in the education of Harlem’s greatest man of letters
books
Book Review / 29 May 2023
29 May 2023
JENNY FARRELL introduces an extraordinary book that maintains the cultural practise of the GDR by writing about ordinary working lives