What is real democracy? Answered by an exposition of the Constitution of the United States
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Karl Peter Heinzen was a German-born American revolutionist, journalist, and writer. He was one of the German Forty-Eighters.
Background
Karl Heinzen was born on February 22, 1809 in Grevenbroich, in the Düsseldorf district of Rhenish Prussia (today Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany), the son of Joseph and Marie Elisabeth (Schmitz) Heinzen. His father during the French Revolution was one of the most ardent of Rhenish republicans, but turned conservative when he accepted the post of Prussian forest inspector in 1815. The early death of his mother deprived the boy of her sympathy and love, and the restraint put upon him at home and at school served to foster a ruling passion for opposing all arbitrary authority.
Education
After completing his studies in the Gymnasium of Cleve, Karl Heinzen began the study of medicine at Bonn in 1827, but on account of a revolutionary speech was dismissed from the university.
Career
Wishing to see the world, Karl Heinzen entered the Dutch military service, which brought him the rank of a subaltern officer and a trip to the East Indies in 1829.
Some years after he published a graphic picture of his eighteen months’ sojourn there, in a work entitled Reise nach Batavia (1841). After he had returned home in 1833, though he had suffered mental tortures under the monotony of a soldier’s life, he performed the required year of Prussian military service.
Heinzen's deep attachment for the accomplished and beautiful Luise Schiller during this period was a turning point in his early life. She was the daughter of the lawyer Moras in Cleve, and widow of the cavalry captain, Richard Schiller. She inspired the most beautiful of Heinzen’s poems, those lamenting her early death. The care and education of her four children Heinzen, then twenty-six years of age, took upon himself, sacrificing eight years of his life in most distasteful and ill paid clerical service under a bureaucratic government, a life especially galling to a man of his independent spirit.
His positions in the Prussian civil service were first, that of a tax-collector, later clerk in the Rhenish railway system at Köln. He then accepted a better paid position with the Aachen Fire Insurance Company, the duties of which also left him some leisure for writing. A volume of poems, Gedichte (1841), was favorably reviewed by the leading critics Menzel and Kurz, who saw in his work virility, genuine emotion, and unconventionality.
It was in satire, however, that Heinzen early found his proper sphere. Die Ehre (1842), and Die geheime Konduitenliste (1842) sharply criticized Prussian civil government, and he became even bolder in his contributions to the radical journals Leipsige Allgemeine Zeitung and Rheinische Zeitung, which were both forbidden in Prussia. This interdict angered Heinzen into writing his severe arraignment of Prussian bureaucracy, Die prussische Büreaukratie (1844), which was widely circulated in spite of the order of confiscation. Criminal proceedings were instituted against the author, who, however, escaped to Belgium and in 1846 went to Switzerland, whence he sent his broadsides of revolutionary propaganda into German territory aided secretly and skilfully by liberal friends Noteworthy among his bitter satires were Steckbrief (1845), Mehr als zwanzig Bogtn (1845), Politische und unpolitische Fahrten Abenteuer (1846), Macht euch bereit (1845). The pens of Heine and of Börne in the preceding decade were not more caustic and effective.
The radical of radicals was banished successively from Ziirich, Baselland, Bern, and Geneva, and in January 1848 Heinzen came to the United States. In New York, in conjunction with Ivan Tyssowski, the Krakau revolutionist, he edited Die deutsche Schnellpost, founded by Eichthal. When the Paris revolution broke out in February 1848, Heinzen hastened back and took active part in the second Baden revolution, but antagonized most of the other leaders. After the collapse he was not tolerated in France or Switzerland, but was transported with his family to London.
When all hope of a third revolution had to be abandoned, Heinzen set sail for America, arriving in New York in 1850. There he founded the radical paper Der Völkerbund, only one number of which appeared. After its financial failure he again edited Die deutsche Schnellpost, subsequently the New Yorker Deutsche Zeitung, and finally the Janus, all of which failed in quick succession. Finding a new great cause in the abolition of slavery, which he wished to agitate in a slave state, he removed to Louisville, Kentucky, and become editor of the Herold des Westens. His establishment was burned, but German friends gave him a new start with a paper called the Pionier, founded in 1854, removed to Cincinnati, then to New York, and finally in 1859 to Boston. Extremely radical, always advocating unpopular causes, it yielded at best a hand-to-mouth existence, but the editor never considered his material welfare, and his able wife for long periods reduced publication expenses to a minimum by serving as type-setter and business manager. The Pionier appeared until December 1879, a year before Heinzen's death.
Heinzen's masterful German style with its clear flow, caustic wit, and brilliant sallies could not easily be transferred into another language. An edition of his collected works was to comprise twelve volumes, but only five appeared.
Achievements
Karl Heinzen is best remembered as editor of the German radical newspaper Pionier. Into this weekly journal he poured his intellectual powers and his soul for more than twenty years. Heinzen stood almost alone in the German-language press in his advocacy of women's rights and defending of the legality of the Grant administration's sale of surplus arms to France during the Franco-Prussian War.
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Religion
Heinzen thought a truly democratic Republic must not be based alone on equal political but also on equal social rights. It was sacredness of property based on individual work he considered a necessity for personal independence. Heinzen's philosophy was materialistic, his religion ethical, non-Christian, antiinstitutional. He was opposed to all strongly centralized government, but had nothing constructive to offer in its place.
Personality
A born satirist, Karl Heinzen spared neither friend nor foe; opposition he could not tolerate; the value of tact and cooperation he never learned. A courageous seeker after truth, he could not compromise with truth as others saw it. The most intellectual of all the German revolutionists, he never mastered the English language and his works with very few exceptions became known for only a limited few.
Connections
In 1840, Karl Heizen was married to Henriette Schiller. They had one son, Karl Frederick (born in 1844).
