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German newspaper

The Rheinische Zeitung ("Rhenish Newspaper") was a 19th century German newspaper, edited most famously by Karl Marx. The paper was launched in January 1842 and terminated by Prussian state censorship in March 1843. The paper was eventually succeeded by a daily newspaper launched by Karl Marx on behalf of the Communist League in June 1848, called the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ("New Rhenish Newspaper").

The city of Cologne (Köln) has long been the most important urban center of the region of Germany known as Rhineland. During the decade of the 1830s a newspaper called the Kölnische Zeitung ("Cologne Newspaper") emerged as the voice of the Catholic political opposition based in that city. The protestant Prussian government, based in Berlin, considered this newspaper and its 8,000 subscribers a thorn in its side, and looked favorably upon attempts by others to establish new newspapers to undercut the Kölnische Zeitung's dominant position. A series of papers had been launched in Cologne, each failing, with the powerful Kölnische Zeitung generally buying out its fledgling competitors. One of this series of hapless rivals was a newspaper launched in Cologne in December 1839 called the Rheinische Allgemeine Zeitung ("Rhenish General Newspaper"). At the eleventh hour a group of prominent Cologne citizens decided to raise fresh working capital and to attempt to reestablish the paper on a new basis. The paper originally expressed a pro government stance, but its political line soon shifted to better accord with popular sentiment among Rhinelanders, many of whom regarded the Prussian government in Berlin as an oppressive alien entity. These articles would be the first of Marx's writings (beside his doctoral dissertation) to be published for the public. Previously fixated upon questions of abstract philosophy, Marx was first introduced to practical journalism in the course of writing for the Rheinische Zeitung. It was during this period, too, that Marx first came into contact Moses Hess and with French socialist ideas. In long articles Marx was additionally critical of the Diet's failings to advance the cause of freedom of the press, as well as its refusal to publish its own proceedings. Far from revolutionary at this juncture, Marx retained a faith that public debate in a free press would be sufficient to ameliorate the various evils facing society regardless of the Diet's weakness. This seemed a reasonable assessment, as by the middle of August 1842 the paper's subscriber list had dwindled to just 885. Frederick Engels, who first established close personal relations with Karl Marx in 1844, later affirmed that it was Marx's journalism at the Rheinische Zeitung which led him "from pure politics to economic relationships and so to socialism."

With the paper's fortunes on the rise, the Rheinische Zeitung continued to draw the government's ire, with the publication in January 1843 of a series of articles documenting the government's refusal to take seriously the complaints of the local peasantry. A defiant tone of some published correspondence and growing sentiment for democracy among the populus further alienated the authorities. Subscriptions had risen to more than 3,000—very few German papers of the day were larger and none more widely quoted. Moreover, thousands of citizens signed petitions calling for the publication's continuation.

In the view of historian David Fernbach, the suppression of the paper in March 1843 by the Prussian government shattered Marx's belief that the country could traverse the road from monarchy to constitutional democracy without revolutionary struggle. Marx would spend the next five years in France, Belgium, and England, waiting for a suitable moment to make a return to his native Rhineland. Marx would return to Cologne during the first half of April 1848, amidst the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states and immediately began to make preparations to establish a new—and more radical—newspaper. This publication, launched on June 1, would be known as the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ("New Rhenish News").