MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Remembering Georg Weerth: Comrade in arms and friend of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Georg Weerth and his gravestone in Havana, the inscription reads: “in memory of Georg Weerth who died in Havana on July 30 1856 aged 34. He was the first great poet representative og the German proletariat, comrade in arms and friend of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.”
[(L to R) Wikipedia and InZweiZeiten/Creative Commons] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
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.
More from this author
On the centenary of the birth of the anti-colonial thinker and activist Frantz Fanon, JENNY FARRELL assesses his enduring influence
JENNY FARRELL relishes a modern parable that challenges readers to confront the legacies of empire, and the possibilities of resistance
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
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
