On January 22nd, 1833, a frosty Tuesday, when ox and horse-drawn carts and even stately carriages got stuck in snowdrifts in the Kingdom of Bavaria and the steaming draft animals were probably taken out of their dishes under curses, the Munich Politische Zeitung read: "Truly, wherever there is a gallows on German soil, you will not find a more worthy subject to hang on it than this Mr. Baruch modo Börne."
This demand, put forward in the tone of a sermon, was to be cited as an example of the ruthlessness of the contemporary feature pages in the next and the following century when the essayist and revolutionary Juda Löw Baruch was mentioned, who was probably the only concession to a hostile world with his birth name and took the author's name "Carl Ludwig Börne". This is not out of fear, but to prevent a book tainted with a Jewish name from being opened by an anti-Semitic readership in the first place.
“Some accuse me of being a Jew,” Börne was later to write under his new name, which ultimately turned out to be the name of a warrior of the spirit: “Some accuse me of being a Jew;
the others forgive me;
the third even praises me for it;
but everyone thinks of it. ”On the gallows with him.
In Börne's Europe arrest, prison, flogging and the scaffold were not empty threats even for a man of the word.
Where even talking and writing about trees could turn into a crime, those who took up their pens and did not want to leave it with declarations of consent with what was already there had to be not only eloquent and stylish, but above all - courageous.
Still recommended for further use
Borne, once recommended to the executioner by criticism, then recommended to prison and vainly sworn by his own father, to be reconciled with his presence and its rules in favor of a bourgeois, safe life for heaven's sake, only mocked every attempt at appeasement: “In Berlin my book has been confiscated by the police. As if the rain stopped when some go under umbrellas. "
State-loyal censors and their informers, his enemies among the columnists and bureaucrats who are subservient to the authorities, regardless of the consequences, with virtuously formulated arguments, in the more crude case and in dramatic contrast to the current rule, even the most vicious and stupid criticism of a book was noble to pass over in silence, but also with a litany of curses and names. Börne's curses would still be recommended for further practical use - for example in dealing with corporate bosses who evade taxes, bankers choking on their bonuses or representatives of the people who have disappeared in the supervisory board and management floors and especially in dealing with moderately educated friends in the limelight,who throw beatings and rotten vegetables from the armchairs of the TV room or the safe cover of the feature pages into the world of art and science, beyond all boundaries of decency.