I wrote last week of Adolf Cluss and how he had been friends with Marx and Engels before and during the revolution of 1848. Most likely he had become exposed to these new ideas during the gymnastics and singing festivals that were popular at the time – not only for the gymnastics and singing, but spreading what was then subversive ideas.
Cluss had been an early leader in this pan-European movement, in March 1848, he signed a leaflet that was distributed in not only his own city of Mainz, but across the region. Doing so made him very much a public figure, which would certainly have repercussions later and cause him to leave Gemany, along with Marx and Engels. This friendship did not falter just because Cluss moved across the ocean from the pair, but instead continued in the form of letters.
Fortunately, many of these letters were saved, and published in the Marx Engels Complete Works in 1981. They show an active correspondence for about five years after Cluss left Germany, with Marx propounding various theories to his friend. Cluss also wrote not only to Engels, but also to Jenny Marx, although the text of these letters is not online due, ironically enough, to copyright claims by the publisher of the Marx – Engels papers.
It is here, however, that my personal connection comes in, as my great-great-grandmother Eleonore Madelung née Perthes, was Jenny Marx’s second cousin; they had a mutual great-grandfather. There was certainly some communication between the two families, a letter from Jenny Marx’s mother, Amalia von Westphalen to Eleonore Madelung’s father Friedrich Perthes exist. That’s Eleonore Madelung later in life in the top left hand.
A 1984 article in the New York Times quotes from one of Jenny Marx’s letters to Cluss, however, stating that her “husband says again and again that, if we only had more guys like Cluss, then we could really get something done.” At the time, Cluss wrote weekly to Marx.
Over the years, however, correspondence lagged and the friendship between the revolutionaries frayed. By 1857, Engels complained about the “peculiar silence of Cluss.” What caused this rift is something experts have not come to a satisfactory conclusion on, though Cluss’s integration into D.C. society may well have played a role.
Nonetheless, when Cluss traveled to Europe to receive his father’s inheritance in the late 1850s, he traveled to London and met with Marx. Jenny Marx wrote about this encounter, and while in some ways the visit was to sever the ties entirely, it was clear to her that Cluss was a man with divided loyalties, and that the break did not come easily to him.
There is no doubt, however, that Cluss did not spend much time extolling his previous political work to his new friends in the Washington D.C. government, and this part of his biography was generally ignored and forgotten. It would take an article in the East German newspaper Neues Deutschland, the official organ of the Socialist Unity Party, as that country’s communist party was known, in 1983 to change that. Over an entire page, they related the history of the architect and his connection to the founders of communism. Since then, most sources include this interesting aspect of Cluss’s history in any biographical rendering of the man.
And you can see it yourself by looking at the solid, proletarian and, above all, red, bricks that make up Eastern Market.