Johannes Ronge or Johannes Kurzweg as he likes to be known in his intimate circle, is certainly not the author of the Book of Revelations. There is nothing mysterious about him, he is banal, hackneyed, as insipid as water, luke-warm dish-water. As is well known Johannes became famous when he refused to permit the Holy Mantle [55] in Trier to intercede for him -- though it is wholly unimportant who intercedes for Johannes. When Johannes first made his appearance the elderly Paulus [56] expressed his regrets that Hegel was dead as he would no longer be able to regard him as shallow were he alive and he added that the late lamented Krug was lucky to be dead as he thereby escaped the danger of acquiring a reputation for profundity. Johannes is one of those phenomena often met with in history who only begin to understand a movement centuries after its rise and fall and who then like children reproduce the content of the movement as if it had just been discovered, regurgitating it in the most feeble, colourless and philistinic manner imaginable. Such craftsmanship does not last very long and soon our Johannes found himself in a daily deteriorating situation in Germany. His watered-down version of the Enlightenment went out of fashion and Johannes made a pilgrimage to England where we see him reappear, without any notable success, as the rival of Padre Gavazzi. [57] The ungainly, sallow, tedious village parson naturally paled by the side of the fiery, histrionic Italian monk and the English bet heavily that this arid Johannes could not be the man who had set the deep-thinking German nation in motion.
But he was consoled by Arnold Ruge who found that the German-Catholicism of our Johannes was remarkably similar to his own brand of atheism.
Ludwig von Hauck had been a captain of engineers in the Imperial Austrian army, then co-editor of the Constitution in Vienna, later still leader of a battalion in the Viennese National Guard, where he defended the Burgtor against the Imperial army on October 30 with great courage, abandoning his post only after all was lost. He escaped to Hungary, joined up with Bem's army in Siebenburgen where in consequence of his velour he advanced to the rank of colonel in the general staff. After Görgy surrendered at Vilagos Ludwig Hauck was taken prisoner and died like a hero on one of the many gallows that the Austrians erected in Hungary to avenge their repeated defeats and to express their fury at the protection Russia had extended and which they so bitterly resented. In London Haug was long thought to be the incarcerated Hauck, an officer, who had so distinguished himself in the Hungarian campaign. However, it now seems to be established that he is not the late Hauck. Just as he was unable to prevent Mazzini from improvising him into a general after the fall of Rome, so too he could do nothing to stop Arnold Ruge from transforming him into the representative of the Viennese revolution and a member of the strong provisional government.
Later he gave aesthetic lectures about the economic foundations of the cosmogony of universal history from a geological standpoint and with musical accompaniment. Among the émigrés this melancholic man is known as "the poor wretch", or as the French say, "la bonne bête".
Arnold could not believe his good fortune. He had a manifesto, a strong provisional government, a loan of ten million francs and even a homunculus to produce a weekly magazine with the modest title Kosmos , edited by General Haug.
The manifesto came and went unread. The Kosmos died of malnutrition in the third number, the money failed to roll in, the provisional government dissolved into its components once more.
At first, the Kosmos contained advertisements for Kinkel's lectures, for the worthy Willich's appeals for money for the Schleswig-Holstein refugees and for Göhringer's saloon. It contained further a lampoon by Arnold. The old joker invented a certain hospitable friend called Müller in Germany whose guest, Schulze, he pretended to be. Müller expresses astonishment at what he reads in the papers about English hospitality;he fears that all this "sybaritisrn" may distract Schulze from his "affairs of state" -- but he does not grudge him this as when Schulze returns to Germany he will be so overwhelmed by state affairs that he will have to deny himself the pleasures of Müller's hospitality. Finally, Müller exclaims: "Surely it was not the traitor Radowitz, but Mazzini, Ledru-Rollin, Citizen Willich, Kinkel and yourself" (Arnold Ruge) "who were invited to Windsor Castle?"If after all this the Kosmos folded up after the third issue the failure could not be put down to lack of publicity, for at every possible English meeting the speakers would find it pressed into their hands with the urgent request to recommend it as they would find their own principles specially represented in it.
Scarcely had the subscriptions for the ten-million-Franc loan been opened than the rumour went around that a list of contributors to a fund to dispatch Struve (and Amalia) to America, was circulating in the City.
"When the Committee resolved to publish a German weekly with Haug as editor, Struve protested as he wanted the post of editor for himself and wished the journal to bear the title Deutscher Zuschauer. Having protested he resolved to go to America."Thus far the report in the Deutsche Schnellpost of New York. It remains silent about the fact (and Heinzen had his reasons for this) that as Gustav was a collaborator on the Duke of Brunswick's Deutscher Londoner Zeitung Mazzini had struck his name off the list of the German Committee.
