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communism but it was quite naughty enough to worry Prussian officialdom – especially since the paper’s circulation and reputation were growing rapidly. ‘ Do not imagine that we on the Rhine live in a political Eldorado ,’ Marx wrote to Arnold Ruge, whose Deutsche Jahrbücher had taken a fearsome battering from the authorities in Dresden. ‘The most unswerving persistence is required to push through a newspaper like the Rheinische Zeitung .’ For most of 1842, the resident censor at the paper was Laurenz Dolleschall, a doltish police officer who had once banned an advertisement for Dante’s Divine Comedy on the grounds that ‘the divine is not a fit subject for comedy’. After receiving the proofs each evening he blue-pencilled any articles he didn’t understand (most of them), whereupon the editor would spend hours persuading him that it was all quite harmless – while the printers waited, long into the night. Marx liked to quote Dolleschall’s anguished wail whenever his superiors chided him for letting through some piece of devilry: ‘Now my living’s at stake!’ One can almost sympathise with the hapless jobsworth, since any censor unlucky enough to have to haggle with Karl Marx every working day might well conclude that a policeman’slot is not a happy one. A story told by the left-wing journalist Wilhelm Blos shows what Dolleschall had to endure:
    One evening the censor had been invited , with his wife and nubile daughter, to a grand ball given by the President of the Province. Before leaving he had to finish work on the censorship. But precisely on this evening the proofs did not arrive at the accustomed time. The censor waited and waited, because he could not neglect his official duties, and yet he had to put in an appearance at the President’s ball – quite apart from the openings this would give to his nubile daughter. It was near ten o’clock, the censor was extremely agitated and sent his wife and daughter on in front to the President’s house and dispatched his servant to the press to get the proofs. The servant returned with the information that the press was closed. The bewildered censor went in his carriage to Marx’s lodgings, which was quite a distance. It was almost eleven o’clock.
    After much bell-ringing, Marx stuck his head out of a third-storey window.
    ‘The proofs!’ bellowed up the censor.
    ‘Aren’t any!’ Marx yelled down.
    ‘But—’
    ‘We’re not publishing tomorrow!’
    Thereupon Marx slammed the window shut. The anger of the censor, thus fooled, made his words stick in his throat. He was more courteous from then on.
    His employers, however, were not. The provincial governor who hosted the ball, Oberpräsident von Schaper, complained in November that the tone of the paper was ‘becoming more and more impudent’ and demanded the dismissal of Rutenberg (whom he wrongly assumed to be the culprit) from the editorial board. Since Rutenberg was a pie-eyed liability anyway, this was no great sacrifice. Marx composed a grovelling letter assuring His Excellency that the Rheinische Zeitung wished only to echo ‘thebenedictions which at the present time the whole of Germany conveys to His Majesty the King in his ascendant career’. As Franz Mehring commented many years later, the letter displayed ‘a diplomatic caution of which the life of its author offers no other example’.
    It failed to mollify Herr Oberpräsident. In mid-December he recommended to the censorship ministers in Berlin that they should prosecute the newspaper – and the anonymous author of the article on wood-gathering – for ‘impudent and disrespectful criticism of the existing government institutions’. On 21 January 1843 a mounted messenger arrived from Berlin bearing a ministerial edict revoking the Rheinische Zeitung’s licence to publish, with effect from the end of March. Loyal readers throughout the Rhineland – from Cologne, Düsseldorf, Aachen and Marx’s home town of Trier –