January Meme: The Silesian Weavers

watervole challenged me to write about a textiles/fabric-related topic, and I don't mind admitting I had a hard time coming up with something which is a bit more interesting to read than "back when I visited Mongolia, I was delighted to discover you could buy non-expensive Cashmere clothing there. However, then it was literature, or rather, Heinrich Heine to the rescue. His poem "Die Schlesischen Weber" - The Silesian Weavers is one of the most devastating imaginable about poverty, industrial exploitation, the failure of both state and religious authorities along with comfortable society to care - not for nothing was it published first in Vorwärts, the journal then edited by Karl Marx - using the imagery of weaving and fabrics (with the creation of the weavers becoming the country's funeral shroud). Here is an English translation - with the German original given as well -, but alas it has a bewildering historical intro note which just isn't true, for it says: This poem was inspired by a protest against the working conditions of weavers in Silesia, a province of Prussia in Northeast Germany. Riots occurred in 1844, demanding better conditions.

As a result of this poem, and the riots resulting in revolution, the king of Prussia was forced to allow his people a constitution.

Yeah, no, not so much. The riots - the "Weaver's Uprising", wherein several thousand weavers smashed the newly introduced machines which had driven down their wages - were in 1844, and they were brutally repressed by the Prussian government. The alas doomed to failure revolution in the German states, including Prussia, was in 1848. (More about the 1848 revolution and Prussian part of it here and here.) While Friedrich Wilhelm IV., the current King of Prussia, certainly early on made constitutional promises, the whole thing ended with him squarely rejecting the constitution the democratically elected assemblies created and imposing a monarchist constitution instead. He also rejected the proposal to become Emperor of a unified Germany, saying he did not want "a crown from the gutter". (Instead, his brother Wilhelm more than two decades later became Emperor in a Bismarck-invented, military created German Empire, which btw had an anniversary last week.) For the weavers - and the other workers - , nothing changed in 1848. (Except for the remnants of serfdom being finally officially abolished, but in effect they had been since Napoleon had reorganized the German states.) A great many of the middle class participants in the revolution(s) had to go into exile, while the weavers couldn't even afford as much and either got shot or got back to being exploited. Heine, who'd already been in exile, remained there. But while people got arrested for reciting the poem The Silesian Weavers, the poem remained and remains. (To this day; it even inspires heavy metal albums.) Here's a decidedly not heavy metal musical version of the poem, sung by Katja Epstein in the 1980s:

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