Letters from Wuppertal

Engels’ first political commentary article. It was serialized in Telegraph für Deutschland, Nos. 49–52, 57 and 59, in March–April 1839.

In July 1838, Engels left his hometown in Wuppertal Barmen and went to work in Bremen. Under the influence of “Junges Deutschland” (Young Germany) thought, Engels experienced a profound ideological struggle. After that, he gradually overcome the religious influence on his family, school and society, and made great progress in politics and ideology. Engels, based on his own experience, described the social reality in which factory owners in his hometown cruelly oppress workers, while religious pietism acts as a defender and excuses them from guilt. Through observing and experiencing the social life in his hometown, the young Engels criticized the workshop system, exposed the dark social reality and the inhuman life of workers in the capitalist factory work, criticized the hypocrisy of religious pietism and the absurdity of the doctrine of religious preconception, and embodied the strong concern for social reality.

Letters from Wuppertal marked that Engels began to abandon his early beliefs, broke free from the chain of religion, a chain that imprisoned people’s intellectual development, and his revolutionary-democratic thought began to germinate.