The first attempt to create such an "organisation"took place as early as the Spring of 1850. A magniloquent "draft circular to German democrats" was hawked around London in manuscript form together with a "Covering Letter to the Leaders". It contained an exhortation to found a united democratic church. Its immediate aim was to form a Central Office to deal with the affairs of German émigrés , to set up a central administration for refugee problems, to start a printing press in London, and to unite all patriots against the common enemy. The Emigration would then become the centre of the internal revolutionary movement, the organisation of the Emigration would be the beginning of a comprehensive democratic organisation, the outstanding personalities among the members of the Central Office would be paid salaries raised by taxes levied on the German people. This tax proposal seemed all the more appropriate as "the German Emigration had gone abroad not merely without a respectable hero but what is even worse, without common assets". It is no secret that the Hungarian, Polish and French committees already in existence provided the model for this "organisation" and the whole document is redolent of envy of the privileged position of these prominent allies.
The circular was the joint production of Messrs. Rudolph Schramm and Gustav Struve , behind whom lay concealed the merry figure of Mr. Arnold Ruge , a corresponding member living in Ostend at the time.
Mr. Rudolph Schramm -- a rowdy, loudmouthed and extremely confused little mannikin whose life-motto came from Rameau's Nephew: "I would rather be an impudent windbag than be nothing at all."When at the height of his power, Mr. Camphausen [30] would gladly have given the young forward Crefelder an important post, had it been permissible to elevate a junior official. Thanks to bureaucratic etiquette Mr. Schrarnm found only the career of a democrat open to him.
And in this profession he really did advance at one point to the post of President of the Democratic Club in Berlin and with the support of some left-wing Members of Parliament he became the Deputy for Striegau in the Berlin National Assembly. Here the normally so loquacious Schramm distinguished himself by his obstinate silence, which was accompanied, however, by an uninterrupted series of grunts. After the Assembly had been dissolved [31] our democratic man of the people wrote a pamphlet in support of a constitutional monarchy but this did not suffice to get him re-elected. Later, at the time of the Brentano government he appeared momentarily in Baden and there in the "Club for Resolute Progress" he became acquainted with Struve. On his arrival in London he declared his intention of withdrawing from all political activity for which reason he then published the circular referred to above. Essentially a bureaucrat Mr. Schramm imagined that his family relations qualified him to represent the radical bourgeoisie in exile and he did indeed present a fair caricature of the radical bourgeois.
Gustav Struve is one of the more important figures of the emigration. At the very first glimpse of his leathery appearance, his protuberant eyes with their sly, stupid expression, the matt gleam on his bald pate and his half Slav, half Kalmuck features one cannot doubt that one is in the presence of an unusual man. And this first impression is confirmed by his low, guttural voice, his oily manner of speaking and the air of solemn gravity he imparts to his gestures. To be just it must be said that faced with the greatly increased difficulties of distinguishing oneself these days, our Gustav at least made the effort to attract attention by using his diverse talents -- he is part prophet, part speculator, part bunion healer -- centring his activities on all kinds of peripheral matters and making propaganda for the strangest assortment of causes. For example, he was born a Russian but suddenly took it into his head to enthuse about the cause of German freedom after he had been employed in a minor capacity in the Russian embassy to the Federal Diet and had written a little pamphlet in defence of the Diet. Regarding his own skull as normal he suddenly developed an interest in phrenology and from then on he refused to trust anyone whose skull he had not yet felt and examined. He also gave up eating meat and preached the gospel of strict vegetarianism; he was, moreover, a weather-prophet, he inveighed against tobacco and was prominent in the interest of German Catholicism and water-cures. In harmony with his thoroughgoing hatred of scientific knowledge it was natural that he should be in favour of free universities in which the four faculties would be replaced by the study of phrenology, physiognomy, chiromancy and necromancy. It was also quite in character for him to insist that he must become a great writer simply because his mode of writing was the antithesis of everything that could be held to be stylistically acceptable.
In the early Forties Gustav had already invented the Deutscher Zuschauer , a little paper that he published in Mannheim, that he patented and that pursued him everywhere as an idée fixe. He also made the discovery at around this time that Rotteck's History of the World and the Rotteck-Welcker Lexicon of Politics , the two works that had been his Old and New Testaments, were out of date and in need of a new democratic edition. This revision Gustav undertook without delay and published an extract from it in advance under the title The Basic Elements of Political Science. He argued that the revision had become "an undeniable necessity since 1848 as the late-lamented Rotteck had not experienced the events of recent years".
