ABSTRACT
Art thou ambitious? What would my 'golden child' say, if I led her in triumph to Berlin in a car drawn by six white horses, as the greatest lady in the land ?1
The man who wrote these words, in a letter to his fiancee, is acknowledged by historians as an important predecessor of Karl Marx. He was a German, Ferdinand Lassalle, the revolutionary leader of the Social Democrats, whom the proletariat worshipped as their messiah. Yet the passage quoted above echoes Tamburlaine, not Marx, and the letter's recipient, the 'golden child', was a representative of the upper-class world which Lassalle was committed to destroying. Through HeU:ne von Donniges, that frivolous world attracted and ruined its greatest opponent. Even his death, at the hands of her official fiance, Prince Yanko von Racowitza, was fraught with ironic contradictions. Lassalle, an outspoken opponent of the barbarous practice of duelling, fell in a duel which he had provoked, bringing his story to a conclusion both tragic and comic.
