The End of East European Communism and Its Impact on the Preparation of Volume I/5 of MEGA2

Abstract

After most of the mysteries concerning the history of the origins of what has become known as The German Ideology had been solved between the mid-1960s and 1980, a much quieter decade followed. Golowina’s exciting discoveries, made by using some of the newly published MEGA2 volumes, were reflected in other editions of works by Marx and Engels. Volume 38 of the English-language Marx-Engels-Collected Works, published by Lawrence & Wishart, London, in 1982, is a prominent example. Footnote 57 provides the reader with a short account of Golowina’s hypotheses, and by doing so illuminates the historical background of a letter of 1846 from Marx to Weydemeyer (see Marx, 1982: 41–4; Sazonov and Golman, 1982: 575–6).