Karl Marx

Little is known about Karl Marx’s early boyhood, apart from his habit of forcing his sisters to eat mud pies. He appears to have been educated privately until 1830, when he entered the Trier High School – whose headmaster, Hugo Wyttenbach, was a friend of Heinrich Marx and a founder of the Casino Club. Although Karl later dismissed his schoolfellows as ‘country bumpkins’, the teachers were mostly liberal humanists who did their best to civilise the yokels. In 1832, after a rally at Hambach in support of free speech, police officers raided the school and found seditious literature – including speeches from the Hambach protest – circulating among the pupils. One boy was arrested, and Wyttenbach was placed under close surveillance. Two years later, the maths and Hebrew teachers were charged with the despicable crimes of ‘atheism’ and ‘materialism’ following the notorious Casino dinner of January 1834. To dilute Wyttenbach’s influence, the authorities appointed a grim-faced reactionary named Loers as co-headmaster.

‘I found the position of good Herr Wyttenbach extremely painful,’ Heinrich told his son after attending Loers’s installation ceremony. ‘I could have wept at the offence to this man, whose only failing is to be much too kind-hearted. I did my best to show the high regard I have for him and, among other things, I told him how devoted you are to him …’ But when Marx proved his devotion by refusing to speak to the conservative interloper, he earned a paternal scolding. ‘Herr Loers has taken it ill that you did not pay him a farewell visit,’ Heinrich wrote after Karl’s matriculation in 1835. ‘You and Clemens [another boy] were the only ones … I had to have recourse to a white lie and tell him we were there while he was away.’ Here is the authentic voice of Heinrich Marx, angry but timid, unhappy but obedient, forever letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’, like the cat in the adage.

His son, by contrast, always preferred to imitate the action of a tiger. ‘Social reforms,’ Karl Marx wrote, when warning the working class not to expect any philanthropy from capitalism, ‘are never carried out by the weakness of the strong; but always by the strength of the weak.’ One could argue that he embodied this principle. Though his intellectual power seldom faltered, the body which sustained this tremendous creative fecundity was a very feeble vessel indeed. It was almost as if he decided to test on himself what he advocated for the proletariat, by defying his physical limitations and seeking out the strength of his own weakness.

Even in the full vigour of youth – before poverty, sleeplessness, bad diet, heavy drinking and constant smoking had taken their inevitable toll – he was a fragile specimen. ‘Nine lecture courses seem to me rather a lot and I would not like you to do more than your body and mind can bear,’ Heinrich Marx advised, soon after his seventeen-year-old son started at Bonn University in 1835. ‘In providing really vigorous and healthy nourishment for your mind, do not forget that in this miserable world it is always accompanied by the body, which determines the well-being of the whole machine. A sickly scholar is the most unfortunate being on earth. Therefore, do not study more than your health can bear.’ Karl took no notice, then or ever: in later years he often toiled through the night, fuelled by cheap ale and foul cigars.

With his usual rash candour, the lad replied that he was indeed in poor health – thus provoking another earnest sermon from his Polonius of a father. ‘Youthful sins in any enjoyment that is immoderate or even harmful in itself meet with frightful punishment. We have a sad example here in Herr Günster. True, in his case there is no question of vice, but smoking and drinking have worked havoc with his already weak chest and he will hardly live until the summer.’ His mother, fretful as ever, added her own list of commandments: ‘You must avoid everything that could make things worse, you must not get over-heated, not drink a lot of wine or coffee, and not eat anything pungent, a lot of pepper or other spices. You must not smoke any tobacco, not stay up too long in the evening, and rise early. Be careful also not to catch cold and, dear Carl, do not dance until you are quite well again.’ Frau Marx, one can safely say, was no skylark.

Shortly after his eighteenth birthday Marx was excused military service because of his weak chest, though he may well have exaggerated his condition. (The suspicion of lead-swinging is strengthened by a letter from his father advising him on how to dodge the draft: ‘Dear Karl, If you can, arrange to be given good certificates by competent and well-known physicians there, you can do it with a good conscience … But to be consistent with your conscience, do not smoke too much.’) The supposed disability certainly didn’t harm his enjoyment of student high jinks. An official ‘Certificate of Release’ issued after Marx’s year at Bonn University, while praising his academic achievements (‘excellent diligence and attention’), noted that ‘he has incurred a punishment of one day’s detention for disturbing the peace by rowdiness and drunkenness at night … Subsequently, he was accused of having carried prohibited weapons in Cologne. The investigation is still pending. He has not been suspected of participation in any forbidden association among the students.’

The university authorities didn’t know the half of it. True, the Poets’ Club – which he joined in his first term – was not a ‘forbidden association’, but neither was it quite so innocent as the name suggested: the discussion of poetry and rhetoric was a cover for more seditious talk. ‘Your little circle appeals to me, as you may well believe, much more than alehouse gatherings,’ Heinrich Marx wrote, happily imagining his boy improving the shining hour with earnest literary debate.

As it happened, Marx was no stranger to alehouses either. He was a co-president of the Trier Tavern Club, a society of about thirty university students from his home town whose main ambition was to get drunk as frequently and riotously as possible: it was after one of their revels that young Karl found himself detained for twenty-four hours, though the imprisonment did not prevent his chums from bringing him yet more booze and packs of playing cards to ease his sentence. During 1836 there was a series of fights in pubs between the Trier gang and a posse of young bloods from the Borussia Korps, who would force the student layabouts to kneel and swear allegiance to the Prussian aristocracy. Marx bought a pistol to defend himself against these humiliations, and when he visited Cologne in April the ‘prohibited weapon’ was discovered during a police search. It was only a begging letter from Heinrich Marx to a judge in Cologne which persuaded the authorities not to press charges. Two months later, after yet another fracas with the Borussia Korps, Marx accepted a challenge to a duel. The outcome of this contest between a short-sighted swot and a trained soldier was all too predictable, and he was lucky to get away with nothing worse than a small wound above his left eye. ‘Is duelling then so closely interwoven with philosophy?’ his father asked despairingly. ‘Do not let this inclination, and if not inclination, this craze, take root. You could in the end deprive yourself and your parents of the finest hopes that life offers.’

After a year of ‘wild rampaging in Bonn’, Heinrich Marx was only too pleased to let his son transfer to the University of Berlin, where there would be fewer extra-curricular temptations. ‘There is no question here of drinking, duelling and pleasant communal outings,’ the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach had observed while studying there ten years earlier. ‘In no other university can you find such a passion for work … Compared to this temple of work, the other universities are like public houses.’ No wonder Heinrich was so eager to sign the necessary form consenting to the move. ‘I not only grant my son Karl Marx permission, but it is my will that he should enter the University of Berlin next term for the purpose of continuing there his studies of Law …’

Any hopes that the wayward youth could now concentrate on his studies without distraction were quickly dashed: Karl Marx had fallen in love.

The one schoolfriend from Trier with whom Marx maintained any connection in adult life was Edgar von Westphalen, an amiable chump and dilettante with revolutionary inclinations. This enduring friendship had nothing to do with Edgar’s qualities but everything to do with his sister, the lovely Johanna Bertha Julie Jenny von Westphalen, known to all as Jenny, who became the first and only Mrs Karl Marx.

She was quite a catch. Revisiting his home town many years later, Karl wrote fondly to Jenny, ‘Every day and on every side I am asked about the quondam “most beautiful girl in Trier” and the “queen of the ball”. It’s damned pleasant for a man, when his wife lives on like this as an “enchanted princess” in the imagination of a whole town.’ It may seem surprising that a twenty-two-year-old princess of the Prussian ruling class – the daughter of Baron Ludwig von Westphalen – should have fallen for a bourgeois Jewish scallywag four years her junior, rather than some dashing grandee with a braided uniform and a private income; but Jenny was an intelligent, free-thinking girl who found Marx’s intellectual swagger irresistible. After ditching her official fiancé, a respectable young second lieutenant, she became engaged to Karl in the summer vacation of 1836. He was so proud that he couldn’t stop himself from boasting to his parents, but the news was kept from Jenny’s family for almost a year.

The reasons for this long concealment are obvious enough at first glance. Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, a senior official of the Royal Prussian Provincial Government, was a man of doubly aristocratic lineage: his father had been Chief of the General Staff during the Seven Years’ War and his Scottish mother, Anne Wishart, was descended from the Earls of Argyll. Such a thoroughbred magnifico would scarcely wish his daughter to saddle herself with the untitled descendant of a long line of rabbis.

On closer inspection, however, the secrecy is more puzzling; for von Westphalen was neither a snob nor a reactionary. After a conventional upper-class marriage which had produced four conventional upper-class children – one of whom, Ferdinand, later became a fiendishly oppressive Minister of the Interior in the Prussian government – the Baron was now married to Caroline Heubel, a plain, decent daughter of the German middle class, who was the mother of Jenny and Edgar. (His first wife, Lisette Veltheim, had died in 1807.) No longer obliged to put on airs and graces or fuss about his social status, Baron Ludwig had relaxed into his more natural character – cultured, liberal and benign. As a Protestant in a Catholic city, he may have felt himself to be something of an outsider; certainly, he sympathised with life’s outcasts. In official reports to Berlin he drew attention to the ‘great and growing poverty’ of the lower classes in Trier, though without proposing any cause or cure. He was an almost perfect specimen of the well-meaning liberal conservative, distressed by the privations of the poor but enjoying his own amplitude of life.

Rather like Heinrich Marx, in fact. The two men met soon after von Westphalen was posted to Trier in 1816 and discovered that they had much in common, including a love of literature and Enlightenment philosophy. Though they were unquestioning monarchists and patriots, both argued – sotto voce and with the utmost politeness – for some mild reforms that might temper the excesses of Prussian absolutism. Like Heinrich Marx, Ludwig von Westphalen joined the Casino Club and was therefore treated with wary suspicion by his superiors in Berlin.

The two wives had nothing in common at all. Caroline von Westphalen was a lively and generous hostess, forever organising poetry readings or musical soirées; Henriette Marx was narrow-minded, inarticulate and socially awkward. To the Marx children, the von Westphalens’ house on Neustrasse was a haven of light and life. Sophie Marx and Jenny von Westphalen were intimate friends for most of their childhood: when the five-year-old Jenny first set eyes on her future husband, he was still a babe-in-arms. Like her brother, who was one year older than Karl, Jenny soon fell under the spell of this dark-eyed, domineering infant (‘he was a terrible tyrant’) and never escaped.

The Baron, too, began to notice their precocious playmate. Unlike his own son, Edgar, the Marx boy had a hunger for knowledge and a quick intelligence with which to digest it. On long walks together, the old man would recite long passages from Homer and Shakespeare to his young companion. Marx came to know much of Shakespeare by heart – and used it to good effect, salting and peppering his adult writings with apt quotations and analogies from the plays. ‘His respect for Shakespeare was boundless: he made a detailed study of his works and knew even the least important of his characters,’ Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue recalled. ‘His whole family had a real cult for the great English dramatist; his three daughters knew many of his works by heart. When after 1848 he wanted to perfect his knowledge of English, which he could already read, he sought out and classified all Shakespeare’s original expressions.’

In later life Marx relived those happy hours with von Westphalen by declaiming scenes from Shakespeare – as well as Dante and Goethe – while leading his family up to Hampstead Heath for Sunday picnics. ‘The children are constantly reading Shakespeare,’ he reported to Engels, with immense paternal pride, in 1856. At the age of twelve, Marx’s daughter Jenny compared his former secretary Wilhelm Pieper with Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing – whereupon her eleven-year-old sister, Laura, pointed out that Benedick was a wit but Pieper was merely a clown, ‘and a cheap clown too’. During the long years of exile in London, Marx’s only forays into English culture were occasional outings to watch the leading Shakespearean actors Salvini and Irving. It is no coincidence that one of the Marx children, Eleanor, went on the stage and another, little Jenny, yearned to do likewise. As Professor S. S. Prawer has commented, anyone in Marx’s household was obliged to live ‘in a perpetual flurry of allusions to English literature’. There was a quotation for every occasion – to flatten a political enemy, to enliven a dry economic text, to heighten a family joke, or to authenticate an intense emotion. In a love-letter to his wife, written thirteen years after their wedding, Marx revealed once again the Baron von Westphalen’s enduring influence:

There you are before me, large as life, and I lift you up in my arms and I kiss you all over from top to toe, and I fall on my knees before you and cry: ‘Madame, I love you.’ And love you I do, with a love greater than was ever felt by the Moor of Venice … Who of my many calumniators and venomous-tongued enemies has ever reproached me with being called upon to play the romantic lead in a second-rate theatre? And yet it is true. Had the scoundrels possessed the wit, they would have depicted ‘the productive and social relations’ on one side and, on the other, myself at your feet. Beneath it they would have written: ‘Look to this picture and to that.’

That last phrase, as Jenny would not have needed telling, was plucked from Hamlet.

Why, then, were Karl and Jenny so reluctant to tell her parents of the betrothal? Perhaps Karl thought that the difference in their ages would count against him: marriages to older women were still rare enough to seem a crime against the laws of nature. Or perhaps they feared that, for all his generosity of spirit, the old man would try to dissuade his adored daughter from throwing in her lot with a brilliant but volatile nonconformist. Life with Karl Marx would never be dull, but it held little promise of stability or prosperity.

Apart from Jenny von Westphalen, the most important passion of Marx’s youth was a dead philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel. It followed much the same course as many love affairs: shy wariness, followed by the intoxicating thrill of a first embrace, followed by rejection of the beloved as the amour fou wanes. But he remained grateful for this initiation into the secrets of adulthood. Long after repudiating Hegelianism and declaring his intellectual independence, Marx spoke affectionately of the man who led him out of innocence. He had earned the right to chide Hegel with the robust honesty of an intimate friend; strangers were permitted no such licence.

‘The mystificatory side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion,’ he wrote in 1873. ‘But just as I was working at the first volume of Capital, it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre epigones, who now talk big in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in the same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e. as a “dead dog”. I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a conscious and comprehensive manner.’ It was very rare indeed for Marx to pay such a compliment to someone with whom he had disagreed: usually, those who fell foul of him could expect to be condemned as curs and jackasses for ever afterwards. Heinrich Heine was an exception, since Marx believed that one had to forgive great poets their shortcomings; and it seems he had a similar rule for great though flawed philosophers. For the second-raters, however – the poetasters, the posturing ninnies, the self-important numskulls – no epithet was too harsh. When he saw Hegel attacked by lesser minds, Marx knew at once whose side he was on.

For one thing, he was still in the old boy’s debt, as he admitted all those years later. Hegel used a radical methodology to reach conservative conclusions. What Marx did was to keep the dialectical framework but discard the mystical mumbo-jumbo – rather like a man who buys a deconsecrated chapel and converts it into a habitable, secular dwelling.

What is dialectic? As any schoolchild with a set of magnets – or, for that matter, any dating agency – will confirm, opposites can attract. If it were not so, the human race would be extinct. Female mates with male, and from their sweaty embrace a new creature emerges who will, eventually, repeat the process. Not always, of course, but often enough to ensure the survival and progress of the species.

The dialectic performs much the same function for the human mind. An idea, stripped naked, has a passionate grapple with its antithesis, from which a synthesis is created; this in turn becomes the new thesis, to be duly seduced by a new demon lover. Two wrongs may make a right – but, soon after its birth, that right becomes another wrong which must be subjected to the same intimate scrutiny as its forebears, and thus we go forward. Marx’s own engagement with Hegel was itself something of a dialectical process, from which emerged the nameless infant that was to become historical materialism.

I simplify, of course; but one is obliged to simplify Hegel since much of his work would otherwise remain impenetrably obscure. As an eighteen-year-old, soon after arriving at Berlin University, Marx himself had mocked this opaqueness and ambiguity in a series of epigrams titled ‘On Hegel’:

Words I teach all mixed up into a devilish muddle,

Thus, anyone may think just what he chooses to think;

Never, at least, is he hemmed in by strict limitations.

Bubbling out of the flood, plummeting down from the cliff,

So are his Beloved’s words and thoughts that the Poet devises;

He understands what he thinks, freely invents what he feels.

Thus, each may for himself suck wisdom’s nourishing nectar;

Now you know all, since I’ve said plenty of nothing to you!

Marx included the poem in a notebook of verse ‘dedicated to my dear father on the occasion of his birthday as a feeble token of everlasting love’. The old man must have been delighted to learn that his son hadn’t succumbed to the epidemic of Hegel-worship which was infecting almost every institution in the land. In one of his letters to Berlin, Heinrich warned Karl against the contagious influence of Hegelians – ‘the new immoralists who twist their words until they themselves do not hear them; who christen a flood of words a product of genius because it is devoid of ideas’.

Someone as limitlessly curious and disputatious as Karl Marx was unlikely to resist for long. Hegel had held the chair of philosophy at Berlin from 1818 until his death in 1831, and by the time Marx enrolled at the university, five years later, his intellectual heirs were still fighting over the legacy. In his youth Hegel had been an idealistic supporter of the French Revolution, but like so many radicals – then as now – he became comfortable and complaisant in middle age, believing that a truly mature man should recognise ‘the objective necessity and reasonableness of the world as he finds it’. The world in question – the Prussian state – was a complete and final manifestation of what he called the Divine Spirit or Idea (the Geist). This being so, there was nothing left for philosophers to discuss. Any further questioning of the status quo was the merest vanity.

Naturally, this line of argument made him very popular indeed with the Prussian authorities, who brandished it as proof that their system of government was not only inevitable but unimprovable. ‘All that is real is rational,’ Hegel had written; and since the state was undoubtedly real, in the sense that it existed, it must therefore be rational and above reproach. Those who championed the subversiveness of his earlier work – the so-called Young Hegelians – preferred to cite the second half of that famous dictum: ‘All that is rational is real.’ An absolute monarchy, buttressed by censors and secret police, was palpably irrational and therefore unreal, a mirage or spectre that would disappear as soon as anyone dared to touch it.

As a student in the Berlin law faculty, Marx had a front-row seat at the arena. His lecturer in jurisprudence was Friedrich Karl von Savigny, a thin, severe reactionary who, though not a Hegelian, nevertheless agreed that the development of a country’s law and government was an organic process reflecting the character and tradition of its people. To challenge Prussian absolutism was to defy nature: one might as well demand a reform in the structure of oak trees, or the abolition of rain. The alternative view was represented by the chubby and cheerful professor of criminal law, Eduard Gans, a radical Hegelian who believed that institutions should be subjected to rational criticism rather than mystical veneration.

For his first year at Berlin, Marx struggled to ignore the temptations of philosophy: he was, after all, meant to be studying law. Besides, hadn’t he already rejected the devilish Hegel and all his works? He distracted himself by writing lyrical verse, but produced only ‘diffuse and inchoate expressions of feeling, nothing natural, everything built out of moonshine, complete opposition between what is and what ought to be, rhetorical reflections instead of poetic thoughts …’ (Out of the quarrel with others, as W. B. Yeats said, we make rhetoric; from the quarrel with ourselves, we make poetry.) He then set about composing a philosophy of law – ‘a work of about 300 pages’ – only to discover the same old gulf between what is and what ought to be: ‘What I was pleased to call the metaphysics of law, i.e. basic principles, reflections, definitions of concepts, [was] divorced from all actual law and every actual form of law.’ Worse still, having failed to bridge the gap between theory and practice he found himself unable to reconcile the form of law with its content. His mistake – for which he blamed von Savigny – ‘lay in my belief that matter and form can and must develop separately from each other, and so I obtained not a real form but something like a desk with drawers into which I then poured sand’.