Karl marx an Intellectual Biography Rolf Hosfeld

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments IDEAS		viii 1
World Spirit 1
Liberalism 13
The Riddle of Modernity 18
Predestination 31
Phenomenology of Communism	36

The Discovery of Simplicity 43 New Species 47

DEEDS Futurism 57 World War 65 The Trauma of Exile	81		57
Lost Illusions 105
DISCOVERIES The Terrible Missile	131		131
Crisis and End Times	144
CONSEQUENCES To the Sun, to Freedom		157	157
Salvation from the East		168

Bibliography 181

Index of Names 187

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sometimes one has one’s own ideas; sometimes they are provided by others. In this case it was Ulrich Wank of the Piper publishing house who suggested during a conversation in Munich that I contemplate a short, essayistic intellectual biography of Marx from a new per- spective. Like many of my generation, I had read Marx’s writings fairly extensively during my university studies, but more than three decades had passed since then; thus I agreed only after some hesita- tion. Having completed the manuscript, I am very thankful to Ul- rich Wank, for without him I would certainly never have devoted myself again so fully to this subject. Gerd Koenen, Michael Jäger, and Jutta Lukas took upon themselves the friendly effort to criti- cally review the text and thereby very much helped me to avoid un- sustainable theses and obvious mistakes. My readers Renate Dörner and Kristen Rotter accompanied the product through all its stages with a watchful eye and constructive understanding, as did my wife Elke, who at appropriate and inappropriate times was always a pa- tient listener.

Note on the Text

The author has used italics in the text to denote a quote from Marx’s writings. These quotes may be only one word or a short phrase. It is the author’s intention to infuse the text with Marx’s voice and per- spective in a seamless manner. Longer quotes from Marx and other outside sources appear in quotation marks or as indented text. The source for the italic quotes may be found in the attributed note, or in the case where several quotes appear in the paragraph, the attrib- uted note will appear at the end of the paragraph.

IDEAS

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World Spirit

“The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons,” Karl Marx wrote from Parisian exile in 1844.¹ Apart from any broader meaning, this was also a summary of his personal expe- rience. This sentence by the then 26-year-old can thus be regarded as primarily an autobiographical statement.

Conditions of censorship had prompted Marx to resign as the editor in chief of the liberal Rheinische Zeitung on 18 March 1843.² The year had started under gloomy prospects,³ and now the weapon of criticism was also knocked out of his hands. Quite a few people were frustrated with Prussian censorship, which had radicalized many. This experience played no small part in turning Marx into the radi- cal remembered by posterity. He, too, was a child of his times.

Czar Nicholas I was to some extent personally responsible for this turn of events, for the decision against the Cologne paper came about under pressure from Russia. Anti-Russian articles criticiz- ing Berlin’s dependency on St. Petersburg displeased the czar, who lodged a determined protest against them. The Prussian ambassador was taken to task at a court ball, and a sharply formulated letter was subsequently sent from the Winter Palace to Potsdam. The Rheini- sche Zeitung was banned. Marx had to go. “I can do nothing more in Germany,” he wrote at the beginning of 1843. “Here one makes a counterfeit of oneself.”⁴ A right life amidst the wrong? No, that

was impossible. He went to Paris, the cosmopolitan European city that years earlier had also attracted the poet Heinrich Heine, for the same reasons.

Back then Heine had been pursuing the promises of the July Rev- olution in Paris. “Sunbeams wrapped up in printing paper” was what he called the first newspaper reports of the struggles for freedom in the French capital when they reached him.⁵ For him the experience was like a journey from Hades into life. Indeed, July 1830 marked a caesura for the entire century. “These combats in the streets of Paris,” wrote Benedetto Croce in the History of Europe in the Nine- teenth Century, “attained to the significance of a world-battle; it seemed to the anxious watchers that the thick black clouds which were lowering at the horizon of European political life had suddenly been scattered by the ‘July sun.’”⁶ And Hegel laconically told his students in 1831 that after the downfall of Napoleon, the reestab- lishment of Bourbon government at the Congress of Vienna was not much more than the staging of a fifteen-year farce.⁷

A creature of the Holy Alliance had suddenly collapsed and pro- vided contemporaries with a theatrical spectacle of a shattered eter- nity. It did not make world history, yet as Hegel’s student Eduard Gans reported, the long-awaited defeat of the French Restoration was a great European event.⁸ It revealed that the principle of revo- lution, not that of restoration, would determine the further course of the nineteenth century. The first consequence was the indepen- dence of Belgium. England underwent electoral reform in 1832; in 1834 Spain obtained a constitutional charter. In Germany in 1832, Liberals and Democrats gathered at the Hambach Palace for a cel- ebration of brotherhood among nations. In the same year, Giuseppe Mazzini founded the freedom movement La Giovine Italia and made it receptive to European ideals.

The July victory in Paris, however, had already foreshadowed the beginning of a new division between the bourgeoisie and the people. Eugène Delacroix captured it with an image in his famous painting Freedom at the Barricades, which was the surprise of the 1831 annual Parisian Art Salon. An allegory of freedom? Yes—but only with difficulty could it maintain a balance between the bourgeoisie and the proletarian figures from the Faubourgs surging forward to the barricades. “All being leads to sorrow,” the painter noted in a brief note entitled “Metaphysics.”⁹ Something uncertain and almost mel- ancholic hung over this bare-breasted apotheosis of freedom from

the heroic days of July. In the same year, Karl Marx entered his third year at Trier’s Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium.

In certain respects, Marx belonged to his century’s generation marked by revolution. In Lyon in 1831 and 1834, the silk weavers staged an uprising with the battle cry “Vivre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant” (Live working or die fighting). In 1835, three years after the Hambach celebration, Marx became a university student. During the Rhine crisis in 1840 he experienced a highly emotional upsurge of Germanic feeling and hatred of the French, but this left no traces upon him. In any event, as a baptized Jew from Trier, he could hardly comprehend the nationalism that, having arisen in the wake of the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, was receiving fresh impetus from the French call for the annexation of the ter- ritories on the left bank of the Rhine. That was not his world. He had problems with the Prussians, but his memories of the French were marked more by nostalgia. Those were the good years when the Civil Code was introduced to the Mosel region and the eman- cipation of the Jews was proclaimed. Also in 1840, Justus Liebig published his Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology, a milestone on the way to rational agricultural practice and the modern world.

For his first semester, Marx completed the journey from Koblenz to Bonn by steamship. Since 1827 there had been a regular link be- tween Mainz and Cologne, and it abruptly changed all conceptions of space and time. “The Rhine steamers go too fast,” the heroine Wally complains in an 1835 novel by Karl Gutzkow.¹⁰ The break from the Age of Slowness occurred at a new tempo and provoked ir- ritation. Progress, the magic word of the eighteenth century, became manifest in the landscape. The first industrial settlements were cre- ated, steamships suddenly became a part of the romantic Rhine’s sil- houette, and soon the railway would slice through arcadian Nature like a sickle. The upheaval was tremendous. The future became the new slogan in a world that for hundreds of years had been based on tradition. This, too, shaped the “revolutionary generation.”

In October 1836, Marx still had to use a mail coach to make his way to Berlin, his second place of study. The first railway—between Berlin and Potsdam—would not exist until two years later. Thus the journey from the Mosel to the Spree was familiarly slow, taking just over a week. Industrialization was then only taking its first tentative steps in the Prussian capital, which, despite gas lighting, still largely

preserved its rural character. At the time of Marx’s arrival, the future railway magnate August Borsig employed barely fifty workers.

The transfer to Berlin was his father’s wish. The university there had a reputation as a demanding school far more conducive to a son’s advancement than the university in Bonn, which was dominated by rakish fraternities. Marx himself, however, may have been more at- tracted by its reputation for academic freedom. Minister of Culture Stein zum Altenstein was still in charge there, and he cultivated Wilhelm von Humboldt’s ideal—an academic space predominantly free from the state—as a political program. The university “Unter den Linden” was considered the only public space in Prussia that was more or less free of censorship, and the atmosphere in Berlin was characterized by an almost feverish intellectual curiosity. Here over the next few years Marx would be introduced to the weapons of criticism.

His first idea developed out of an intense engagement with Hegel’s philosophy during a convalescent stay on the peninsula between the Spree and Lake Rummelsburger. At the beginning of 1837, the stu- dent attracted the attention of the doctor because of a weakness in his chest and the periodic spitting up of blood, and a little later he was declared an invalid because of an irritability of the lungs. That summer Marx began the first of the many spa treatments he would undergo throughout life. Illness was almost fashionable during the overly sensitive Biedermeier period in which he grew up. With his dispo- sitions, he could easily have dedicated himself to the widespread cult of world-weariness—as the novelist Karl Immermann said in 1836, the curse of the current generation was to “feel unfortunate even without any particular afflictions.” Marx did not do so, but he struggled with weak health throughout his entire life; time and again his letters were replete with reports about the condition of his lungs and bronchial tubes, gall bladder, liver, and his furunculosis. For now, though, the fresh country air in the fishing village of Stra- lau at the gates of the Prussian capital was supposed to reinvigorate the anaemic weakling.

Marx had just completed his second semester in Berlin. Initially the grotesque craggy melody of Hegelian philosophy remained some- what foreign to him, but eventually it thoroughly suited his need for rest. By moonlight on the shore of Lake Rummelsburger, the patient delved deeply into Hegel from beginning to end, ran around madly in the garden by the dirty water of the Spree, and in the end fell into the

arms of the enemy and became a Hegelian. The nineteen-year-old concluded that
From the idealism which, by the way, I had compared and nourished with the idealism of Kant and Fichte, I arrived at the point of seeking the idea in reality itself. If previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, now they became its centre.
The world was inherently reasonable, even though it was also inher- ently contradictory. A second conclusion formed during the summer weeks in Stralau:
In the concrete expression of a living world of ideas, as exemplified by law, the state, nature, and philosophy as a whole, the object itself must be studied in its development; arbitrary divisions must not be introduced, the rational character of the object itself must develop as something imbued with contradictions in itself and find its unity in itself.¹¹
Science, Marx learned from Hegel, meant “surrender to the life of the object,”¹² and from this life of the object itself, by means of in- tellectual abstraction, distilling the concepts and categories that classify and order it. This claim for the potential to obtain abso- lute knowledge would accompany him throughout his life. Soon Marx would maintain that he himself, not Hegel, had first found the real¹³—because it was material—key to this.

For the time being, however, he found in Hegel the key to what his future terminology would call criticism. For Marx and his gener- ation of young Hegelians, viewing the present “critically” meant not accepting it as a given but rather working out from its internal con- tradictions those principles and tendencies that pointed beyond the present toward the future. A beer garden on the banks of the Spree in Stralau became a laboratory for such thought experiments. In the summer of 1837, this was the meeting place for the Berlin Doctor Club, an eccentric circle of critical students of Hegel that now also included the young student Marx. In this somewhat bohemian at- mosphere many conflicting views were expressed,¹⁴ presumably quite boisterously and loudly on occasion. The theologian Bruno Bauer, who was to have an especially strong influence on Marx, was initially not among them, being still an orthodox Hegelian at the time. The origins of the Left Hegelians, without whom Marx’s further develop-

ment can scarcely be imagined, lay not in academic seminar rooms or lecture halls but rather in the Stralau tavern and at regular literati meetings in a café in the Französische Straße. They claimed—treat- ing Hegel somewhat one-sidedly—not that reality was necessarily inherently reasonable, but rather that reason was the actual reality. And reason was essentially negating, that is, “critical.”

If pursued with reference to the Prussian state, this abstract in- quiry could become directly political. Was this state already a reason- able entity for Hegel, or did reason still need to develop into reality within this state? Did not the Hegelian embodiment of the idea, the embodiment of freedom, Marx asked a little later, also and necessar- ily require the freedom of unlimited public expression of opinion?¹⁵ Was Prussia thus still inherently a highly unreasonable state?

Hegel would presumably have answered: in principle, no; in its details, yes. In any case, this was how he formulated matters in a let- ter to State Chancellor Hardenberg when sending him a copy of his Philosophy of Right.¹⁶ But Hegel had been dead for six years when Marx delved into his works. Marx essentially became familiar with Hegel’s philosophy through his most gifted student, Eduard Gans— which meant Hegel as seen from a liberal perspective. At the time Gans was a celebrated man at the university in Berlin. In the winter semester of 1838/39—Marx’s fifth semester in Berlin—Gans resumed his “contemporary historical” lectures about politics and social is- sues in modern Europe, which he had discontinued five years earlier under pressure from the authorities. A captivating and almost hyp- notic speaker whose meetings often attracted hundreds of listeners, he was considered, like his role model Mirabeau, a herald of new liberal confidence during a time of Prussian agony. The students ar- rived in enthusiastic torchlight processions, and the lecture halls could barely cope with the congestion.

Hegel had taught that the state was the “march of God in the world,” the reality of the ethical idea.¹⁷ To be sure, Gans believed this as well, but in contrast to Hegel he held the view that in mod- ern times this “reality” could only be produced through the public and free competition of ideas—through “opposition.” “If the state will have nothing to do with opposition,” he announced, “then it lapses into laziness.” And if in the process an agreement between civil society and the state was not possible—for example, due to the repression of the opposition—then at some point there would inevitably be a revolution,¹⁸ one that by rights would be welcomed

by “every better and progressive person.”¹⁹ It was the Vormärz: Old Europe found itself at the “beginning of its end,” and even Prince Metternich, the architect of the restoration, knew it. There were no prospects for “honorable capitulations.”²⁰

After 1840, the idea that it might be possible in Prussia to strike a balance between the regime and a rapidly modernizing society slipped ever further away. That year Friedrich Wilhelm IV became king in Prussia. At first it looked as if the new king would, in the words of the Russian envoy Peter von Meyendorff, provide for “une certain couleur libérale,”²¹ a certain liberal coloring. He issued an amnesty for political prisoners and courted a number of well-known heroes of the Wars of Liberation and opponents of Metternich’s sys- tem. The parliaments and press became freer, and a wave of enthu- siasm accompanied the change in rulers. However, it very quickly became clear that Friedrich Wilhelm was by no means a liberal.

Marx was among the few who recognized this early on. “Already when the oath of allegiance was taken in Königsberg, he justified my supposition that the question would now become a purely personal one,” he noted in retrospect. “He declared that his heart and his turn of mind would be the future fundamental law of the realm of Prussia, of his state.”²² The immense and elaborate spectacle Friedrich Wil- helm had staged in Königsberg was born of his desire to invent the sacred tradition of the Prussian monarchy—one that did not exist. He was a Romantic obsessed with the past who wanted to surprise Metternich’s cold world of power with something extravagant.²³ This extravagance was Friedrich Wilhelm’s “Christian state,” the fantastical product of a late-Romantic art-religion that raved about Christian regeneration through the spirit of an ancient Christianity, understood more aesthetically than religiously, and the divine ori- gins of royal dignity. He had his “lords” and “cavaliers” and dreamed of a sacred mystical union as hollow as the figure of Christ adorning the courtyard of his Church of Peace in Potsdam, arms outspread to offer protection and blessings. But what he initially promised with respect to a certain liberalization of the press was nothing more than “respectable publicity” inserted into the privilege-based order of his personal rule.²⁴ He was the living denial of the Fredrickian rational state in which Hegel and, to a lesser extent, his students had placed all their hopes for the potential for reform from within.

In Prussia, Marx noted laconically, in reality the King is the sys- tem, and it was only a matter of time before the ludicrous historical

comedy of this new cavalier would end in tragedy. For while the court wove fantasies in the old German manner, elsewhere, people had long ago started to philosophise in the new German manner. In other words, Marx and others had possessed the audacity of wanting to turn men into human beings²⁵ and had stripped away from them the sup- posedly divinely willed corset of the Estates and subjects.

It was a radical break in thought, and not only with respect to royal romanticism. The fact that this break had theological origins was very significant for Marx’s further development. Around 1840 in the Berlin Doctor Club, a veritable “scientific terrorism”²⁶ had dawned, led by Bruno Bauer, whom a friend at the time called the “Robespierre of theology.”²⁷ As a consequence, the New Hegelians had announced the “dissolution” of the idea of religion and in the same breath that of the Christian state as well. “Zeitgeist” had been a fashionable word for years, and in 1840 the poet Georg Herwegh noted that the “sword of revolution” is always felt first in literature. In this respect, language too had changed, becoming impetuous “like the pace of the times, cutting like a sword and beautiful like freedom and spring.”²⁸ Among the young Hegelians, the idea spread that they stood on the threshold of a new era of Enlightenment that was unique in history, and they actually began to search within their own ranks for the future German Robespierre and Marat. As Marx confided in his handwritten notes while working on his dissertation, one felt like Prometheus, who having stolen fire from heaven begins to build houses and to settle upon the earth.²⁹ It was quite an intense at- mosphere, in which everything flourished.

As Marx began his studies in Berlin, the debate among Hege- lian students was completely dominated by the polemic The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, written by the Tübingen theologian Da- vid Friedrich Strauß and perceived as a provocation. The Hegelian Strauß, a researcher of myths, assumed that all Christology had been imputed to the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. In contrast to the atheists of the French Enlightenment, however, he did not con- sider this to be a deliberate fraud or a clever invention but rather a myth that expressed a profound truth³⁰—namely, the incarnation of God—in the form of an unconscious idea. This truth, however, could not be reduced to whether Jesus was actually born, lived, and was resurrected in the manner described by the Evangelists. The real message was rather that the person “in his immediate consciousness knew himself to be one with God.”³¹ This view could with some

justification call upon Hegel, who likewise polemicized against what he held to be the eighteenth century’s abstract theory of priestly fraud and asserted by contrast that even religion possessed truth, albeit “in the form of picture-thoughts.”³² Additionally, writing in the era of the Grimm brothers’ research into legends and fairy tales and Niebuhr’s source criticism,³³ Strauß could not treat historical sources as naively and unself-consciously as Hegel and Goethe had done— a realization that came to Marx as well. Especially when moving into the individual scientific and scholarly disciplines, speculative philosophy needed to meet the challenge of the factual and empiri- cally demonstrable.

For the time being, however, it confronted the internal contra- dictions of theory. For several years, the theologian Bruno Bauer was in this respect the dominant figure in the Berlin Doctor Club. He began teaching at the university “Unter den Linden” in 1834 and first drew attention to himself in 1835 when, on the instigation of the orthodox pietist theologian Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, he published a scathing review of Strauß’s Life of Jesus. In 1840, how- ever, he did a complete about-face, now describing Strauß’s text as an event that struck the realm of theological bliss like a contempla- tive lightning bolt. Shortly thereafter he published his Critique of the Synoptics, whose thorough exegesis, as the theologically learned Marx pointed out, proved that the contradictions alone in the re- ports of the evangelists disqualified them as reliable records of histor- ical fact.³⁴ It was indeed a solid critical work, and Albert Schweitzer wrote in The Quest of the Historical Jesus that Bauer’s criticism of the evangelical histories of the synoptists was worth a dozen good Lives of Jesus. To date, Schweitzer insisted, it was the most ingenious and complete index of the problems with the historicity of Jesus’s life.³⁵

In the 1840s, however, Bauer and his views hit a roadblock, given the radical conclusions he drew from his criticism. He maintained that the Evangelists were the product of a zeitgeist that included not only the stories of the life of Jesus but also set pieces from Jewish, Alexandrian, Greek, and Roman myths and philosophies. In other words, the Evangelists represented nothing more than a late-antique interim stage of human self-consciousness that assumed institution- alized forms in the Christian religion, thereby taking on a life of its own and preserving itself.

Marx, who as a student of Bauer in the late 1830s attended his seminars at the university, was considered a veritable arsenal of ideas

among friends in the Doctor Club. Bauer invited him to collaborate on a new edition of the Hegelian lectures on the philosophy of reli- gion, awakening in Marx the desire to write something comparable, although he never realized this goal. The theologian was deeply im- pressed by the younger man’s exuberant intellectual spirit; likewise, Bruno Bauer’s influence on Marx can hardly be overestimated.

“The ego was everything and yet it was empty,” Bauer wrote about early Christianity in the third volume of his Critique of the Synoptics. “It did not dare to conceive of itself as everything and the universal power, that is it remained a religious conception and completed its alienation in that it placed its own universal power over itself and worked in the sight of this power in fear and trembling for its preser- vation and holiness.”³⁶ Thus in religion the object of the fantasy of human consciousness had assumed independence as its own being. A calcified product of the human spirit began to rule the living. In religion, according to Bauer, the person was bereft of himself, and the being stolen from him was transferred to heaven and thus made into a non-being, a nonhuman.³⁷

Marx would never escape from the influence exerted by this in- tellectual concept of an inverted theology. For him, capital in the modern economic process would remain a general, self-created de- miurge that confronts and rules over the person as an alien force. It was a grandiose vision of a world without gods, in which the person was the true source of every society, all politics, the world of ideas, and history; the person was its actual but also dispossessed and alien- ated “causa sui,”³⁸ the truth of which, however, could only be recog- nized once criticism had opened the person’s eyes.

When Bauer wrote the work Christianity Exposed in 1842, he al- ready saw himself entirely in the role of a radical Enlightenment philosopher, as was supposed to be clear from the allusion to the title of Paul Henri Thiry d’Holbach’s atheistic polemic Le christianisme dévoilé, written eighty years earlier. Through the critique of religion, Bauer wanted to dispel the “delirium of humanity” and thereby lead humanity to an understanding of itself again.³⁹ The first political target was Friedrich Wilhelm’s Christian state, for a state that ac- cording to Bauer would be a creation of self-consciousness could no longer be a Christian state. At the very least, it required the legal acceptance of an enlightened and critical opposition.⁴⁰ In political terms, this was a liberal position.

But conditions in Prussia drove Bauer toward increased radi- calism. In 1839, following a literary feud with the mighty Heng- stenberg, he was transferred as a precaution to Bonn, initially as a Privatdozent, albeit with the prospect of soon becoming a professor. He wanted Marx to join him as quickly as possible and pressured him to finally take his “wretched exam,” suggesting that the follow- ing summer Marx would already be delivering lectures in Bonn.⁴¹ But then Altenstein, the last proponent of liberal academic policy in Prussia, died. His successor, Friedrich von Eichhorn, ensured a fundamental change of course after 1840.

In that year Friedrich Julius Stahl, who considered the state a necessary consequence of humanity’s sinful nature, became the successor of the liberal Eduard Gans, who had died young, and in 1841 the elderly Schelling was called from Munich to Berlin to use his authority to smoke out the entire troublesome hive of Hege- lianism—the “dragon spawn of Hegelian pantheism, the shallow know-it-allness, and the legal dissolution of domestic discipline,” as Friedrich Wilhelm informed him through a confidant.⁴² Also in 1841, the police investigated students at Halle University who had petitioned for David Friedrich Strauß’s appointment as a professor. Only a theologian, Marx noted shortly thereafter, could believe that this period’s confrontations concerned religion as religion.⁴³ In real- ity, they were about the ideological pillars of the Christian state. Even for Bruno Bauer, it was not chiefly his critical theology that sealed his doom but rather his invocation of Hegel when, during a visit by the South German liberal Carl Theodor Welcker, he pub- licly proposed a toast to Hegel and in particular his conception of a constitutional state governed by laws.⁴⁴ After this performance, the king himself promptly directed Eichhorn to dismiss Bauer as a Privatdozent in Bonn and scuttle his academic career by blocking any further opportunities.

The campaign against Hegel had intensified in the late 1830s. Not only was Hegel’s theory of the constitutional state an attack on the personality principle of the pure monarchy, the Silesian monar- chist Karl Ernst Schubarth observed in 1839, but it was tantamount to a call for insurrection and rebellion, and the whole speculative dialectic with its so-called specific negations was in reality noth- ing other than a disguised black mass in which God must humbly request of the Devil “that he help him—as the negation to be sub-

lated—attain his supreme existence.”⁴⁵ Quite right, replied Bruno Bauer, who had been denied all bourgeois career opportunities. Playing the picaresque role of a strict orthodox pietist, Bauer an- nounced that Hegel was in fact an atheist; he knew how to disguise himself well, but actually, with his message that God as a person was dead, he represented the “root of evil.” Strictly speaking, his theory was “Revolution itself.”⁴⁶ This was to be demonstrated in a public provocation—a satirical “ultimatum” comprised of citations from Hegel’s collected works entitled the Trumpet of the Last Judg- ment against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist: an Ultimatum, published anonymously in October 1841. Marx presumably also participated in this intellectual carnival; at any rate, he was supposed to collabo- rate on a continuation with a second Ultimatum.⁴⁷

At the time, Marx was living in Bonn. Even after Berlin, Bauer joked to Marx that pietists had sensitive noses, a “premonition of a crisis, like animals prior to a change in the life of nature.” But the planned response of the left Hegelians would become a catas- trophe for the pietists, “terrible and drastic” and “greater and more enormous” than the catastrophe by which Christianity had entered the world.⁴⁸ This rhetoric revealed an unintentional theatricality, which the two young “critics,” Bauer and Marx, also displayed by riding donkeys through Godesberg on holidays, thereby deeply dis- turbing Bonn’s decent society and greatly amusing themselves by poking fun at the philistines of this officious Prussian administra- tive town on the Rhine. Were they trying to emulate the eccentric Prince Pückler, whose favorite public appearances included driving a team of deer along Unter den Linden in Berlin? Or did Marx, as a Rhinelander, have in mind the carnivalesque tradition of the Eselsmesse (Mass of Asses)? At times they lived (and caroused) in an overstimulated, early-adolescent mood of superiority and boundlessness.

Then the Trumpet of the Last Judgment was banned. The carnival of philosophy that Marx had discussed in the handwritten notes for his dissertation was no longer a viable option. On 15 April 1841, he received his doctorate with a dissertation on the difference between democritical and epicurean natural philosophy, but the removal of his mentor Bauer from Bonn University suddenly dashed all hopes for a future academic career. Needed now were no longer the intel- lectual games of half-hearted minds in ivory towers, but rather the judgments of whole-hearted generals.⁴⁹