Karl Marx: Man and Fighter Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen

Chapter 03: Jenny von Westphalen

Marx spent the summer and autumn of 1836 in Trier, where he became secretly engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, his future wife.

Her antecedents were entirely different from his own. She came from a different world. Her grandfather, Philipp Westphalen (1724-1792) was adviser and confidential secretary to Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick. A man of middle-class origin, he owed his rise to his abilities alone. His contemporaries spoke of him as a competent administrator and a far-seeing and prudent politician. He never became a soldier but remained a civil official throughout his career, but the victories of Krefeld, Bellinghausen, Warburg, Wilhelmsthal and Minden were his handiwork. Philipp Westphalen was the duke's real chief of staff during the Seven Years' War. Delbrück, the military historian, describes him as the Gneisenau of the Seven Years' War, and Bernhardi calls him the leading spirit of Ferdinand's staff. He was a gifted writer, and his notes are among the most important historical sources for the period.

The King of England esteemed the German so highly that he appointed him adjutant-general of his army. Westphalen, with the national pride that distinguished him and later frequently brought him into conflict with the fawning courtiers of the Guelf court, declined the honour. In the end he only accepted ennoblement at the hands of the house of Brunswick in order to be able to marry the woman of his choice.

He met her when she was on a visit to her uncle, General Beckwith, commander of the English-Hanoverian army, which helped. Duke Ferdinand in the struggle against the French. Jeanie Wishart of Pitarrow came of the family of the Earls of Argyll who played such a big rôle in the history of Scotland, particularly during the Reformation and the Great Rebellion. One of her forefathers, George Wishart, was burned at the stake as a Protestant in 1547 and a little later another, Earl Archibald Argyll, mounted the scaffold in Edinburgh as a rebel against King James II.

The younger branch of the family, to which Jeanie Wishart of Pitarrow belonged--she was the fifth child of George Wishart, an Edinburgh minister--also produced a number of prominent men. William Wishart, Jenny's great-grandfather, accompanied the Prince of Orange to England, and his brother was the celebrated Admiral James Wishart. Jenny's grandmother, Anne Campbell of Orchard, wife of the minister, belonged to the old Scottish aristocracy too.

Ludwig von Westphalen, the youngest son of this German-Scottish marriage, was born on July 11, 1770. He was his mother's favourite child. She survived her husband by twenty years and lived with her son until her death. He was an exceptionally learned man. He spoke English, his second native tongue, as well as German, and could read Latin, Greek, Italian, French and Spanish. Marx used to remember with pleasure how old Westphalen would recite whole hymns of Homer by heart. It was from her father that Jenny and Karl learned to love Shakespeare, a love they preserved all their lifetime and handed on to their children.

Marx was sincerely attached to Jenny's father, his 'paternal friend.' The words with which he dedicated the thesis for his doctor's degree proceeded from a thankful heart. 'May all who are in doubt,' he wrote, 'have the good fortune that I have had and be able to look up with admiration to an old man who retains his youthful vigour and welcomes every advance of the times with enthusiasm and passion for truth and an idealism which, bright as sunshine and proceeding from deep conviction, recognises only the word of truth before which all the spirits of the world appear, and never shrinks back from the retrograde ghosts which obscure the gloomy sky, but, full of godlike energy and with manly, confident glance, penetrates all the chrysalis changes of the world and sees the empyrean within. You, my paternal friend, provided me always with a living argumentum ad oculos that idealism is not a figment of the imagination but a truth.'

For a man with an outlook of that kind there was not much scope in the German States of his time. Little bound him to the hereditary Brunswick Guelf dynasty. He had no hesitation in entering the service of the Napoleonic kingdom of Westphalia. His son and biographer, Ferdinand von Westphalen, tried to attribute this step to his concern for the well-being of his family, but this cannot be accepted as a satisfactory explanation. His family always had been prosperous and was still prosperous at the time, and, besides, Ludwig von Westphalen proved sufficiently a few years later that he was willing to make greater sacrifices for his convictions than that involved in declining an official position. The Kingdom of Westphalia was such a notable advance on the feudal state, and so full of beneficial reforms in every respect, that a man as sensitive to the demands of the time as Ludwig von Westphalen could not hesitate a moment in choosing whether to serve a fossilized petty princeling or the brother of the emperor of the world.

In the realm of King Jerome, just as in the Rhineland, the popularity of the new régime, at first widespread among middle-classes and peasants alike, dwindled away, to be replaced by aversion and ultimately bitter hostility. With every increase in the taxes necessary to finance the never-ending war, with every new calling-up of recruits, hostility grew. In 1813 Westphalen, then sub-prefect of the arrondissement of Salzwedel in the department of the Elbe, was arrested by order of Marshal Davoust because of his hostility to the French régime and confined in the fortress of Gifhorn. He was only freed by the troops of the Allies.

He was confirmed in the office of administrative head of the district by the Prussians and remained in Salzwedel for another three years. In 1816 he was promoted and transferred to Trier, which became his and his family's second home.

Westphalen's first wife, Elisabeth von Veltheim, was descended from the Old Prussian aristocracy and died young, in 1807, leaving four children. Two daughters were brought up by her relatives. They grew up far from their father and he only went to see them occasionally. Ferdinand, the elder of the two sons, stayed in Salzwedel until he left school and then went to live with his sisters. His father had practically no influence upon his upbringing. He grew up in a thoroughly reactionary environment to be a thorough reactionary himself--arrogant, narrow-minded and bigoted. He actually became Prussian Minister of the Interior, and in the most reactionary cabinet that Prussia ever had he was the most reactionary of them all. Frederick William IV, the 'romantic on the throne,' was later very friendly with him.

Ludwig von Westphalen's second wife was Karoline Heubel, daughter of a minor Prussian official from the Rhineland. She was a clever and courageous woman. A picture of her in her old age, with her large, gleaming eyes, enables one to see how beautiful she was in her youth. There were three children of this marriage. Jenny, the eldest, was born at Salzwedel on February 12, 1814. The next child was a daughter, of whom no more is known, and the third was a son, Edgar, born in 1819.

Jenny, who later had to endure poverty in its shabbiest form--for in London there was no money to buy a coffin for her dead child--had a happy and carefree childhood. Her parents were rich.

Ludwig von Westphalen's salary in the early eighteen-twenties was one thousand six hundred thalers a year, which was a great deal at that time and place, and in addition there was the yield of a respectable estate. At that time two good furnished rooms could be rented at Trier for from six to seven thalers a month, and the price of a four-course dinner every day for a whole month was from six to seven thalers. The Westphalens occupied a sumptuous house with a big garden in one of the best streets of Trier.

Heinrich Marx and his family lived next door. In a small town like Trier everybody knows practically everybody else. Children living in neighbouring houses know each other best of all. Jenny's favourite playmate was Karl's elder sister, Sophie. Edgar, who was scarcely a year younger than Karl, sat next to him on the same school bench. Westphalen, himself half-German and half-Scotch, had no national or racial prejudices. Lessing was one of his favourite authors. That Heinrich Marx had only recently become a Christian worried him not at all. The children made friends and the fathers followed suit. The Marx children played in the Westphalens' garden, and in his old age Edgar von Westphalen still remembered with pleasure the friendly greeting that old Marx always had for him and his sisters.

A close friendship sprang up between old Westphalen and Karl Marx. The old man--he was in his seventies--used to enjoy wandering 'over our wonderfully picturesque hills and woods' with the young schoolboy. Of the talks that they had on these occasions Marx was fondest of recalling those in which Westphalen awakened in him his first interest in the character and teachings of Saint-Simon. Marx's father was a Kantian. The pedigree of scientific socialism according to Friedrich Engels is well known: 'We German Socialists are proud of being descended, not only from Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen but from Kant, Fichte and Hegel as well.'

Laura Lafargue burned the whole of the correspondence between her parents. We do not know when the love-affair between the two young people first began, and we believe it to be a waste of time to try and find out from the rare and obliterated traces that are left. At the time of Marx's death an old inhabitant of Trier could still remember 'lovely Jenny' and Marx, the young student, whom he recollected as 'practically the ugliest human being whom the sun could ever have shone on.' An older friend of his, he said, still used to speak ardently of the charming, bewitching creature, and neither he nor anybody else could understand how her choice had possibly managed to fall upon Marx. True, he admitted that Marx's early demonstrated talent and force of character and his prepossessing ways with women made up for his ugly exterior. One seems to hear the voice of a spurned suitor in all this.

Karl's father was at first the only person to know of the secret engagement. He knew his son too well not to know that it was useless to forbid him something which Karl would certainly not have allowed himself to be forbidden. He expressed what reassured him in his letters to his son. He admonished him in this affair, as in all others, to be as candid with his father as with a friend, to test himself rigorously and, above all, to be mindful of man's sacred duty to the weaker sex. Karl, if he persisted in his decision, must become a man at once. Six weeks later he wrote again: 'I have spoken to Jenny, and I should have liked to have been able to reassure her completely. I did my uttermost, but I could not talk everything away. I do not know how her parents will take it. The judgment of relatives and of the world is after all no trifle. ... She is making a priceless sacrifice for you. She is manifesting a self-denial which cold reason alone can fully appreciate. Woe betide you if ever in your life you forget it! You must look into your heart alone. The sure, certain knowledge that in spite of your youth you are a man, deserving the world's respect, nay, fighting and earning it, giving assurance of your steadfastness and future earnest striving, and imposing silence on evil tongues for past mistakes, must proceed from you alone.'

At the time of his engagement Karl Marx was an eighteen-year-old student with numerous inclinations and a highly uncertain future. As the second son of a numerous family, with no considerable financial prospects to look forward to, he would have to fight for his own place in the world, and he would need a number of years for the purpose. Jenny, four years older than he, was the daughter of a rich and noble State official, the 'prettiest girl in Trier,' the 'queen of the ball.' When Marx visited Trier in 1863 he found Jenny still survived in old people's memories as the 'fairy princess.' The engagement conflicted with all the prejudices of the bourgeois and noble world.

Karl 'had to become a man at once.' In the middle of October he went to Berlin and plunged head over heels into his books. In order to marry it was necessary to complete his studies as quickly as possible, pass his examinations and find a job. In the meantime all Jenny could do was wait. She was twenty-two years old. Many of her friends were married, and the rest were engaged. She rejected all her suitors--officers, landed proprietors and government officials. People in Trier started to talk.

As long as Karl had been in Trier what people said did not worry Jenny. When she grew afraid he had been there to support her, full of courage and plans for the future. She believed in him, in his future and hers. But when he went she was alone. Nobody must notice anything, she must laugh gaily, pay visits, go to dances, as behoved a girl of marriageable age belonging to the best society. Karl's father and his sister Sophie were her only confidants. With them she could talk openly of her love and of her anxieties.

The two persons dearest to Marx, Jenny and his father, were often filled with anxiety for the future. His father wrote to him at the beginning of March, 1837, and said that though from time to time his heart delighted in thoughts of him and of the future, he could not shake off anxious and gloomy forebodings when the thought struck him: Was Karl's heart in conformity with his head, his capacity? Was there room for the earthly but tender feelings so consolatory to the man of feeling in this vale of tears? Karl's heart was clearly possessed by a daemon it was not granted everybody to be possessed by, but was the nature of this daemon divine or Faustian? Would Karl--and this doubt was not the least painful of those that afflicted his father's heart--ever be susceptible of a true, human, domestic happiness? Would Karl--and this doubt, since he had recently begun to love a certain person not less than his own child, was no less tormenting--ever be in a position to bring happiness into his most immediate surroundings? He felt sorry for Jenny. Jenny, who with her pure, childish disposition was so utterly devoted to Karl, was from time to time a victim, against her will, of a kind of fear, heavy with foreboding, that he could not explain.

In another letter six months later he wrote: 'You can be certain, and I myself am certain, that no prince could estrange her from you. She cleaves to you body and soul, and she is making a sacrifice for you of which most girls are certainly not capable. That is something you must never forget.'

Jenny waited impatiently for Karl's letters. They came rarely. Marx was never a very good correspondent. To make up for it, at Christmas, 1836, Jenny received a volume of poems, The Book of Love, dedicated to his 'dear, ever-beloved Jenny von Westphalen.' Sophie wrote to her brother that when Jenny came to see Marx's parents on the day after Christmas 'she wept tears of joy and pain when she was given the poems.'

The three volumes of The Book of Love have long since vanished. What survives of Marx's poetical attempts--two poems published in a periodical, the Athenäum, a volume of poems dedicated to his father, scenes from Oulanem, a tragedy, and some chapters from Scorpion and Felix, a novel in the manner of Sterne--justify the harsh judgment that Marx himself passed on them. He described them as sentiment wildly and formlessly expressed, completely lacking in naturalness and entirely woven out of moonshine, with rhetorical reflections taking the place of poetical feeling. All the same he granted them a certain warmth and straining after vital rhythm.

Jenny's position became more and more intolerable. She hesitated when his father suggested that Karl should reveal the secret and ask her parents for her hand. She seems to have been worried by the difference in age between herself and Karl. Eventually she agreed to Karl's father's suggestion and Karl wrote to Trier. How the demand for her hand was received we do not know. There seem to have been difficulties and some opposition, the leader of which is sure to have been Ferdinand, the subsequent Prussian Minister of the Interior, who had just been transferred to an official position in Trier, where he was soon noted for his 'great zeal and moderate intelligence.'

Eventually Jenny's parents gave their consent. At the end of 1837, Karl Heinrich Marx, a student nineteen years of age, became officially engaged to Jenny von Westphalen.