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

Chapter 04: Student Years in Berlin

There were seven hundred students at Bonn, but several thousand in Berlin. Bonn, in spite of spies and informers, was a pleasant, patriarchal provincial town, in which it was not easy to get away from the usual students' round, with its taverns and duels. The University of Berlin, compared to the other universities in Germany, was a 'workhouse' compared to a 'tavern,' to quote Ludwig Feuerbach.

At that period Berlin still retained many relics of the times of the Brandenburg Electors. The walls still surrounded the Old Town, and the old towers, only the names of which remain to-day, were still standing. Gardens, meadows and fields still made deep inroads into the maze of narrow, crooked alleys. Schöneberg was still the wooded beautiful mountain, and the unpretentious houses of the Nollendorfs still stood on the Nollendorfplatz, which teems with traffic to-day. It lagged behind the young industrial towns of the Rhineland in economic and social development, but with its three hundred thousand inhabitants it was second only to Vienna, the biggest town on German-speaking territory, and was the first big town that Marx became acquainted with.

He matriculated in the faculty of law on October 22, 1837, took a modest room in the Mittelstrasse, not far from the university, and reluctantly proceeded to pay calls upon a few influential friends of his father's to whom he had been given introductions, and then cut himself off from all social intercourse. He saw no one and spoke to no one.

Bonn had taught him that an attractive title to a course of lectures is not always a reliable guide to its contents. In his first term he attended only three courses of lectures--by Steffens, the philosopher, on anthropology, Savigny on jurisprudence and Gans on criminal law.

Grams and Savigny, the two stars of the university, were bitter opponents. Friedrich Karl Savigny was the founder and principal theorist of the school of historical jurisprudence which rejected the conception of natural right as an empty abstraction and regarded law as something concrete arising out of the spirit and historical development of a nation. This boiled down in practice to a simple sanctification of everything handed down from the past. The ideologist of the Christian-German state had discerned the revolutionary implications of the philosophy of Hegel at a time when the ruling powers still regarded it as absolutism's strongest possible support.

His most important adversary was Eduard Gans. Hegel had summoned the young scholar, who possessed a gift of eloquence not granted to other lecturers, to the faculty of jurisprudence. Gans was not a thinker of special originality. All his life he remained faithful to his great teacher's system, but he went his own way in the conclusions he drew from Hegel's fundamental principles. In opposition to the school of historical law that looked towards the past, he set up Saint-Simonistic ideas looking towards the future. He had a glowing enthusiasm for the complete freeing of the human personality, an enthusiasm for all plans which had as their goal the complete reconstruction of society. His controversy with Savigny was more than merely a legal one. It assumed a philosophical, actually a political character.

After the death of Hegel in 1831 Gans lectured on history as well as law, the history of the French Revolution and its salutary effects on the rest of Europe in particular. The big lecture hall was filled to overflowing by his audience. His lectures were attended not only by students but by officials, officers, men of letters, 'the whole of Berlin,' in fact everyone who was still concerned for political and social questions in those fusty times. They came to listen to the free speech of a free man.

The fact that the university was freedom's only sanctuary was one of the principal factors in its importance. Gans once took a French scholar round Berlin. In Unter den Linden he showed him the building next to the university. 'Look!' he said. 'The university next to the arsenal. That is the symbol of Prussia.' Prussia was an enormous barracks. A narrow and spiteful censorship waged a pitiless war on intellectual freedom. It was a time when a censor (he was the one with whom Marx was destined to tussle when editor of the Rheinische Zeitung) suppressed an advertisement of a translation of Dante's Divine Comedy by 'Philalethes,' the later King John of Saxony, with the comment that 'no comedy should be made of divine things.' A police régime of the pettiest kind hampered the citizen's activities in every direction and made his life increasingly intolerable. Only at the university was there a modicum of freedom of speech. Gans was one of the few who made real use of his academic freedom. He expressed opinions and praised the French Revolution in his lectures in a way he could not possibly have done in books.

Savigny and Steffens testified to the zeal with which Marx listened to them, and Gans's report on him was that he was 'exceptionally industrious.'

Marx, obliged to study law, felt, to use his own expression, 'above all an urge to wrestle with philosophy.' He made up his mind to combine philosophy and law. He worked through the sources and the commentaries and translated the first two books of the Pandects--'absolutely uncritically and just like a schoolboy,' as he wrote to his father in retrospect. He worked at a three-hundred-page philosophy of law, covering the whole territory of law, only to see at the end that 'without philosophy nothing could be accomplished.' In addition he made excerpts from works on the history of art, translated Latin classics, started studying English and Italian in order at the end of term 'once more to search for the dance of the Muses and the music of the satyrs.' These poems, he wrote to his father, were the only ones in which he 'caught a glimpse, as if by the touch of a magic wand, of the realm of true poetry as a distant fairy palace,' and 'all his creations fell away to nothing.'

'What with all these activities, in my first term I stayed up many nights, fought many battles, experienced much internal and external excitement. In the end I emerged not very much enriched, having neglected nature and art, and rejected friendships.' His health had been seriously affected in the process, but he did not spare himself but cast himself once more into the arms of philosophy. Once more he wanted 'to plunge into the ocean, but with the firm intention of finding mental nature to be necessarily just as concretely and firmly grounded as physical nature ... my aim was to search for the idea in real things themselves.' Marx had read fragments of the Hegelian philosophy, whose 'grotesque, craggy melody' he had not found to his taste. He wrote a dialogue entitled Cleanthes, or the point of departure and necessary progress of philosophy, a philosophical-dialectical treatment of divinity as manifested as an idea-in-itself, as religion and as history, only to find at the end that his dearest child had been 'nursed in moonshine, and that it was as if a false siren had carried it in her arms and handed it over to the enemy.' His last sentence was the beginning of the Hegelian system. Mortification at finding himself forced to bend the knee to a philosophical system that he hated made him ill. During his indisposition he read Hegel from beginning to end, and most of Hegel's pupils as well, and 'chained himself firmly and more firmly still to the present philosophy of the world from which he had thought to escape.' By the late summer of 1837 he had become an Hegelian.

He was living at the time at Stralau, a country place near Berlin, where the doctor had sent him. Fresh air, plenty of walks and a healthier life enabled him to 'ripen from a pale-faced weakling to robust bodily vigour.' Moreover, it was at Stralau that he met the men who introduced him to the 'Doktorklub' and played a great part in the next stage of his development.

The 'Doktorklub' had been founded a few years previously. There were no tavern clubs or local students' associations in Berlin. Students who were in sympathy with one another met on fixed days at inns and coffee-houses, which in Berlin were also reading-rooms. In one of these inns in the Französischestrasse there met regularly a number of students and young graduates united by a similar interest in literary and philosophical questions. In the course of time these meetings took on the character of an informal club and they were transferred to private premises where there would be no undesired guests and more open speech was possible. 'In this circle of ambitious young men,' a member of the 'Doktorklub' wrote in his reminiscences, 'there reigned that spirit of idealism, that enthusiastic urge for knowledge, that liberal spirit that still so thoroughly animated the youth of that time. Poems and other work done by us used to be read aloud and criticised at our meetings, but our special interest was the philosophy of Hegel, which was still in its prime and held sway more or less over the whole educated world, though individual voices had already been raised against the system and a split between the Rights and the Lefts had already become perceptible in the ranks of the Hegelians themselves.'

Marx became a frequent visitor to the club, and through it he made numerous acquaintances in Berlin literary and scientific circles including Bettina von Arnim, the last Romantic, in whose salon in Unter den Linden the most varied society met--young writers and old generals, Liberals and Conservatives, ministers and Jewish journalists, believers and atheists. Marx does not seem to have been a frequent guest of Bettina's, and in his poems he wrote a pointed epigram about the 'new-fangled Romantic.' Bettina remembered the young student well. When she came to Trier in 1838 (or 1839) he had to accompany her on all her excursions. Marx only had a week to spend in his native town, and was left with practically no time to talk to Jenny at all.

The university became unimportant for Marx. True, he had to attend the prescribed lectures, the lectures essential for a law student if he were to pass his examinations, but more than that he did not do. In the eight terms he spent in Berlin after the summer of 1837 he only attended seven courses of lectures, and for three whole terms he attended no lectures at all. His interests were now confined to philosophy. Some of his notebooks of this period have been preserved. They are full of excerpts from Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Bacon, and other philosophical classics.

The political under-currents of the time masqueraded, were forced to masquerade, as philosophical schools of thought. Division appeared in the Hegelian camp. The 'Old' Hegelians remained loyal to the system and conservative ideals of the older Hegel, while the 'Young' Hegelians laid even greater stress on the revolutionary elements in the Hegelian method, on the Hegelian dialectic, which regards nothing as permanent but everything as flowing or becoming, recognises the contradiction in everything and is thus the 'algebra of the revolution.' The breach between the two schools of thought became wider and wider and the 'Doktorklub' was in the very midst of the rising battle. The challenging 'Young' Hegelian group began to crystallise out of it. Its most important representatives were Adolph Rutenberg, Karl Friedrich Köppen and Bruno Bauer.

Marx met Rutenberg first, and it was probably Rutenberg who introduced him to the 'Doktorklub.' In November, 1837, he was calling him his most intimate friend. Rutenberg was a former 'Burschenschafter,' and had served long sentences in Prussian prisons. He became a lecturer in geography and history at the Cadet School but was soon dismissed because of the unfavourable influence he was said to exercise on his pupils and because of the Liberal newspaper correspondence he wrote. He became a professional writer. He was somewhat superficial, not overweighted with learning, and an easy and quick writer, and soon came to occupy a foremost position among the publicists of Berlin. Political journalism, properly so-called, did not exist in Germany of the thirties. The draconic censorship alone was sufficient to nip it in the bud. An inadequate substitute was provided by the general correspondence with which the journalists of Berlin kept the provincial Press supplied. There was very little in this correspondence. It contained few facts and still fewer ideas, but that left all the more scope for Liberal expressions and veiled hints about the remarkable things the writer would be able to disclose were the sword of Damocles, i.e. the censorship, not dangling over his head. During the period in question these letters from the capital fulfilled a definite need. They expressed the elementary interests of society and strengthened the elementary protest against the ruling powers. Rutenberg was one of the most prominent representatives of this type of journalism, and as such he had a certain importance in Marx's life. At the beginning of 1842 he was appointed editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. In this position, when he had to prove himself as a genuine publicist for the first time, he was a complete failure. He was not fit for more than writing Berlin letters full of veiled hints. Rutenberg sank lower and lower and ended up in doubtful hole-and-corner journalism.

Karl Friedrich Köppen was a man of entirely different stamp. He, like Rutenberg, was a history master by profession, but was a man of real learning and scholarship, with a solid and extensive knowledge in many fields. At the same time he was of a modest and retiring disposition, with no aptitude whatever for placing himself in the limelight, unlike Rutenberg, who was very skilled at it indeed. Köppen's chief work, an account of Lamaism, has in many respects not been superseded to this day. He was the first German historian to put forward an unprejudiced view of the Terror in the French Revolution. Even some of his letters on transitory themes have preserved their value. Those he wrote about Berlin University are still prized by scholars and specialists. It is only as a politician and a pioneer of the Socialist movement that Köppen is still not appreciated according to his deserts. He took an active part in the formation of the first workers' organisations in Berlin in 1848 and 1849. When the Reaction set in he was one of the few intellectuals who continued working in the workers' clubs in spite of the severe penalties he had to suffer. Köppen remained true to his ideals, and his friendship with Marx survived all the vicissitudes of life. When Marx visited him in Berlin in 1861 he found him 'the old Köppen still.' He wrote to Engels that the two occasions he 'pub-crawled' with him really did him good.

The most important member of the group was Bruno Bauer, a lecturer in theology. A contemporary describes him thus: 'Somewhat small in build and of medium height, his demeanour is calm and he confronts you with a confident, serene smile; his frame is compact, and you observe with great interest the fine but definite features of his face, the boldly protruding, angular and finely pointed nose, the high-arched brow, the fine-cut mouth, the almost napoleonic figure.' Generally distracted and absent-minded, with his gaze directed into space--Rutenberg's children always used to say that Uncle Bauer was looking into Africa--he used to liven up in argument. His wide erudition, his gift of precise definition, his irony and the boldness of his thought made Bauer the chosen leader of the Young Hegelian movement. It was not till later, when the time came to proceed from analysis to synthesis and establish positive, practical aims that he failed. He remained the critic; and criticism for criticism's sake, 'absolute criticism' became for him an end in itself. But at the end of the thirties and the beginning of the forties, when the times demanded criticism of the old and the shattering of ancient idols, Bruno Bauer was in the very forefront of the battle.

In 1837, when Marx joined the group, Young Hegelianism was just coming into existence. David Friedrich Strauss had published his Life of Jesus two years before. It was the first Hegelian onslaught on the foundations of official religion. It is somewhat difficult to-day to realise its full significance. Society of that day was divided into strata. It was a rigid framework, resting solely on the sanction of religion, and reason had to adapt itself to it in all modesty and humility as to something willed by God. As long as the foundation on which it rested, namely the principle of divine revelation, stood intact, all criticism of any detail of the social structure was impotent. But any thrust at that principle that went home shook the whole structure to its depths.

Before Strauss Hegelian philosophy had peacefully and harmoniously cohabited with religion. Certainly it was only a marriage of prudence, but from the point of view of the old world it was a highly useful and convenient one. Strauss was the first to disturb this harmonious bliss. Everybody immediately realised that it forestalled a general attack on the whole position. Marx wrote a few years later:

'Criticism of religion is the hypothesis of all criticism. The foundation of irreligious criticism is that man makes religion and religion does not make man. But man is no abstract being lurking somewhere outside and apart from the world. Man means the world of men, the state, society. Religion, which is a distorted outlook on the world because the world is itself distorted, is the product of the state and of society. Religion is a fantastic materialisation of the human entity, because the human entity has no true reality. Hence the fight against religion is a direct fight against a world the spiritual aroma of which it is.'

Strauss found anything but support among the Hegelians of Berlin. The essays published by Bruno Bauer in 1835 and 1836 were among the most trenchant of the attacks that were made on him. Bauer flatly denied the right of philosophy to criticise Christian dogma, and he did so with such dogmatism and violence that Strauss confidentally [sic] predicted that he would end up in the camp of the extreme bigots. Bauer took a different path, however, and it was the bigots who forced him down it. Apart from the fact that their attack was directed at the philosophy of Hegel, which a Hegelian like Bauer was necessarily obliged to defend, the God whom they so martially proclaimed was not the mild Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount but the gloomy, vindictive Jehovah of the Old Testament. Their Holy Book was the Old Testament far more than the New, and it was this that set Bauer on his critical tack.

He made his début in this direction in 1837 and 1838; at a time, that is to say, when Marx had become a member of the 'Doktorklub.' Marx took part in the development of Young Hegelianism which originated in the club; moreover, he was, as far as we can tell--unfortunately there is no period of Marx's life about which we are so badly informed--one of the most active and progressive spirits in its development. He took his place at the most extreme wing from the start. Ruthless consistency was a characteristic of the very beginning of his independent intellectual life. At the end of 1836 he expressed his views about law in a letter to his father, who replied: 'Your views about law are not without truth, but systematised they would be very calculated to cause storms.' The ageing Trier lawyer had lived through the storms of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and yearned for peace and quiet. His son liked storms and looked out for them, though for the time being in the realm of intellectual conflict only.

Most of the members of the 'Doktorklub' were older than Marx, and many of them were much older. That did not prevent them from accepting him as an equal practically from the first. As early as 1837, when he was a student of nineteen and was nursing the idea of founding a literary paper, his friends Rutenberg and Bauer were able to assure him that 'all the aesthetic celebrities of the Hegelian school' were willing to collaborate. The club used to meet often, either in private houses or in small inns in the neighbourhood of the university For a short time it met every day. The books and essays to which it gave birth demonstrate its breadth of interests and the rapid development through which it passed.

At first the chief subject of discussion was religion. To begin with the battle raged round the question of the distortion of true Christianity by mythology and the assimilation of Christianity to the conclusions of contemporary philosophy, but it quickly developed into an attack on religion itself. Though the members of the club did not definitely emerge as atheists until 1842, most of them had long been aware of what lay at the end of the road they had embarked upon, and occasionally ceremoniously greeted one another with the jesting appellation of 'Your irreverence.'

In the second half of the thirties the Government started a drive against Hegelianism, and that drove the 'Doktorklub' into political opposition, though an outward fillip was still required. The 'Doktorklub' gave the initiative at the 'serenade' of students on Gans's birthday in 1838. The celebrations were intended to honour in Gans the sturdy champion, not only of the Hegelian tradition, but also of the seven Göttingen professors who, to the applause of the whole of Germany, had preferred sacrificing their office to taking an oath of loyalty to the King of Hanover who had abolished the Constitution. But, so far as the club was concerned, being in political opposition was still far from involving them in taking an active part in contemporary life. Rutenberg was the only one who demanded that they should take the plunge into contemporary life. His insistence that the time had come to abandon fruitless 'brooding' and pass from the world of theory to the world of action was answered by Bauer, who maintained that there could be no question yet of their direct participation in the life of the time. Before they could have any practical influence upon the world, and that in the near future, they must, in his view, effect an intellectual revolution in men's minds. There was no other way. Marx shared Bauer's opinion. The old must be intellectually annihilated before it could be annihilated on the material plane. The alteration of the world would necessarily follow from the new interpretation put upon it by philosophers. In other words a virtue was made of impotence. This earned the club the following lampoon in classical metre:

So far our deeds are all words and are like to remain so;

Abstractions we have in our minds are bound to come true of themselves.1

Bruno Bauer was still faithful to this view when he moved from Berlin to Bonn in 1838. In 1840 and 1841 the Berlin group moved faster and faster towards the Left. In the summer of 1840 an observer characterised it as 'thoroughly devoted to the idea of constitutional monarchy.' Köppen wrote his book on Frederick the Great and his Opponents and dedicated it to 'his friend Karl Heinrich Marx of Trier.' Köppen honoured Frederick, 'in whose spirit we swore to live and die,' as the enemy of Christian-German reaction. His basic idea was that the state was embodied in its purest form in a monarchy ruled over by a monarch like Frederick, a philosopher, a free servant of the world spirit. Renewal could only come from the top.

The phase of Liberal constitutional monarchism soon ran its course. By the winter of 1840-1 the club were calling themselves 'friends of the people,' and their theoretical position was therefore at the extreme left wing of revolutionary republicanism. Rutenberg in his Berlin letters compared the so-called reading rooms of Berlin with the Paris coffee-houses on the eve of the Revolution and Köppen wrote his essays on the Terror. The club had begun 'direct' participation in contemporary life.

During this period Marx published nothing, and no manuscripts dating from these years have been preserved. His share in the intellectual life of the club, and it was an important one, was only expressed indirectly in the writings of others. It appears from a letter Köppen wrote to Marx on June 3, 1841, that many of the ideas expressed by Bruno Bauer in his essay on 'The Christian State and Our Times,' one of the first in which political deductions were drawn from religious criticism, were Marx's. Köppen remarked that as long as Marx was in Berlin he had no 'personal, so to speak, self-thought thoughts of his own'; which was obviously a very, friendly and highly exaggerated piece of self-depreciation, but at the same time gives a clue to how much Marx was able to give his friends. They treasured him as 'a warehouse of thoughts, a workshop of ideas.' Marx lived in their memories as the 'young lion,' combative, turbulent, quick-witted, as bold in posing problems as in solving them. In the Christliches Heldengedicht, written in 1842, after Marx had left Berlin, Marx appeared as the club remembered him:

Who's this approaching who thus rants and raves?
'Tis the wild fury, black-maned Marx of Treves;
See him advance, nay spring upon the foe
As though to seize and never let him go.
See him extend his threatening arms on high
To seize the heavenly canopy from the sky;
See his clenched fists, and see his desperate air,
As though ten thousand devils had him by the hair.2

It must not be supposed that the 'Doktorklub' confined itself to bringing together a collection of academic intellectuals for the purpose of philosophical discussion only. Most of its members were young, exuberant and always ready for mischief. Protest against the crass philistinism that surrounded them and the absurd, petty regimentation of personal life by the police occasionally broke out in unruly forms. Bruno Bauer appears in the police records as a 'heavy drinker' and Rutenberg was reported to have taken part in street fights. Edgar Bauer, a younger brother of Bruno, was punished for ostentatiously smoking in the street, which was forbidden by the police. Liebknecht describes in his memoirs how Marx celebrated a reunion with Edgar Bauer in London in the fifties. They engaged in a 'pub-crawl' and not a single tavern on their route was allowed to remain unvisited. When they could drink no longer they started throwing stones at the street lamps under cover of darkness and went on until the police came and they had to run. Marx developed a turn of speed no one had thought him capable of. He was nearly forty at the time, father of a numerous family, author of works of far-reaching importance. One can imagine what he must have been capable of in his twenties in Berlin.

Marx, once accepted into the ranks of the Young Hegelians, paid practically no more attention to the university. It had been 'purged.' Eduard Gans, Hegel's most important pupil and the only Hegelian in the faculty of law, died young, in 1839. Bauer had to leave the university soon afterwards. He was unspeakably obnoxious to the pietists, and all Altenstein, Minister of Public Worship and Education, who was favourably inclined towards the Hegelians, was able to do for him was to have him transferred to Bonn. Reactionaries were installed in the Hegelians' places. Gans's chair was filled by Julius Stahl, theorist of Prussian absolutism, who in the fifties became a practitioner of it as well. The extreme bigots, the people whom Hegel had described a few years previously as the 'rabble' with whom he had to 'tussle,' set the tone in the university.

With the accession of King Frederick William IV the Christian-Romantic reaction set in in full force. He who did not bow and hold his peace was visited with exemplary punishment. Of academic freedom no trace was left. The university became an annexe of the barracks.

In his first student years Marx had had hopes of becoming a university lecturer at Berlin. This was impossible now. He could not even expect to take his doctor's degree at the university. His thesis would have to be submitted to Stahl, against whom the students--with Marx certainly among them--had noisily demonstrated when he was appointed to Gans's place. As Varnhagen noted in his diary, this was the first outward opposition to the new government.

Marx's father died in May, 1838. During the last year the family's material position had been worsening. In Trier Jenny was waiting. And on the other side Bruno Bauer was urging his friend to hurry. It was time to put a stop to his 'shilly-shallying' and end his 'wearisome vacillation about the sheer, nonsensical farce of his examinations.' Marx, he said, should come to Bonn, where he would find things easy. At Bonn he would be able to get a lectureship. The professors at Bonn knew they were no philosophers and that the students wanted to hear philosophy. 'Come here and the new battle will begin.' Marx doubted whether everything would turn out to be so easy at Bonn as Bauer hoped. He was far more engrossed with a project for founding a philosophical journal, about which he had been conducting an earnest correspondence with Bauer, than with the prospect of a lectureship at Bonn. But he was not yet willing to give up hope of overcoming the obstacles and being able to teach at Bonn by his friend's side.

On March 30, 1841, he received his leaving-certificate from Berlin University. On April 6 he sent to Jena a dissertation on 'The difference between the natural philosophies of Democrites [sic?] and the Epicureans.' Certain negotiations appear to have preceded this step. The University of Jena was celebrated at the time for the readiness with which it granted doctor's degrees. It lived up to its reputation. A week later the dean of Jena University presented the candidate Karl Heinrich Marx to the faculty of philosophy. The diploma was dated April 15. Marx's official student years were at an end.

Chapter 04 notes

1: Unsere Taten sind Worte bis jetzt und noch lange
Hinter die Abstraktion stellt sich die Praxis von selbst
.

2: Wer jaget hinterdrein mit wildem Ungestüm?

Ein schwarzer Kerl aus Trier, ein markhaft Ungetüm.
Er gehet, hüpfet nicht, er springet auf den Hacken
Und raset voller Wut und gleich als wollt' er packen
Das weite Himmelszelt und zu der Erde ziehn
Streckt er die Arme sein weit in die Lüfte hin.
Geballt die böse Faust, so tobt er sonder Rasten,
Als wenn ihn bei den Schopf zehntausend Teufel fassten

.