Routledge Library Editions karl marx

No direct information is available concerning this period, but to judge from the letters of his father it would appear that a certain amount of wild oats was sown in it. At first we find his father complaining only of “ Bills a la Karl, without relation and without result ” (and it is true of Marx throughout his life that as far as accounts were concerned the classic theoretician of money could never quite make his own tally), but later on we find his father in a very bitter mood and complaining of “wild frolics ”.

Coming on top of the merry year he had just spent in Bonn it had all the appearance of a typical student escapade when at the mature age of eighteen Karl Marx became engaged to a playmate of his childhood, a close friend of his elder sister Sophie, who helped to smooth the path to the union of the

two young hearts. In reality, however, it was the first and most joyous victory of this born master of men, a victory which appeared “absolutely incomprehensible ” to his father until he discovered that the girl too had “something of genius” about her and was capable of making sacrifices which would have' been impossible for an ordinary girl.

Indeed, Jenny von Westphalen was a girl not only of unusual beauty, but of unusual spirit and character. She was four years older than Karl Marx, but still only in the early twenties. Her youthful beauty was in its first glorious bloom and she was greatly admired and much courted, and as the daughter of a highly-placed official she might have made a brilliant match. Jenny von Westphalen sacrificed all her brilliant prospects for “a dangerous and uncertain future”, as Marx’s father put it, and occasionally he believed that he could observe in her also the anxious presentiments which disturbed him, but by that time he was so certain of the “ angelic girl ”, the “ enchantress ”, that he swore to his son that not even a prince should rob him of her.

The future turned out to be more dangerous and more uncertain than Heinrich Marx had feared even in his worst forebodings, but Jenny von Westphalen, whose youthful portrait radiates childlike grace and charm, held to the man of her choice with the steadfast courage of a heroine in defiance of terrible sufferings and affliction. It was not in the humdrum sense of the word perhaps that she lightened the heavy burden of his life, for she was one of the favoured children of fortune and not always capable of dealing with the minor misfortunes of life as a woman of the people more inured to hardship might have done, but in the high sense in which she understood his life’s work she became his worthy partner.

In all her letters which are still extant there is a breath of real womanliness. Hers was a nature such as Goethe has described, ringing equally true in every mood, whether it was reflected in the delightful chatter of happy days or in the tragic anguish of a Niobe robbed of a child by poverty and privation and unable to give it even a modest grave. Her beauty was always the pride of her husband and after their fates had been linked together for twenty years we find him writing in 1863 from Trier where he had gone to attend the funeral of his mother : “ Everyday I made a pilgrimage to the old Westphalen house (in the Romerstrasse) and it interests me more than all the Roman remains because it reminds me of the happy days of my youth and because it once sheltered my treasure. Everyday I am asked left and right about the quondam ‘ most beautiful girl in Trier ’ , the ‘ Queen of the ball ’. It is damned agreeable

for a man to find that his wife lives on in the memory of a whole town as ‘ an enchanted princess ’.” And the dying Marx, free as he was of al sentimentality, spoke in a sorrowful and deeply- moving tone of the most beautiful period of his life embodied in Jenny von Westphalen.

The young people became engaged without first asking the per^assion of the girl’s parents, a circumstance which caused the conscientious father of Karl Marx no little misgiving, but it was not long before their consent was obtained. Despite his name and title, Privy Councillor Ludwig von Westphalen belonged neither to the East Elbian Junkers nor to the old Prussian bureaucracy. His father was Philip Westphalen, one of the most remarkable figures in military history. He was civil secretary to Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick who, at the head of a miscellaneous army in English pay, successfully defended Western Germany during the Seven Years War against the invasive proclivities of Louis XV and his Pompadour. Philip Westphalen became the real Chief-of-Staff of the Duke in the face of all the English and German generals with the army. His services were recognized in such measure that the King of England proposed to make him Adj'utant-General of the army, an honour which Philip Westphalen refused. He was, however, compelled to tame his independent spirit to the extent of “ accepting” a title, and his reasons for so doing were similar to those which caused Herder and Schiller to submit to the same indignity : in order to marry the daughter of a Scottish baronial family who had come to the camp of Duke Ferdinand to visit a sister married to the General commanding the English auxiliary troops.

One of the sons of this pair was Ludwig von Westphalen. From his father he had inherited an historic name and on his mother’s side his ancestors recalled great historical memories : one of her forefathers in the direct line of descent had gone to the stake during the struggle for the Reformation in Scotland and another, Earl Archibald of Argyle, was executed in the market-place at Edinburgh as a rebel against James II. With such family traditions Ludwig von Westphalen was far above the reeking and musty narrow-mindedness of the beggar-proud Junkers and of the obscurantist bureaucracy. Originally in Brunswick service, he had not hesitated to continue this career when Napoleon amalgamated the little Dukedom with the Kingdom of Westphalia, for he was obviously less interested in the hereditary Guelphs than in the reforms with which the French conquerors remedied the decaying conditions in his own little Fatherland. However, his objection to foreign dominance




was none the less strong on that account, and in 1813 he felt the stern hand of the French Marshal Davoust.

His daughter Jenny was born in Salzwedel on the 12th February 1814 where he was Landrat,1 and two years later he was transferred to Trier as adviser to the government. In his preliminary zeal the Prussian Prime Minister Hardenberg had sufficient acumen to realize that he must send the most capable men and those least affected by the common idiosyncrasies of Junkerdom into the newly-won Rhineland, which in its heart still leaned towards France.

To the end of his life Karl Marx spoke with the greatest devotion and gratitude of Ludwig von Westphalen, and when he addressed him as his “ dear fatherly friend” and assured him of his “ filial love ” it was more than the perfunctory flourish of a son-in-law. Westphalen could recite whole passages from the poems of Homer and he knew most of the dramas of Shakespeare by heart both in English and in German. In the “ old Westphalen house” Karl Marx obtained much stimulation which his own home was unable to offer him and his school still less. From his earliest years he was one of Westphalen’s favourites, and it is not unlikely that Westphalen gave his consent to the engagement in view of the happy marriage of his own parents, for in the eyes of the world the daughter of an aristocratic baronial family had also made a bad match when she married a commoner who was poor and no more than a civil servant.

The spirit of the father did not live on in the eldest son, who developed into a bureaucratic careerist and worse than that : during the period of reaction in the ’fifties he was the Prussian Minister of the Interior and he defended the feudal claims of the most obdurate and obscurantist Junkers even against the Prime Minister Manteuffel, who was at least a shrewd bureaucrat. There were never any particularly close relations between this son, Ferdinand von Westphalen, and his sister, in fact she was only his step-sister, for he was fifteen years older than Jenny and the son of his father by an earlier marriage.

Jenny’s real brother was Edgar von Westphalen, who developed as far to the left of his father’s path as his step-brother did to the right. Occasionally Edgar even appended his signature to the communist "manifestos of his brother-in-law Karl Marx, but he never became a very reliable supporter. He went overseas and experienced changing fortunes, returned and turned up here and there, a thoroughly wild character whenever he was heard of, but he always kept a warm corner in his heart for Jenny and Karl Marx and they named their first son after him.

1 Approximately the German equivalent of Sheriff of the County.—Tr.

CHAPTER TWO: A PUPIL OF HEGEL

i. The First Year in Berlin

Even before Karl Marx had become engaged to Jenny von Westphalen his father had decided that his studies should be continued in Berlin and a document dated the 1st of July 1836 is still extant in which Heinrich Marx not only gives his permission but declares it his wish that his son Karl shall enter the University of Berlin to continue studies in jurisprudence and political economy begun at Bonn.

The engagement itself probably strengthened this decision, for in view of the remote nature of their prospects the cautious character of Marx’s father caused him to feel that for the moment at least a separation of the lovers was desirable. His Prussian patriotism may have influenced him in his choice of Berlin, and also perhaps the fact that the Berlin University did not foster the “glorious college days” tradition which, in the opinion of his prudent parent, Karl Marx had supported quite enough at Bonn. “Other universities are positively Bacchanalian compared with this workhouse”’ declared Ludwig Feuerbach, referring to Berlin.

The young student certainly did not choose Berlin himself. Karl Marx loved the sunny Rhineland, and the Prussian capital remained obnoxious to him all his life. The philosophy of Hegel cannot have exercised any attraction because he knew nothing at all about it, although it ruled still more absolutely at the University of Berlin since the death of its founder than it had done even during his life. And then there was the accompanying separation from his sweetheart. It is true that he had promised to content himself with her agreement to marry him in the future and to renounce all present signs of affection, but such lovers’ oaths are notoriously writ in water. In later years Marx told his children that his love for their mother had turned him into a raving Roland in those days, and in fact his young and ardent heart did not rest until he had obtained at least permission to write to Jenny.

However, the first letter he received from her arrived only

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after he had been in Berlin a year. Thanks to a letter he wrote to his parents on the loth of November 1837 to give them “some idea of the past year here”, we are perhaps better informed about this year than about any other in his life either earlier or later. This interesting document reveals the whole man even in the youngster, the man striving after truth even to the point of moral and physical exhaustion, his insatiable thirst for knowledge, his inexhaustible capacity for work, his merciless self-criticism, and that fierce fighting spirit which might overrule the heart, but only when it seemed to be in error.

Karl Marx matriculated on the 22nd October 1836. He did not bother much about the academic lectures and in nine half-yearly terms he put his name down for only twelve, including for the most part the obligatory lectures on jurisprudence, and even of these twelve he probably heard very few. Eduard Gans was the only one of the official University lectures who exercised any influence on his mental development. Marx attended the lectures of Gans on criminal law and the Prussian civil code, and Gans himself has testified to the “excellent diligence” which Marx displayed at both these courses. However, the merciless polemic which Marx wages in his earliest writings against the historical school of law is of far greater value than any such testimony (which always tends to be influenced by personal considerations), for it was the philosophically trained jurist Gans who had raised his eloquent voice so strongly against its narrowness and mustiness and its deleterious influence on legislation and the development of law.

According to his own account Marx studied jurisprudence merely as a subordinate discipline together with history and philosophy. As far as these last-mentioned subjects were concerned, he did not bother about the lectures at all and did no more than put down his name for the usual obligatory lectures on logic by Gabler, the official successor of Hegel but the most mediocre amongst Hegel’s mediocre followers. Karl Marx was essentially a thinker and even at the university he worked independently, so that in a year he obtained a wealth of knowledge which ten years of the usual slow spoon-fed academic lectures could hardly have given him.

On his arrival in Berlin “ the new world of love” clamoured for attention . “ Full of yearning and empty of hope” his

feelings poured themselves into three exercise books full of poems all dedicated “ To my dear and ever-beloved Jenny von West- phalen”. They were in Jenny’s hands in December 1836, welcomed with “tears of joy and sadness”, as Marx’s sister Sophie reported to Berlin. A year later in his long letter to




his parents the poet himself passes a very disrespectful verdict on these children of his Muse : “ Feeling stamped flat and formless; nothing natural about them ; everything up in the air ; utter contradiction between what is and what should be ; rhetorical reflections instead of poetical ideas ”. At the end of this list of sins the young poet is prepared to grant “ perhaps a certain warmth of feeling and a striving after poetic fire ” as an extenuating circumstance, but even this was true only in the same way and to the same extent as it is true of the Laura Lieder of Schiller.

In general these youthful poems breathe a spirit of trivial romanticism, and very seldom does any true note ring through. In addition the technique of their verse is more clumsy and helpless than it had a right to be after Heine and Platen had both sung. Thus the artistic talent which Marx possessed in great measure and which later expressed itself in his scientific works began to develop along peculiar by-paths. In the figurative power of his language Marx rose to the level of the greatest masters of German literature and he attached great value to the a!sthetic harmony of his writing, unlike those poor spirits who regard a dry-as-dust style as the first condition of scholarly achievement ; but still, the gift of verse was not amongst the talents placed in his cradle by the Muses.

As he wrote to his parents, poetry must be for him no more than an agreeable subordinate interest. He would study jurisprudence thoroughly and felt above all a desire to wrestle with philosophy. He went through Heineccius, Thibaut and the authorities, translated the first two books of the Pandects 1 into German, and sought to found a philosophy of law. This “ unfortunate opus ” he declares got almost as far as 300 Bogen,2 but this may very well have been a slip of the pen. In the end he saw “ the falsity of the whole thing ” and then flung himself into the arms of philosophy to draft a new metaphysical system, only to realize once again the folly of his efforts. During his studies he adopted the habit of making summaries of the books he read, for instance, Lessing’s Laocoon, Solger’s Ervin, Winckelmann’s History of Art, Luden’s German History, etc., and at the same time jotting down his own reflections. He also translated the Germania of Tacitus and the Elegies of Ovid, and began learning English and Italian on his own, that is to say, from grammars, but he made little progress. He read Klein’s Criminal Law and the Annals, and also all the new literary productions, but this was only by the way and in his spare time.

1 The corpusjuris civilis ofJustinian. Presumably the Institutions and Digests.—Tr.

* A “ Bogen ” or printer’s sheet is sixteen printed pages.—Tr.




The end of the term was then again devoted to the “ Dance of the Muses and Music of the Satyrs,” when suddenly the domain of real poetry opened up before his eyes like a far-off fairy palace and all his own creations fell to nothing.

According to all this, therefore, the result of the first term was “ many nights of wakefulness, many battles fought, and much internal and external stimulation received ”, but nevertheless little gained, nature, art and the world neglected and friends lost. In addition his health suffered from over-exertion, and acting on medical advice he moved to Stralau, which at that time was still a peaceful little fishing village. In Stralau he recuperated rapidly and took up his spiritual wrestling once again.

In the second term he also mastered a mass of the most varied knowledge, but gradually it became more and more evident that the one firm pole in the ceaseless flow of things was the philosophy of Hegel. Marx’s first acquaintance with it was rather fragmentary and its “ grotesque and rough-hewn melody” did not please him at all, but during a second bout of illness he studied it from beginning to end and soon after fell in with a club of young Hegelians where, in the conflict of opinions, he became more and more attached to “ the present world philosophy”, but certainly not without silencing everything sonorous in him and causing “ ‘ a downright rage of irony at so much negation”.

Karl Marx explains all this to his parents and concludes by asking permission to come home at once instead of at Easter in the following year as his father had already promised. He declared that he wanted to discuss with his father “ the many vicissitudes” to which his character had been subjected in process of formation, and that only in the “ dear presence” of his parents would he be able to lay “ the restless ghosts”. This letter is of great value to us to-day because it is a mirror in which we can see the young Marx clearly, but it was not favourably received by his parents. His father, already ailing, again caught sight of the “ Demon” which he had always feared and which he now doubly feared since his son had fallen in love with “ a certain person” whom the old man loved as his own child and since an honourable family had been persuaded to approve of a relationship which apparently and according to the usual way of the world would be full of danger and gloomy prospects for its beloved child. Marx’s father was not egoist enough to dictate a course of life to his son if other courses would also permit the fulfilment of “ sacred obligations ”, but what the old man now saw ahead was a storm-troubled sea with no prospect of any safe anchorage.

Therefore, despite his “ weakness ”, which he realized better than anyone else, he decided “to be hard for once ”, and in his reply he was hard after his own fashion, and reckless exaggeration alternated with woeful sighs. He asks his son how the latter has fulfilled his tasks and answers the question for him : “ God help us ! ! ! Lack of order, a brooding prowling around in all the fields of science, a stuffy brooding under a dismal oil lamp. Going to seed in a scholastic dressing-gown with unkempt hair as a change from going to seed with beer glass in hand. Repellent unsociability and the consignment of everything decent, even including consideration for your own father, to a secondary position. The limitation of the social art to a dirty room where in woeful disorder the love letters of a Jenny and the well-meaning exhortations of a father, written with tears perhaps, are used as pipe-lighters, which, by the way, is better than that they should fall into the hands of third persons as a result of still more irresponsible disorder.”

And then he is overcome by melancholy, and in order to remain merciless he fortifies himself with the pills the doctor has prescribed for him. Karl’s poor management is taken to task severely: “My worthy son spends 700 thaler in a year as though we were made of money. In defiance of all advice and against all usages and although the richest need no more than 500 thaler.” Naturally, he admits, Karl is neither a spendthrift nor a waster, and how can a man who invents new systems every week and scraps them the next be expected to bother his head about such trivial matters ? Everyone had his hand in Karl’s pocket and everyone swindled him right and left.

The letter proceeds in this style for some time and finally the father sternly refuses his son permission to return home : “To come home now would be foolish. I am very well aware that you do not bother much about the lectures—probably paid for—but at least I insist on decorum being observed. I am no slave to the opinions of other people, but I don’t like chatter at my expense.” Karl could come home at Easter, as arranged, or even ten days earlier if he cared, for his father was not pedantic.

Throughout all these complaints we can detect the reproach that the son has no heart, and as this reproach has been levelled against Karl Marx repeatedly it is as well to say here, when it is raised for the first time and probably with greater justification, what there is to say about it. Naturally, we have no use for the popular phrase “ the right to enjoy life to the full” which was invented by a pampered civilization to cloak its cowardly egoism, and not much use for the older phrase “ the right of genius” to

permit itself more than the ordinary human being. The ceaseless striving for the greatest truth which always characterized Marx sprang from the depths of his heart. As he once said bluntly, his hide was not thick enough to let him turn his back on “ the sufferings of humanity”, or, as Hutten has expressed the same idea, God had burdened him with a heart which caused the common sorrows of humanity to touch him more acutely than the others. No man has ever done so much as Karl Marx to destroy the root causes of “the sufferings of humanity”. His ship ploughed its way across the high seas of life through storm and stress and under constant fire from his enemies. His flag was always at the mast-head, but the life on board was not a comfortable one either for the captain or the crew.

Marx was certainly not devoid of feelings towards those nearest to him. His fighting spirit could overrule the feelings of his heart where necessary, but it never completely stifled them, and the man in his maturity often complained bitterly that those who were nearest to him suffered more under the inexorable lot of his life than he did himself. The young student too quickly showed that he was not impervious to the distress of his father. He abandoned his wish to go home immediately and even his Easter visit, much to the disappointment of his mother but to the great satisfaction of his father, whose anger quickly began to subside. He held fast to his complaints, but he abandoned his exaggerations : in the art of abstract reasoning he was certainly no match for his son, he wrote. And he was already too old to study the necessary terminology before plunging into the holy of holies, but on one point nothing transcendental offered much assistance and just on this point his son wisely maintained a dignified silence, namely on the paltry question of money, whose value to the father of a family the son still apparently failed to recognize. However, he declared, weariness compelled him to lay down his arms.