Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  It is not at all clear how Heinrich and Henriette met. Most likely, it was through his mother Ewa, whose second marriage, five years after the death of her first husband Samuel Levi, was to the rabbi of the German-language congregation in Amsterdam, Moses Löwenstamm. If so, then Heinrich and Henriette had an arranged marriage, a common practice among the Jewish middle class in central Europe through the beginning of the twentieth century.32

  Henriette brought to this marriage a necessary foundation for Heinrich’s practice of law in Trier: a substantial dowry. It included cash, 8,100 guilders, or about 4,500 Prussian talers—quite a bit of money, considering that a day laborer or poor artisan would have earned about 100 talers per year. Along with the money went the household furnishings, which included, decades later, at the time of Heinrich’s death, 68 bedsheets, 69 decorated tablecloths, 200 napkins, and 118 towels. It was only with the assets of his bride that Heinrich was able to establish his own household and practice his profession—a very common state of affairs in the nineteenth-century German middle class. In his own private life, Karl Marx would reject this approach and take a very different path, paved with financial insecurity for himself, his wife, and his family.33

  Henriette Marx née Presburg has not had a good press from historians and biographers. They have taken their cues from Karl Marx himself, who was very much his father’s son. Years after his death, his daughter Eleanor reported that her father was deeply devoted to his own father’s memory and never tired of speaking of him. He always carried around with him a daguerreotype of Heinrich, which the family placed with Karl Marx in his grave.34 There was no mention of Karl keeping a picture of his mother with him. Quite the opposite; he got along badly with her, seeing her as a philistine, with no interest in intellectual questions, quarreling constantly with her over his inheritance, and showing little emotion at the news of her death.

  Marx’s mother is usually described as an uncultured woman, who could neither speak nor write proper German, someone completely devoted to her home, obsessed with the health of her family members—“modest, even primitive,” “one of those Dutch housewives who live entirely for their family,” or even a “yiddische Mama.”35 Her surviving correspondence reveals a very broken German, but considering that Dutch was her native language and she only began to learn German when she got married at the age of twenty-six, this lack of facility is not particularly surprising. Her efforts at writing in a foreign language, as poorly as they may have turned out, testify to her above average literacy, especially for a woman of the time. Her concern for the health of family members—the chief topic of her letters to Karl when he was at the university—is understandable when we realize that her husband and four of their children died of tuberculosis.36 If Henriette was taken up with her household, and all its bedsheets, tablecloths, and napkins, and if she persistently refused Karl an advance on his inheritance, this was all about preserving her dowry, a central element of her commitment to her marriage and family.

  Henriette Marx was a person caught up in the middle of a social transformation: from the Jewish nation of the society of orders, spread across the borders of pre-1789 European states, to the emerging nineteenth-century world of nation-states, in which Jews aspired to be citizens. Heinrich Marx’s father, Marx Lewy, had come all the way from Bohemia to be a rabbi in Saarlouis and Trier, without anyone seeing it as peculiar. But then, Jews were largely limited in their public life and sociability to themselves. Heinrich Marx wanted a career and a public life in Prussia, a German state; his Dutch wife, despite her impressive dowry, did not fit very well in such a social world. When the attitudes of the Prussian government made it necessary for Heinrich to become a Christian, Henriette’s devotion to her household, and the very household-oriented version of female Jewish piety that accompanied it, was also a poor match for these new circumstances. Henriette was evidently reluctant to convert, and held out on the conversion of her children as well. Karl Marx was only baptized in 1824, five years after his father; Henriette finally accepted her baptism the following year.37

  Whatever the degree of social compatibility, religious tension, or romantic involvement between Heinrich and Henriette Marx, their marriage was very fruitful. Their first son, Mauritz David, was born at the end of October 1815, a little more than a year after his parents’ nuptials. He died three and a half years later, their only child to pass away before reaching adolescence—an impressive result for the time, and one that Karl Marx, founding a family under much less favorable circumstances than his father had, would not be able to match. In November 1816, Heinrich and Henriette’s daughter Sophia was born; in May 1818, their son Karl. August 1819 saw the birth of their son Hermann, October 1820 the birth of their daughter Henriette; Louise was born in November 1821, Emilie in October 1822, Caroline in July 1824, and their last child, Eduard, in April 1826, at which point Henriette Marx was a few months short of her thirty-eighth birthday. The Marxes had nine children in less than eleven years. This very rapid pace of reproduction excluded any possibility of practicing contraception, which was basically unknown in central Europe at the time. It also rather suggests that Henriette employed a wet-nurse to feed her infants, for if she had breast-fed them herself, her lactation would have reduced her fertility.38

  Heinrich could support his large and rapidly growing family because his law practice was flourishing—a success in middle age, after a long and difficult period in his youth. In 1820, he was appointed an Advokat-Anwalt, enabling him to represent clients in lucrative civil cases and not just the less remunerative criminal ones. His clients included the peasants of a number of villages in the vicinity of Trier and the municipal government of Trier itself. The family’s finances reflected the success of his legal work. A special levy on the city’s propertied citizens, imposed to fund measures taken against the cholera epidemic of 1831 (Heinrich Marx represented one affluent inhabitant of Trier who sued the city because she thought she was over-assessed), shows that Heinrich had a yearly income of 1,500 talers, not in the same league as Trier’s wealthiest merchants, bankers, and landed property owners, but still placing the household in the top 5 percent of the city. Heinrich put the family’s assets, stemming from his wife’s dowry and a later inheritance, into different forms of property: a house in Trier, a vineyard overlooking the city, loans to Trier businessmen and to nearby villagers, and 540 talers’ worth of 5 percent Russian government bonds.39

  The family enjoyed esteem as well as affluence. In 1831, Heinrich Marx received from the Prussian government the title of Justizrat, judicial councilor, a highly desired honorific, awarded by the authorities, following careful investigation, to well-regarded attorneys. He was a member of the Casino, Trier’s exclusive social club. We might leave the final word on Heinrich Marx’s position in Trier society to Karl Marx’s younger sister Louise. Married to a Dutchman who owned a publishing house for Protestant literature in Capetown, South Africa, and extremely embarrassed to have a communist leader for a brother, she would always emphasize to anyone who would listen her antecedents in “a respected and well-loved Trier attorney’s family.”40

  We do not know much about the place of the young Karl Marx in a prosperous but fast-growing and increasingly crowded household. Perhaps his mother’s constant succession of pregnancies made it difficult for Karl to develop a strong emotional relationship to her, foreshadowing their later estrangement—although the property disputes between them after Heinrich Marx’s death would have been cause enough. Marx’s daughter Eleanor related after her father’s death that her aunts had told her Karl as a boy had been a “terrible tyrant,” always ordering his sisters around.41 Since one of Eleanor’s sources would have been the same Aunt Louise who disapproved of her brother’s communist life, we might want to take that assertion with a grain of salt—or several. It seems likely that Karl did not attend elementary school, but received private lessons at home. At the very least, a Trier book dealer, Eduard Montigny, instructed him in writing.42

  The
young Karl Marx really only emerges into any sort of light in 1830, when he began his course of studies at the Trier Gymnasium. This university-preparatory secondary school, the crown jewel of education in Germany from the early nineteenth century to the present day, was, in its initial phases, characterized by a very heavy emphasis on the classics, with most hours of instruction devoted to the study of Latin and Greek.43 It was not an entirely appealing curriculum for the adolescents subjected to it (exclusively young men, until the beginning of the twentieth century), and generations of sensitive German intellectuals have penned lengthy complaints about a youth wasted in tedious memorization of meaningless texts, classes led by pedantic and authoritarian teachers and populated by dim-witted and careerist pupils. Concisely summing up a rich and evocative literature of complaint are the remarks of the dramatist and theatrical critic Alfred Kerr: “Three things—the relationship with the teachers, the relationship with the other pupils, and the smell in the lavatories—can be summarized in one word: abominable.”44

  We will never know what Marx thought about the lavatories—outhouses, then—but all his writings, throughout his life, loaded as they are with Greek and Latin phrases and allusions to the classics, suggest that his school experience was more positive than that of complaining memoirists. Marx’s appreciation of the classics and understanding of their modern relevance appeared in his private as well as his public life. February 1861 was a particularly difficult time for Marx. His income was threatened by the loss of his lucrative position as a European correspondent for the New York Tribune; his family life was still shaken by the near death of his wife from smallpox; and his political future remained undecided between returning to Germany and resuming political agitation there, or staying as an exile in London. In this period of personal stress, he relaxed by reading Appian’s book on the Roman civil wars in the original Greek text, and making comparisons between the leading personalities of ancient Rome and his European contemporaries. The form of Marx’s instruction made every bit as much of an impression as the content. Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, and a close political ally and friend, recalled how in 1850, Marx had taught a class on political economy to the German Workers’ Educational Association in London:

  Marx proceeded methodically. He put forth a proposition—as short as possible—and explained it in a longer exposition, in the course of which he took the greatest care to avoid all expressions that the workers would not understand. Then he demanded of his listeners that they pose him questions. If they did not, then he began to examine them, and did it with such pedagogical skill that no gap, no misunderstanding evaded him.45

  It is easy to see Marx here making use of the teaching style he had encountered in the Gymnasium.

  The secondary education Marx enjoyed was just for a small portion of the population; his graduating class of 1835 counted all of thirty-two pupils, from Trier itself as well as towns and villages in the vicinity. His classmates were divided into two groups, largely by religion. Most of the Catholics were from modest backgrounds, typically intending to go on to the Trier Theological Seminary and become priests. By contrast, the seven Protestants in the class were from families of government officials, professionals, or army officers: they were heading for the university to study law, medicine, or public administration. Forty years later, Marx would remember the Catholic pupils in his class as a bunch of “peasant dolts,” probably reflecting the opinion their Protestant classmates from more affluent and better-educated families had of them. Marx himself was a good but not superb pupil, receiving high grades on his German and Latin exams but doing poorly in math.

  For his third foreign language, after Latin and Greek, Marx chose French rather than Hebrew. This choice reflected the wishes of Heinrich Marx that his son prepare for a legal rather than a theological career. An aspiring Protestant pastor would have learned the language of the Old Testament, but an attorney who was to practice in the Rhineland would need to know the language of the Napoleonic Code that was still, as Heinrich had advocated, the basis of the legal system. Although Karl’s plans would veer off in a quite different direction from his father’s wishes, his capabilities in the French language, and his knowledge of French culture and history—both sharpened by lengthy stays in Paris and Brussels—would be a central fixture of his intellectual world.46

  There was another more political aspect to Marx’s educational experience. The Gymnasium director, Johann Heinrich Wyttenbach, no longer expressed the youthful radical enthusiasm he felt in the 1790s, when he had worked closely with the revolutionary French occupiers (Napoleonic rule had been, for him, a sobering experience), but the Prussian authorities were convinced that his basic political sympathies had not changed, and that he was unwilling to keep the younger teachers in line. A number of these teachers advocated subversive causes—the union of the different central European monarchies into a German nation-state, the introduction of a constitution in the Prussian kingdom, perhaps even a democratic and republican government—or advocated freethinking points of view, like the science teacher who was accused of emphasizing differences between geological findings and biblical revelation. The authorities suspected that the teachers were indoctrinating their pupils with such subversive ideas. Their suspicions were not entirely unjustified. A number of the Gymnasium graduates became leftists, including the director’s son, Friedrich Anton Wyttenbach, who was imprisoned in a fortress for his radical ideas and activities. Ludwig Simon, son of one of the politically questionable teachers, became a fiery opponent of Prussian rule and represented the city of Trier in the German National Assembly during the Revolution of 1848 as a prominent member of the Assembly’s extreme left. Viktor Valdenaire, from the nearby town of Saarburg, was another left-wing activist in the midcentury revolution.47

  School was not the only place that the young Karl Marx would have been exposed to politically questionable ideas. There was another source, a good deal closer to home. On January 25, 1834, his father Heinrich was involved in a notorious episode at the Trier Casino. Following the founders’ day dinner, a group of fifteen members sitting around the table began to sing revolutionary songs: the Polish national anthem and the Parisienne, anthem of the 1830 Revolution in France, when an authoritarian conservative monarch, not entirely unlike Prussia’s king, was overthrown and replaced by a liberal regime. The outburst culminated in repeated renditions of the Marseillaise, accompanied by shouting, pounding on the table, and waving around a tricolor handkerchief containing scenes of the July 1830 barricade fighting in Paris. A Prussian army officer who had witnessed the scene denounced the group to the government, creating a scandal. There was an investigation and charges of revolutionary subversion were brought against some of the participants, although they were all ultimately acquitted by a jury. The Casino itself was dissolved, and replaced with two social clubs. One of them had a membership mostly consisting of army officers and government officials; the other counted among its founders (including Heinrich Marx) the more affluent and esteemed burghers of Trier.

  In the course of the investigation, the accused all claimed to have left before the most subversive aspects of the singing. It was also reported that the singers had consumed rather more wine than was good for them. If there was ever a scene to which the Latin motto, In vino veritas, applies, it was this one. Those who joined in the singing included affluent merchants, attorneys, a notary, physicians, a teacher at the Gymnasium, and even a few lower-ranking state officials—the sorts of people on whom the Prussian authorities relied to work with them in their colonial regime in western Germany, ruling over a discontented lower-class Catholic population. Yet even the Prussians’ allies, once their inhibitions were lowered, despised them. For Karl Marx, who was fifteen at the time, and would have known about and understood the event and its ramifications, it must have been a revelation, about both the Prussian government and his father. The Protestant, the good Prussian, proud bearer of the title of Justizrat and
respected and prosperous attorney, was, at least for a brief alcoholic interlude, a sympathizer with ideas diametrically opposed to Prussia’s authoritarian regime.48

  About a year and a half after the founders’ day outburst, Marx completed his courses and sat for the graduation exam, the Abitur. The essays he wrote for his religion class and for his German class are his very first writings to be preserved. As might be expected from a seventeen-year-old writing his graduation exam, they largely reflected the ideas of his teachers and of the adults around him. But they also contain initial glimmerings of Marx’s own ideas and aspirations.

  The essay on religion had as assigned topic, “The Union of the Faithful with Christ, According to John, 15:1–14.” Marx began his essay by considering the pre-Christian peoples of antiquity, and concluded that in spite of their cultural, artistic, and scientific progress, they could never “throw off the fetters of superstition, develop true and dignified concepts of either themselves or of Divinity,” and that even their ethics and morality were never free of “alien admixtures of ignoble limitations. . . .” And the ancients were aware of this: “Even the greatest sage of antiquity, the divine Plato, speaks in more than one place of a deep yearning for a higher being, whose appearance the unsatisfied aspiration to truth and light fulfills.” These aspirations, Marx suggested, could be fulfilled only by the union with Christ, without which humans are “condemned by God,” a condition “from which only He is capable of redeeming us.” The union with Christ takes the form of passionate love for Him, which also makes humans virtuous, causing them to love their brothers. The result is virtuous behavior, a virtue that stems from “love of Christ, from love of a divine being, and when virtue arises from this pure source, it appears liberated from everything worldly and truly divine . . . it is simultaneously milder and more human.”49