Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  The idea of Christ’s love liberating mankind from its sinful condition was a classic piece of Christian doctrine, but Marx’s interpretation of it makes clear that he was taught an Enlightened version of Christianity. One of the burdens of the pre-Christian world that Christ’s love could lift was superstition—a major enemy of Enlightened thinking. Plato’s yearning for “truth and light,” a yearning that only Christ could fulfill, was another clue, since those terms, “light” in particular, were code words used by central Europe’s Enlightened Protestants. While Marx did mention human sinfulness and depravity that could only be redeemed by Christ, he did not dwell on it. Nor did he emphasize the transforming experience of Christ’s redemption, the believer being born again, an experience that Germany’s Pietists found every bit as central to their religion as their American counterparts did. These sentiments are redolent of the intellectual influence of Heinrich Marx, of the Gymnasium’s director Johann Heinrich Wyttenbach, a lifelong adherent of Kantian ideas, and of Johann Ludwig von Westphalen, privy councilor of the Prussian district administration and a family friend. By contrast, the ideas of Marx’s actual religion teacher, a Protestant pastor who was skeptical of the Enlightenment and had some modest sympathies for the Awakening, seem less prevalent in his pupil’s essay.50

  The theme of Marx’s essay for his German class was “Observation of a Young Man on the Choice of Profession.” He began by suggesting that young men should base their choice on their most profound inclinations: “the deepest conviction, the innermost voice of the heart . . . for the Divinity never leaves the mortal completely without a guide. . . .” He then introduced two groups of qualifications. One concerned the validity of an individual’s inward voice. Perhaps his inclination toward an occupation was just a temporary enthusiasm. Young men could consider the advice of their more knowledgeable elders, such as their parents—a suggestion Marx blew through in one sentence and to which he never returned. Most of all, they must trust to their own experience, to see if their inclination is a permanent one.

  Marx then pointed out another problem for following one’s heart: “our relationships in society.” We might want to see the future socialist here, but the example he used was choosing an occupation for which an individual lacked physical capacity or talent. This inability to perform one’s chosen occupation would be shaming, proof of a person’s cosmic and social uselessness, leading to self-contempt, “a snake that, eternally undermining, gnaws at the breast, sucks the lifeblood from the heart and mixes it with the poison of hatred of humanity and despair.”

  Yet, and this was the main point of the essay, it did not suffice to follow an occupation for which one had both the inclination and the ability. Rather, the chosen occupation should be one that “grants us the greatest dignity, that is founded on ideas, about whose truth we are convinced, that offers the greatest field, in which to act for humanity, and even to approach the universal goal, completeness and perfection. Every occupation is just a means to that goal.” Marx suggested that such completeness and perfection occurs at the intersection of the fulfillment of individual inclinations and abilities, and the improvement of the human condition:

  The main consideration that must steer us in our choice of occupation is the welfare of humanity, our own completion. One should not delude oneself to imagine that these two interests could be in hostile conflict, that one must annihilate the other. Rather, the nature of man is so arranged that he can only reach his perfection when he acts on behalf of completion, for the welfare of the world around him. If he just creates for himself, he can certainly be a famous scholar, a great sage, an excellent poet, but never a completed truly great man. . . . When we have chosen the profession in which we can do the most for humanity, then burdens can never press us down for they are sacrifices on behalf of all. Then we will not enjoy a poor, limited egoistical joy, but our good fortune will belong to millions, our deeds will live on silently but their effects will be eternal and our ashes will be moistened by the glowing tears of noble men.51

  In this essay, we can see, besides an excessive use of mixed metaphors, once again the influence of Johann Heinrich Wyttenbach and the Kantian ideas he professed. Another important influence was the Olympian German literary figure of the day, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose poetry, novels, plays, and collected personal conversations all articulated the ideals of completion and perfection as goals of human striving. Known to virtually every educated speaker of German, Goethe’s works were required reading for the students in the Trier Gymnasium. The principal Wyttenbach was a personal acquaintance of the celebrated poet.

  One feature of this essay was Marx’s choice of examples for individual accomplishment: a scholar, sage, and poet. He did not mention being a soldier, administrator, businessman, or lawyer—all fields of accomplishment to which young men of his social class in Prussia might aspire. The last was his father’s choice, and at this time Marx’s own, for his career. The intellectual and artistic pursuits he mentioned instead reflected the influence of Wyttenbach, who was all those things, and whose presence loomed large on the modest stage of Trier, even though it was not of any great import in the broader central European cultural world. The pursuit of intellectual investigation as a means to the betterment of the condition of humanity was a theme that would recur throughout Marx’s life—one need only think of his constant insistence that communist politics and communist aspirations for humanity had to be based on Wissenschaft, systematic scholarship—and found its first naive, adolescent expression in this essay.

  If the two graduation exam essays showed aspects of Marx’s formal, intellectual education, another feature of the graduation suggests something of his informal, political one. In this same year the Prussian authorities, tired of what they saw as Wyttenbach’s inability or unwillingness to counter subversive political currents, installed a classics teacher with reliably conservative ideas, a man named Vitus Loers, as co-director of the school. This move was both a personal affront and a political gesture. Marx responded in kind. He snubbed the new co-director, refusing to pay a farewell visit to Loers, one of only two members of his graduating class who behaved this way. Shortly after Marx left Trier for his university studies in November 1835, there was a banquet in Loers’s honor. Heinrich Marx was present, and saw that the right-wing teacher was visibly angry about his son’s behavior. Heinrich attempted to pacify Loers by telling him that Karl had paid him a visit but found him out of the office. At the banquet, Heinrich also met Wyttenbach, visibly depressed by the affront of Loers’s appointment. Heinrich tried to pacify him as well, informing him of Karl’s admiration and devotion to him, remarks that evidently cheered him up.52

  Heinrich Marx’s two actions at the banquet might sum up much of his son’s early life. Karl Marx was born into and grew up in a family seeking to leave the constrained and cramped environment of the Jewish “nation” in a Europe of the society of orders. In its place, family members would put a life based on the doctrines of the Enlightenment: a rationalist approach to the world, a Deist religion and belief in human equality and basic rights, an aspiration toward being a productive citizen in a community of such citizens. As Heinrich’s own experiences had shown, the path to such a life was tortuous and difficult, filled with compromises, and affected by the vicissitudes of war and revolution over which the inhabitants of the small, marginal city of Trier had little control.

  In following this path, Heinrich had become first a Frenchman and a supporter of the emperor Napoleon, and then a Prussian and Protestant, both distancing him from the social environment of deeply Catholic Trier. He had obtained a modest affluence and social respectability. But there were incidents, like the singing in the Casino or his son’s snubbing of Vitus Loers, that brought into sharp relief the difficulties encountered in being both a good Prussian and a supporter of the doctrines of the Enlightenment. It is perhaps characteristic of the differences between Heinrich and Karl, or maybe just of the contrast between a cautious and reticent middl
e-aged paterfamilias and a brash adolescent, that the former made his doubts about Prussian rule known when he was drunk, the latter when he was sober.

  Karl was certainly rasher than his father in 1835; but one might wonder if he was politically more radical, if he was willing to oppose the Prussian monarchy consistently and fundamentally, rather than just at specific times and on particular issues. The answer is probably not yet, and we might see that by comparison to another student and future revolutionary at the Trier Gymnasium, Ludwig Simon. Simon was a year behind Marx, and the German essay assignment for his Abitur in 1836 was to write about love of the fatherland. In his essay, Simon insisted that only Germany could be his fatherland, but never Prussia—a radical repudiation of the monarchy that fit the dominant attitude in Catholic Trier. Neither Heinrich nor Karl was quite ready to take that step.

  We can take this comparison a little further. Simon was a revolutionary in 1848 and remained true to his revolutionary views in French and Swiss exile, where he lived until his death in 1872. But Simon’s revolutionary ideals were very much those of the Jacobins of the French Revolution of 1789—nationalist, republican, and democratic, perhaps given to social reform, but certainly not an opponent of capitalism or private property. While in exile, Simon worked as a banker.53 Karl Marx would be a revolutionary as well, one who would share many of Simon’s Jacobin tendencies, a point often lost in discussions of Marx’s revolutionary ideas and aspirations; but his version of revolution would involve the demand for changes in economic structure and property relations. The path to combining Jacobin politics and communist economics would go through a distinctly Prussian form of intellectual life that Marx encountered in his university studies. In the fall of 1835, this encounter still lay in the future.

  2

  The Student

  AS KARL MARX TRAVELED down the Moselle from Trier to Koblenz, and then by steamboat north along the Rhine to Bonn to begin his university studies in October 1835, he could have seen Halley’s Comet, high in the night sky. In mystical thinking, comets are portents of great deeds, although an ever rationalist Marx would have rejected any connection between astral signs and his own destiny. The realities of university study in central Europe during the 1830s supported such perceptions, suggesting not great deeds ahead of the new student but a long and tortuous career path, with an uncertain outcome. A young man in Prussia beginning a legal career faced years of university study, an unpaid apprenticeship, and two state exams, before there was even the possibility of an appointment as a state’s attorney, judge, or lawyer in private practice. For a decade or more, the student and aspiring jurist would be without any income and dependent on his family for support. Other career paths for students, including those leading to a position at a Gymnasium or a university, were just as long, difficult, and stressful.1

  While secondary and higher education had expanded substantially in the German states during the first decades of the nineteenth century, funding of government positions to employ the growing number of graduates had not kept pace. Between about 1820 and 1840, the number of law graduates in Prussia holding unpaid positions tripled, but salaried state judicial posts increased by only 20 percent. This mismatch has been a chronic problem in central Europe, recurring at regular intervals over the last two centuries, but the difficulties created by the disjuncture between graduates and state-funded positions for them were probably worse in the 1830s and 1840s than at any other time. Slow economic growth in the German states meant that governments lacked the tax revenues to expand the number of public service positions available for graduates, but also that the private sector, struggling with hard times, could not provide adequate alternatives.2

  Karl Marx’s legal studies required a long-term family financial commitment to him. Women were not admitted to German universities until the beginning of the twentieth century, so that Karl’s sisters would receive a different kind of commitment, albeit also financially substantial—a prospect, Heinrich Marx, asserted, that “made his hair stand on end”—namely, a dowry enabling them to make a good marriage. Karl’s younger brother Hermann, “a deeply good heart” but “not much in his head,” as Heinrich described him, did not attend a university but was instead sent to Brussels and apprenticed to a merchant.3

  The years 1835 to 1842, which marked Marx’s transition from adolescence to adulthood, were dominated by the difficulties of his projected career and the long-term financial dependence on his family it implied. The prospect of dependence itself was difficult enough for a self-assertive young man like Karl, and conflicts with his family seemed inevitable. Within a year of leaving home, the difficulties of this path and the conflicts with his family expanded, almost to the breaking point.

  As a good Prussian subject, Heinrich sent his son to the university in Bonn. The Prussian government had founded it in 1818 in this little Rhenish town—then as today in the shadow of its much larger northern neighbor Cologne—as an act of political integration and reconciliation. Young men from the middle and upper classes of the Rhineland, suspicious of and potentially hostile to their new overlords, would be transformed into future members of a loyal provincial elite by spending their formative years with students, many Protestant noblemen, from the kingdom’s core eastern provinces. In practice, this combination of Rhenish students—often with liberal, democratic, or Catholic conservative but anti-Prussian political sympathies—and young Prussian noblemen led more to conflict and exacerbation than to the creation of Prussian loyalties.

  Such conflicts shaped Marx’s first year at the University of Bonn. He attended lectures “industriously,” as his professors attested, and took part in the League of Poets, a group of young men (including some future revolutionary leaders) who met to discuss literary and aesthetic questions, and to try their hand at writing poetry. But Marx’s chief activity was his extracurricular association with an informal circle of students from Trier and other cities in the southwestern part of the Rhineland, whose members spent their time in Bonn’s taverns, drinking heavily, and then brawling with other students. It was among these students that Marx acquired his nickname, “The Moor,” from his swarthy complexion, by which he would be known to friends and family for the rest of his life.4

  Drinking, brawling, comic nicknames—it all sounds like the recreation of an apolitical late adolescent; but the actions had a political edge, since the fighting was between the students from Trier and those from Prussia’s eastern provinces. In a period of political repression, brawling with such individuals was how many Rhinelanders, not just university students, expressed their discontent with Prussian rule. Marx was elected one of the leaders of the group of Trier students, and his role in the physical disputes culminated, during the summer of 1836, in his participation in a duel with sabers—an old German university tradition, still occasionally practiced today—defending the honor of the middle-class Rhinelanders against the eastern aristocrats.5

  Karl’s bad behavior evoked his father’s disapproval for the way he was veering off course. Heinrich had sarcastic words about the dueling; he repeated warnings about excessive frequentation of taverns; he reminded Karl of the family’s expectations for him, “the hope that you might, one day, be a support for your brothers and sisters.” He also criticized Karl’s way with the family’s money—not, as many accounts suggest, that Karl was spending too much of it, but that his manner of accounting for it was chaotic and disorganized:

  Your accounts, dear Karl, are à la Carl, disjointed and without result. Briefer and more consequential, just put the figures regularly into columns, and the operation would have been very simple. One demands order of a scholar, especially of a practical jurist.6

  Heinrich’s conclusion was that a change of university was necessary. As he wrote at the end of the 1835–36 academic year, making the statement official, “I do not just grant my son Carl Marx permission to do so, but it is my will that he enroll at the University of Berlin to continue his studies of law and public administration that he h
as begun in Bonn.”7 Moving to Berlin would mark a major change in Karl’s life. He would be much further off from his family, a four-day trip by stagecoach, since there were no rail connections between the Prussian capital and its western provinces until the end of the 1840s. Berlin, with its 300,000 inhabitants, about twenty times that of Bonn, was a different world from the little Rhenish university town. Residing in Berlin was Marx’s first experience in big city living that would become the rule rather than the exception for the rest of his life.

  Berlin was not quite yet the center of industry, commerce, and finance it would become within a few decades. Steam-powered factories and an industrial workforce, to the extent that they existed, were overshadowed by the many artisans, toiling in small craft workshops, and the ubiquitous Eckensteher, day laborers licensed by the government to stand on street corners and wait for work. Above all, the city was a royal residence and the seat of government of one of Europe’s great powers. It possessed a lively cultural and artistic life: theaters, operas, and ballet beckoned; art enthusiasts could visit its excellent new art museum; music lovers could attend concerts at the Singakadamie, the city’s renowned choral society, or hear the virtuoso pianist Franz Liszt perform. Sarcastic musical and theatrical critics, and a growing group of sardonic humorists, dissected the artistic aspirations and flayed the pretensions of their creators and consumers. The city’s intellectual life was varied and diverse, but centered on its university. Like Bonn University, the University of Berlin was an eminently Prussian institution, but it was known for its intellectual quality and for its sober, serious, and scholarly atmosphere. These attracted curious students from all over Europe, including Jakob Burckhardt and Søren Kierkegaard. It was the presence of the court and the state bureaucracy that made such an intellectual and cultural efflorescence possible, but that also created a distinct tension between a largely authoritarian regime and a group of artists and thinkers who had their own distinct ideas.