Karl Marx
Page 9
Quite another aspect of Marx’s situation comes to light in the dedication of the thesis to Marx’s “dear paternal friend, Ludwig von Westphalen.” This dedication contained a number of flattering passages: “to give you [Westphalen] a small proof of my love”; “to admire an elderly man who possesses the strength of youth”; “a living argumentum ad oculus that idealism is no illusion but a truth.” It is hard to know what in those remarks was aimed at reinforcing Westphalen’s agreement to let Marx marry his daughter, and what reflected Marx’s strong admiration for his boyhood mentor—although there is no reason to think that the two motives were in conflict.
The dedication also contained a political and religious/philosophical polemic. Following in the footsteps of Bruno Bauer, Marx praised the way Westphalen “greets every progress of the age with the enthusiasm and sobriety of the truth . . . never draws back from the threatening shadows of the retrograde ghosts, from the often dark and clouded heaven of the times. . . .” “Progress” and “dark” (in German, finster; it has the connotation of sinister as well) were code words used by Germany’s freethinkers to describe their ideals and the attitudes of their devout enemies. By employing them, Marx was proclaiming his adherence to the freethinkers’ ranks, as the Young Hegelians in general did.
In the preface to his thesis, Marx carried his support of freethinking further, articulating it in sharper and more drastic fashion. He asserted that the “confession of philosophy” is the “confession of Prometheus.” He cited Prometheus’ statement in the original Greek (which, of course, would have been no bar to any educated German’s understanding of it), but its translation is “with a word, I hate each and every god.” This confession, he reiterated, is also philosophy’s, “its own saying against all heavenly and earthly gods, that do not recognize human self-consciousness as the highest divinity. There shall be no god besides it.”48 Here as well, Marx was following Bauer to an increasing radicalization of Young Hegelian thought, from an attempt to purify and justify Protestant theology to a parody of it, as the ironic reference to the Ten Commandments’ assertion of monotheism makes clear, from freethinking to atheism.
Having completed his dissertation, Marx needed to submit it. After the death of Eduard Gans and the departure of Bruno Bauer, the University of Berlin had become steadily more hostile to Hegelian thought, especially its freethinking and atheistic Young Hegelian variant. In any event, by the time Marx finished his thesis, he was no longer a student at Berlin: his studies had exceeded the statutory maximum of four years, and he had not applied for an extension, so he was dropped from the university’s rolls. Marx chose instead to submit his dissertation to the University of Jena; it was the only German university that required neither a residence period nor a formal defense at which the degree candidate appeared in person, for the acceptance and approval of a dissertation. For those reasons, its fees for granting a doctorate were the lowest.49 Hostile commentators have sometimes described Marx’s doctorate as a mail-order diploma, but this seems rather unfair. Jena was a reputable university, not a diploma mill, to use modern parlance, and the doctoral dissertation that its faculty approved was a work of considerable erudition and scholarship, written by someone with serious aspirations to an academic career. The University of Jena formally granted Marx his doctorate on April 15, 1841.
Doctorate in hand, Marx returned to the Rhineland in June 1841. He had personal business in Germany’s western fringes, his long-term engagement to Jenny; family business, the final settlement of Heinrich Marx’s estate; and professional and occupational business as well: following Bruno Bauer to the University of Bonn, where he was planning to start his career, once again in Bauer’s footsteps, as a philosopher/theologian, or, more precisely, a philosopher/anti-theologian. It would take just a few months of residence in Trier and Bonn for all these plans to be disrupted. Marx’s life would take an unexpected turn, leading him forever out of the arena of scholarship and esoteric intellectual inquiry and into a quite different world of polemical journalism and political controversy.
3
The Editor
MARX’S RETURN TO HIS native region in 1841, at the age of twenty-three, marked the beginning of his adult life. Personal circumstances and political trends converged in a combination of aspirations denied and hopes fulfilled to make that beginning difficult and precarious. Right after his return, the prospect of an inheritance dissolved, leaving him without assets or income. Just as Marx was trying to gain a toehold in academia, the connection between Hegelian philosophy and the Prussian state was coming to an end, a termination signaled by the dismissal of Bruno Bauer, Marx’s mentor, political ally, and close friend, from his post as lecturer at the University of Bonn in March 1842—terminating not just Bauer’s academic career but his protégé’s as well. Meanwhile, the renewal of personal contact between Marx and his fiancée, after a three-year absence, took a quite propitious turn, only Karl’s lack of assets and gainful employment made it difficult to see how he and Jenny could ever get married. Marx did find a way out of this difficult situation: by moving, as most Young Hegelians were, from philosophy to political action, from aspirations for a state-sponsored career to aspirations toward subversion of the Prussian state.
MEMBERS OF THE FAMILY met with a notary in Trier, on June 23, 1841, to draw up a division of Heinrich Marx’s estate, an act spelling the end of Karl’s expectations of an inheritance. After carefully totaling up Heinrich’s assets, subtracting from them Henriette’s dowry and inheritances from her family, and dividing what remained, the “marital community of property” between the widow and her children, each of the surviving children was entitled to a grand sum of 362 talers. Since Marx had already borrowed over 950 talers from his mother, he was not entitled to anything from his father’s estate—even assuming that the other costs of his university education were not to be deducted from his share of the inheritance.1
Marx described this division of the family’s property in bitter terms. “My family, in spite of its affluence, poses difficulties for me, which expose me to the most wretched conditions,” he wrote to one fellow Young Hegelian, Arnold Ruge. He would not explain more precisely what these “private crude and disgusting actions” were, but in a subsequent letter to Ruge, he stated that “I have had . . . a falling out with my family, and, as long as my mother lives, I have no right to my fortune.”2 Legally speaking, Marx’s grievances had no foundation, and since he had taken a class in inheritance law at the University of Berlin, he would have known that. The division of Heinrich Marx’s estate between his widow and their children followed very carefully the provisions of the Napoleonic Code, and Karl’s debts outweighed his share of the inheritance. Karl continued to suspect his mother of hiding assets from him, but his sense of grievance, as the second letter to Ruge suggests, was mostly due to his mother’s refusal to offer him an advance on the inheritance he would receive after her death. Karl’s suspicions and grievances, paired with his mother’s determination to hold fast to her dowry and inheritances, and to dole them out to her children in what she saw as equitable fashion, would permanently poison his relations with his mother and his surviving siblings.3 In 1841, the initial result of the division of Heinrich Marx’s estate was that Karl would continue to be dependent on his mother’s largesse for support until he could obtain gainful employment.
The path to employment seemed to run through Bruno Bauer and the University of Bonn, and for most of the year following Marx’s return to the Rhineland, he lived in that university town and worked on his academic career, preparing his habilitation, the postdoctoral dissertation, required as a prerequisite to a professorship, and designing a lecture course on logic. Bauer was planning to start a new philosophical journal, an Archives of Atheism, with Marx as co-editor. Plans were well advanced, contacts with potential publishers initiated, and Young Hegelian circles abuzz with the news of this audacious project. The journal never did get off the ground, but another of Bauer’s projects did, a satirical pamphlet e
ntitled The Trumpet Blast of the Last Judgment Against Hegel the Atheist and Anti-Christ. Adopting the pose of a born-again Christian, Bauer denounced the great philosopher himself as the source of the Young Hegelians’ subversive, godless ideas. Marx was suspected, incorrectly, of being the co-author of the pamphlet. He did work on a sequel Bauer was planning to publish, concerning Hegel and Christian art, a work probably designed as an attack on German Romanticism, which was suffused with admiration for the pious Middle Ages.4
This aggressive godlessness was calculated to create a scandal, a favorite intellectual and political tactic of the Young Hegelians.5 One does have to wonder, as contemporaries did, whether Marx and Bauer’s provocations were entirely compatible with their scholarly career plans, whether editing an Archives of Atheism was quite the right course of action for an aspiring professor of Protestant theology.6 Well aware of these issues, Bauer counseled Marx to take a cautious stand. When Marx was still in Berlin finishing his thesis, Bauer told his young supporter to call on top Prussian government officials to plead his case. He warned Marx that he should be careful whom he spoke to in private in Bonn and what he said. Finally, he advised Marx to formulate his dissertation in exclusively scholarly terms, leaving out the aggressively atheistic preface, for it would just give “weapons [to those] who would like to keep you from a professorship for a long time. . . . Just not now! Later, when you have a chair . . . you can say what you want in whatever form you want.”7
Bauer, though, proved unwilling to heed his own advice. Even as Marx was returning to the Rhineland to work with him at the university, he was burning the bridges connecting him to the Prussian government. Behind Bauer’s decision was the change in state policy resulting from the deaths of the long-term minister of education and religious affairs Karl von Altenstein and the monarch, Friedrich Wilhelm III, in 1840. The old king had been willing to tolerate Hegelians at Prussian universities and in Prussian state service, but he had been deeply conservative and authoritarian. At first, the attitudes of his successor, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, were unclear to the public. It seemed possible that he might be more liberal than his predecessor; even the cynical Bauer was willing to suspend judgment. Soon enough, it became clear that Prussia’s new ruler was an adherent of the Awakening, a supporter of Romantic cultural ideals, and an enthusiast for the pre-1789 society of orders; none of these attitudes would do followers of Hegel any good. The new minister of religious and educational affairs, Johann Eichhorn, loyally implemented the ideas of his royal master.8
This rightward and anti-Hegelian turn of official policy only encouraged Bauer to ratchet up his provocations. He rejected the compromise solutions Eichhorn proposed, such as returning to Berlin to do research in ecclesiastical history on a state stipend, accepting a transfer from the faculty of theology to the philosophical faculty, or even applying for a position as professor of ecclesiastical history. Instead, he sent the minister his history of the Synoptic Gospels with the request that he be appointed a professor of theology. As he wrote to Arnold Ruge, he would only be satisfied “when I have been authorized, as a professor, to preach the system of atheism publicly.” Bauer was seeking martyrdom, albeit of an atheistic nature, which he received from the Prussian government when it finally dismissed him from his lectureship in March 1842, although not until the competing bureaucratic and academic memoranda on his case had been leaked to the press, creating an enormous scandal among Germany’s educated classes.9 As a parting shot, Bauer enlisted Marx for a public, atheist provocation. Right around Easter time in 1842, the two went to the nearby village of Godesberg, a favorite excursion site from Bonn, rented donkeys, and galloped through the village on them parodying Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem—an incident spread by word of mouth in the vicinity of Bonn, and emphasized a few years later in a book Bauer published about his personal and political struggles.10
Bauer then returned to Berlin to press an appeal in his case. His chances of prevailing were slim indeed, but he still seemed to think that he had a legitimate claim on a university position, a viewpoint the authorities found immensely annoying, as Marx was told by Ferdinand von Westphalen, now well launched on his bureaucratic career.11 The whole long, difficult, and problematic relationship between the Prussian monarchy and Enlightened ideas—a relationship central to Heinrich Marx’s career and to his son’s aspirations—had come to an end. A radicalized, Young Hegelian, atheistic version of Enlightenment and a Prussian state controlled by devout conservatives with a hankering for the society of orders could not exist harmoniously, but only as sworn enemies.
With Bauer’s dismissal and departure for Berlin, Marx was left alone and friendless in Bonn. Finding life there unbearable, he planned a move to nearby Cologne, the Rhineland’s largest city, but gave up his plans, ostensibly “because life there is too noisy for me, and one does not get to better philosophy for all the good friends.”12 Yet Marx had spent four and a half years in Berlin, which was four times as large as Cologne, without noise or good friends being a problem. Other motives were probably at play: the higher cost of living in Cologne and Marx’s very limited funds. His private dilemmas and broader political trends had converged in an unpleasant fashion.
AFTER FIVE YEARS OF an epistolary relationship during which Karl and Jenny existed for each other largely in their respective imaginations, the two lovers were reunited in person during 1841–42. They were by no means always together, since most of the time after his return from Berlin Karl was living in Bonn, a two-day journey by steamboat from Trier. Still, he was present for the first six weeks of his return from Berlin and again for six weeks in the winter and spring of 1842, when Jenny’s father was dying, as well as for a brief visit that summer. The two had also met earlier in the summer of 1841, when Jenny herself made the trip down the Rhine to visit family friends in Neuß, to the north of Cologne. In a letter Jenny wrote to Karl at the time, she told him that her mother had forbidden her to see him unless she was chaperoned by her brother Edgar, “to preserve outward and inward propriety”:
Oh, my little heart, how that fell heavily on my soul, like a hundredweight! Outward and inward propriety!!—oh, my Karl, my sweet only Karl!
And yet, Karl, I can, I feel no regret, I shut my eyes, firmly, firmly and I see then your blessedly laughing eye—you see, Karl, then, in that thought, I am blessed—to have been everything to you and now nothing more to others. Oh, Karl, I know very well what I have done, and how I would be despised before all the world, I know that all and yet I am joyful and blessed and would not give up the memory of those hours for any treasure in the world. That is the most precious to me, and shall remain so forever. It is only when I think that I must still live separately from you for so long, once again so totally surrounded by wretchedness and misery, then I shake uncontrollably.13
It may be churlish for the historian to wish to uncover a maiden’s secrets, but it is difficult to read this passage as anything other than as a description—modest, reticent, full of euphemisms, written, like Karl’s poetry, in the Romantic cultural idiom—of the young couple having engaged in sexual relations. There are no details on time and place, and we may suspect that it was a onetime event, or at best repeated very infrequently, since the couple did not have many unchaperoned moments, and Jenny did not become pregnant.
It was still a remarkable step for her to take. Premarital sexual relations were far from unusual in early nineteenth-century Germany, and, in fact, probably on the increase, as the demographic evidence of rising illegitimacy rates and ever more frequent bridal pregnancies implies. But these practices were characteristic of the working class and the rural population, and perhaps in very rarified circles of bohemian artists and intellectuals (some Young Hegelians among them) in Berlin. It was virtually inconceivable behavior for the very proper daughter of a high Prussian state official from a straitlaced provincial city.14
If Jenny did violate every canon of respectable female chastity—“despised before all the world”—she surely did so as a
sign of her love for and commitment to Karl—“everything to you and now nothing more to others”—after all the long years of their distant, almost virtual engagement. Had Karl been a cad of nineteenth-century melodrama, or, more prosaically, like defendants in nineteenth-century paternity suits, he would have walked away from Jenny, perhaps with a few choice words about how he could no longer associate with an unchaste woman. Karl, though, was already committed to Jenny, and had been since their engagement. Physical intimacy would not change that commitment but reinforced his dilemma of not having a job enabling him to marry the woman he so loved. As Jenny pointed out in her revealing letter, it was torment for her to have to “still live separately from you for so long,” but the pair could only be together once Karl had found gainful employment. With Bruno Bauer’s dismissal and the end of Karl’s own academic prospects, that separation seemed to stretch indefinitely into the future.
MARX’S SOLUTION WAS THE one other Young Hegelians were pursuing at the time: renouncing a career as an academic in the service of the Prussian state, he would become a freelance writer in opposition to that very state. During the first half of 1842, he proposed a number of articles to Arnold Ruge, in part based on the work Marx had been doing with Bruno Bauer in the previous six months. Ruge, whose Halle Yearbooks had been suppressed by the Prussian authorities, had set up shop under the new title of the German Yearbooks in Dresden, in the Kingdom of Saxony, not under Prussian jurisdiction. In what would become an uncomfortably familiar pattern in Marx’s life, only one of the promised articles actually arrived, and it was quite late in doing so. Ruge, whose entire publishing schedule was disrupted by Marx’s dilatoriness, was strikingly tolerant with him, his patience a sign of recognition of Marx’s talents and abilities as somebody whose writing was worth waiting for. Marx excused himself, pleading family difficulties, but also admitted that his time had been absorbed by another, closer outlet for his writing, a recently founded newspaper in Cologne, the Rhineland News.15