Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  Engels would be, as Jenny wrote, “a great Cotton lord” while remaining “the same old Fritz.”48 In view of his deep political and personal objections to being a capitalist, it was a considerable sacrifice, but it guaranteed his own future, and helped Marx and his family survive their debts and expenses in London. Engels’s move to Manchester implied a division of labor between the two men. Marx, living in the global metropolis, would be the chief theorist and activist; Engels, earning money in the provincial industrial city, would offer advice and provide the financial support helping Marx to maintain himself and his family at the expensive center of intellectual and political life. This arrangement cemented a political and personal partnership; from that point on, to themselves and their contemporaries, they would be “Marx and Engels.” Remittances from Manchester—prosaically as postal money orders, more colorfully in the form of bank notes cut in half and sent in two separate envelopes—allowed Karl and Jenny to make partial payments to their creditors and sometimes to keep them at bay. In the early years of Engels’s employment, when he was just establishing himself, he could only offer modest support, moving the Marx family’s financial situation from impossible to merely desperate.49

  THE POVERTY AND LONELINESS of exile was profoundly magnified by personal tragedy: Heinrich Guido and Franziska Marx each lived for little over a year. Heinrich Guido’s death, on November 19, 1850, was a shock. He died “Suddenly, by one of the cramps he had often had. A few minutes before, he still laughed and was having fun.” It is hard to diagnose the baby’s death posthumously—meningitis or even crib death might be possibilities; his mother’s memoirs described it as pneumonia. Whatever the cause, the death of her son was a great blow to Jenny. A few days afterwards, Marx wrote to Engels that Jenny, whose pregnancy with Franziska was already advanced at this time, “is in a truly dangerous condition of being worked up and upset. She had nursed the child herself and had purchased his existence with the greatest sacrifices in the most difficult of circumstances. In addition, the thought that the poor child has been a victim of our wretched conditions, although he did not lack for any care.”50

  A profound sense of having come down in the world pervades these remarks—Jenny nursing the child instead of paying a wet-nurse, the suspicion that the poverty of their surroundings played a role in Heinrich Guido’s fatal illness. These feelings became even more pronounced a year and a half later, when Franziska died at 1:15 a.m. on April 14, 1852. Her death, the result of a respiratory ailment (possibly whooping cough), unlike her brother’s, was not a surprise, since she had been ill for much of her short life. But after two infant deaths in the space of fourteen months, Engels, in his consolation letter, expressed Karl and Jenny’s own apprehensions: “I have seen to my regret that my fears about your little girl have been all too quickly confirmed. If there were only some way that you and your family could move into a healthier area and a more spacious apartment!”51 Whether or not the slum neighborhood and the cramped rooms contributed to the deaths, it was the case that three of the four children born in London died at birth or in infancy, while two of the three born in Brussels survived to adulthood. The family’s poverty certainly cast its shadow on Franziska’s death, since Marx had to spend the day of his daughter’s funeral running around, seeking money to pay the undertaker.52

  Almost as upsetting as these infant deaths was a birth in the household. The family servant, Lenchen Demuth, bore a son, Henry Frederick (Freddy), on June 23, 1851. The space in the birth certificate for the name of the father was left blank, and Engels stepped forward to claim paternity. Decades later, on his deathbed, he admitted that he had done so at Marx’s request, to save Marx’s marriage, and that Marx was actually the father of the child. Two of Marx’s daughters, Laura and Eleanor, horrified at what they had learned about their father, suppressed the information, and the truth about the paternity did not become public until the 1960s. Even today, there are skeptics who refuse to believe that Karl fathered a child on his maid, or, rather more bizarrely, maintain that the letter setting forth Engels’s deathbed confession was a Fascist forgery. If the letter was forged by the Fascists, then they must have known a lot of unpublicized details of Marx’s private life.

  In fact, there is a good deal of corroborating evidence: Jenny Marx’s cryptic remarks in her reminiscences, written fifteen years later, about a crisis in her marriage; correspondence between Marx and Engels referring indirectly to the situation; and the fact that Lenchen’s son had quite a dark complexion, like Marx, and very much unlike the fair Engels. Clinching proof comes from new documents that surfaced in the 1990s, letters originally collected by David Rjazanov in conjunction with his preparations for a complete edition of Marx’s and Engels’s works. Following the editor’s arrest in the great purges, the documents were hidden in Stalin’s secret archives for six decades, until the end of communism in the USSR. They show that the adult Freddy Demuth was aware of the truth about his own paternity and that Engel’s deathbed confession was well known to the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party. They had no doubts about its authenticity and no hesitations about covering it up.53

  In view of the family’s being crowded into one and a half rooms in their Soho apartment, one does have to wonder when and how the conception occurred. It might have been during Jenny’s absence in the Netherlands, when she was trying to raise money for a move to New York from Karl’s relatives; but an August 1850 date seems improbable for a late June 1851 birth. Possibly, it was at some unobserved moment, late at night, or during the day when Jenny was taking the children for a walk. The emotional circumstances of the conception—a onetime occurrence, or part of a longer affair; some kind of coercion, physical or otherwise, on Karl’s part, or Lenchen as willing partner—are all completely unknown.

  The baby was put out to foster parents, a typical fate of illegitimate children of household servants in the nineteenth century, and all too often a death sentence. But Freddy Demuth survived and returned on occasion to visit his birth mother. Karl’s daughters always wondered about the visitor. One can only imagine how Jenny’s suspicions of her husband must have grown as she watched the progress of Lenchen’s pregnancy in the tiny apartment but heard from her servant no word about the man responsible. Engels’s avowal of paternity made it possible for Jenny to repress her doubts and save her marriage. The best way to put it was that the paternity of Freddy Demuth was one of those open family secrets, which everyone knows but no one will acknowledge, even to themselves. In the end, Freddy outlived all Karl’s legitimate children, dying without descendants in 1929.

  AS IF UNCEASING FINANCIAL pressures, the deaths of two children, and the near unraveling of his marriage were not enough, Marx’s early years in London exile were also a period of political and personal isolation. After breaking with the non-communist democrats in the German political refugee community, and then with the communists, Marx had few followers left: Weydemeyer and Cluss off in America, Engels a bit closer in Manchester, along with two communist circles, each consisting of ten to twenty members, in Cologne and London. Ideological differences certainly played a role in these disputes, but as with Marx’s troubled relations with Karl Grün some five years earlier, personal and political motives were closely intertwined.

  The break between Marx and the democrats occurred at the end of 1849 and the beginning of 1850 over the question of support for the refugees. Invited to attend a meeting to create a unified refugee support committee, Marx responded by denouncing the entire enterprise for failing to include among the invitees two of his supporters, Conrad Schramm and Ferdinand Wolff, or any of the workers “who have, for years, been at the head of the London German democrats.” Bewildered leftists did not understand why Marx and his friends had not attended the meeting anyway, and asked that further individuals be co-opted onto the committee.54

  Behind these procedural issues lay a broader question of political orientation. Prominent German exiles were working toward the unification of all the émigr
é radicals in London, an ambition shared by refugees from other European countries, leading to the creation of a European Democratic Central Committee in 1851.55 Before the 1848 Revolution, Marx had supported just such a policy in the London Fraternal Democrats and the Brussels Democratic Association; the Communist Manifesto announced that communists “labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.” Marx’s turn toward an exclusively communist radicalism, to be built on a working-class following, now led him in the opposite direction: against cooperation with the “petit-bourgeois” democrats, and toward treating them as a political enemy.

  Picking a fight with refugee democrats in London was hardly an ideal move. Most of the exiled leftists supported the democrats against the communists. The democrats even founded their own workers’ association, which quickly drew adherents away from the communists of Great Windmill Street. As one German traveling from London to Switzerland in early March 1850 reported, perhaps somewhat exaggeratedly, just three months after the clash over the refugee committee, “Engels and Marx . . . are excluded from all groups of the emigration and from the German workers’ associations.” The same report went on to describe August Willich as the “head of the [German] communists” in London.56

  In the spring and summer of 1850, tensions mounted swiftly among the leadership of the Communist League, pitting Marx and Engels against August Willich and Karl Schapper. At a climactic meeting of the League Central Authority on September 15, 1850—during which adherents of both sides asserted, in emotionally overwrought fashion, their expectation of dying in revolutionary action—Marx and Engels engineered the Authority’s transfer to Cologne, where their own followers were in charge. Willich and Schapper, who had the support of a substantial majority of the German communist artisans in London, then constituted their own Communist League and declared Marx and Engels expelled from it. The two leaders’ supporters in Cologne responded by expelling Willich and Schapper from the original Communist League.57

  Following the split in the League and Engels’s move to Manchester, the pro-Marx Communist League in London consisted of about a dozen individuals, who met informally on Wednesday evenings in the Rose & Crown on Cross Street in Soho. The communists in Cologne, now the League’s official leaders, were a group of the same size, although politically more active—but only as long as they could keep their existence hidden from the Prussian police. Marx himself increasingly renounced political activism. Using the admissions card to the great library of the British Museum he had acquired in June 1850, he spent his days there from nine in the morning until seven in the evening, studying the works of political economists such as John Stuart Mill, and Samuel Lloyd, an expert on monetary questions. Wilhelm Pieper reported to Engels in January 1851 that “Marx lives very withdrawn. . . . When one comes to Marx, one is greeted, not with compliments, but with economic categories.”58

  For Marx and Engels, their isolation from the other German émigrés was the result of adherence to political principle, a viewpoint faithfully endorsed by Marxist and Leninist historians ever since. Since the spring of 1849, Marx had regarded the “petit-bourgeois” democrats as not revolutionary enough; only a working-class-based movement could be authentically revolutionary. Not being revolutionary or proletarian enough was hardly a reproach that could have been leveled at Willich or Schapper, or the substantial majority of German communist artisans in London who supported them.

  Marx’s political motivation for this break veered in the opposite direction: Willich and his supporters were too revolutionary, planning to introduce communism by violent—and, if necessary, military—means in the next revolution, which they saw as imminent. Marx, who was equally convinced of the imminence of the revolution, perceived it as only the first step in a long process of reaching a communist state and society. He distinguished his viewpoint very clearly from Willich’s at the meeting of the Central Authority of the Communist League that led to the split in the organization: “While we say to the workers: you have 15, 20, 50 years of civil war to go through, to change conditions, to make yourselves capable of exercising power, instead of that is said [by Willich and Schapper]: We must come to power immediately, or we can go to sleep.”59

  As clear as these ideological distinctions may have seemed to Marx, they were in practice more than a little blurred. To anyone outside the orbit of the left, all the plans for a new, radical revolution, by democrats and communists alike, seemed equally extreme, as the entire German-speaking world learned when the Prussian police arrested Marx’s Cologne supporters and put them on trial in 1852. Rank-and-file leftists did not entirely distinguish between the two communist factions. Searching the homes of radical workers in Germany, police found written material from both Marx’s group and Willich and Schapper’s. When Marx explained the difference between himself and Willich to his Cologne adherents, he asserted that the next revolution would bring the petit bourgeoisie to power, but would be followed by a “social republic,” a “social-communist” regime, and finally, a “purely communist” one. In this explanation, distinctions between his view and that of Willich seemed to be more of degree than kind.60

  Whatever ideological clarity might have been apparent at the time of the break between Marx and Engels and Willich and Schapper faded within a few months. In November 1850, Gottfried Kinkel came to England, after his liberation from a Prussian prison in a daring jail break, a move that made him the hero of German émigré radicals in Europe and North America. Kinkel, who had already clashed with Marx during the 1848 Revolution, was appalled by the attack on him published in Marx’s review. He and Willich began a close collaboration in exile politics, so close that Marx and Engels’s correspondence became replete with references to “Kinkel-Willich,” treating as one entity the insufficiently revolutionary petit-bourgeois leftist and the excessively revolutionary communist extremist.61

  Contemporaries had another explanation for the many political disputes and splits in which Marx became involved. They blamed such skirmishes and schisms on his personality. It was “not because of their doctrines, but because of their personal incompatibility and constant drive toward domination,” as one political exile reported in Switzerland, that Marx and Engels had been excluded by all the other German democrats in London. Willich and Schapper described the reasons for their break with Marx and Engels in the same way. It was not about “principles” but “purely personalities.” They accused both men of “persecut[ing] in every imaginable fashion” anyone “who was not dependent enough, unconditionally to blow into the horn of these people.”62

  Marx’s political opponents certainly respected his intellect. Armand Goegg, a prominent democratic exile, asked Marx to contribute a piece for a magazine he was editing, which would contain the opinions of the “25 most esteemed members of the advanced democratic party in Germany.” Even August Willich, in his inimitable Prussian-military-communist fashion, had a high opinion of Marx. His post-revolutionary plans included this command: “Citizen Karl Marx is called upon to present himself in Cologne within 48 hours and to take over the direction of finances and social reform. . . . Disobedience of this order, any resistance or effort to argue, as well as inappropriate jokes, will be punished by death.”63

  The controversy between Marx and Engels on the one hand, and the exiled German democrats and the Willich-Schapper communists on the other, was carried out almost entirely by means of personal insults. Marx’s opponents denounced his intellectual arrogance and tyrannical leanings. The story of how he and Engels had attended a meeting of the Workers’ Educational Association while drunk, and had to flee to avoid a beating at the hands of the outraged proletarians, resentful of intellectuals’ condescension, made the rounds in London and was retold as far off as Cincinnati, a city filled with German immigrants. There were repeated accusations, ventilated both in the German press and in German-language newspapers in the United States, that Marx was taking money for himself from the refugee committee—probably based
on rumors about the time when he had borrowed £30 from it. Unlike the attacks on his arrogance and condescension or his unpopularity with the workers, which Marx laughed off, these accusations genuinely angered him, since he had for years made it a point of honor to refuse to accept such donations from others, even when they were offered to him. His one moment of weakness only increased his indignation.64

  Marx shot back in similar fashion. Kinkel and Willich, along with most of the exiled German democrats, tried to float a “revolutionary loan” among the Germans in America, with the proceeds to be used for political agitation in Germany, and the loan to be repaid by a future revolutionary government. This plan, for all its fantastic elements, did actually succeed in raising money, and Marx immediately accused his opponents of putting these funds in their own pockets. Besides such embezzlement, Karl Schapper was also accused of running off with the fiancée of one member of the Communist League and making her his wife.65 But it was August Willich, above all, who drew Marx’s ire:

  Willich, in spite of his philistine-noble . . . NCO’s moral hypocrisy is just a common . . . swindler and . . . so I am informed by a respectable Philistine, card cheat. The lad hangs around in the pub all day . . . where he can consume for free, and pay by bringing in customers, whom he entertains with his stereotypical phrases of passion for the future revolution . . . in which he no longer believes. . . . The guy is a lazy, greedy bum [the German word, much pithier than the English, is Schmarotzer] of the worst kind. . . . 66