Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  IN THE COLUMNS OF The People and the pages of Herr Vogt, Marx’s voice was strident but its resonance was weak. As Engels pointed out to his friend at the beginning of the Vogt affair: “we have seen more than once that an émigré newspaper or a German brochure printed in London can only conquer a public presence in Germany, if the matter can be kept going for at least a year. It is impossible to be directly present in Germany, in political or polemical terms on behalf of our party.” Quite aware of this problem, Marx had toyed with some desperate solutions, including sending, under a pseudonym, articles to the New Prussian News—the voice of the extreme right-wing, Evangelical conservatives in Prussia—denouncing the pro-Vogt refugee democrats in London.22

  Marx balked at remaining the perpetual spectator, especially as conditions in Prussia were changing rapidly, making radical political activity once again possible. Speculations about a political amnesty were circulating, and it was announced almost immediately after the death of Prussia’s mentally incapacitated Friedrich Wilhelm IV in January 1861.23 Refugees could now contemplate returning to a Prussia very different from the authoritarian kingdom of the reaction era. The former regent, on the death of his royal brother Wilhelm I, had appointed moderately liberal government ministers. Democrats and more militant liberals from the Revolution of 1848 joined together to form a new political party, the “Party of Progress.” Closely tied to the Party of Progress was the National Association, a league of liberals and democrats across central Europe that called for the union of the German states under Prussian leadership—a proposal Marx despised, but one whose public articulation had previously been prohibited. The Party of Progress did well in elections to the Prussian parliament in 1861 and 1862—a little too well perhaps, because its parliamentary representatives soon clashed with the monarch and his top generals, leading to a four-year-long period of political upheaval known as the Conflict Era. Ultimately, this confrontation between the monarch and his parliament would make the fortune of Otto von Bismarck, appointed Prussia’s prime minister in 1862; but at times the kingdom seemed on the brink of revolution. Only how was Marx to become involved? His political base in Cologne that had served him so well for a decade was gone, dispelled by the Cologne Communist Trial. His supporters were scattered or had joined the Party of Progress.24

  Marx’s remaining options in Germany were closely linked with Ferdinand Lassalle. Born to a middle-class Jewish family in Breslau in 1825, the always controversial Lassalle had been a fiery leftist agitator in the Rhenish city of Düsseldorf during the 1848 Revolution. He was part of the circle of Marx supporters—the “party of the New Rhineland News,” as contemporaries said—and correspondent for the newspaper, which also reported in detail on his agitation and many clashes with the Prussian authorities. Following the suppression of the revolutionary movement in 1849, Lassalle neither emigrated nor went to jail, unlike Marx’s other political associates, but remained an isolated outpost of radicalism on the Rhine River—“the only one left,” as he wrote to Marx in 1855—trying to hold the fort in an increasingly repressive environment.25

  That same year, he moved to Berlin, a daring and confrontational step, because it was unclear if the police would let such a known subversive reside there. After a protracted struggle, he was able to gain a residence permit, thanks to his personal connections with Alexander von Humboldt, the famous naturalist and philosopher, an elderly savant who was both a sympathizer with left-wing ideas and a friend of the reactionary Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Lassalle used his stay in Berlin to publish a lengthy study of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, a work that appeared to considerable scholarly acclaim, and made him a well-known figure in the intellectual and avant-garde circles of the Prussian capital.

  It was Lassalle who arranged for Marx to be a correspondent for the New Oder News in Breslau, and later The Press in Vienna, both journals edited by Lassalle’s cousin. Lassalle found a Berlin publisher for Marx’s Toward a Critique of Political Economy, the first result of Marx’s decades-long studies in economics, and for Engels’s Po and Rhine. Marx consulted Lassalle closely on political issues in Prussia, and on his lawsuit against Karl Vogt. Lassalle raised much of the funds needed for the publication of Herr Vogt. He even lent Marx money when the latter found himself characteristically short and Engels was unable to help.26

  By the beginning of the 1860s, it was clear that Marx’s main artery to renewed German political activity ran through Lassalle. But this route had its own distinct problems. Unlike most of Marx’s associates, Lassalle would not defer to Marx’s intellectual authority. He wanted to be an independent thinker and radical theorist: a philosopher producing his own interpretation of Hegel, an economist, and a political strategist. During the early 1850s, when Marx’s followers in Cologne asked for guidance on the future shape of European politics and the possibilities of a new revolutionary upheaval, Lassalle had proferred his own opinions instead of requesting advice.27

  The political divergence of the two men was particularly evident at the time of the Northern Italian War. Lassalle’s opinions put him in the Karl Vogt camp: he saw Austria as the main opponent of revolutionary movements in Europe. His own pamphlet, The Italian War and the Task of Prussia, rejected the rescue of Austria in northern Italy in the name of German nationalism. Instead, Lassalle wanted the Prussians to prove their nationalist credentials by imitating Napoleon III. Lassalle advocated sending the Prussian army north to seize from Denmark the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, with their mostly ethnically German population, a major issue of national unity left over from the Revolution of 1848. In a lengthy correspondence with Marx, he rejected the latter’s analysis and vigorously defended his own position, including a belief in Karl Vogt’s bona fides, as well as a skepticism about seeing the hand of the czar behind diplomatic and military confrontations.28

  Two truly prophetic letters, written at the time of the Battle of Solferino, appeared in this correspondence. Lassalle informed Marx and Engels about the perverse effects of their call for a national war against France. Berlin newspapers, he asserted, were promoting “rotten hatred of France.” They were injecting their “passion, through the nationalist veins into the heart of the lowest class of the population and among democrats.” The press’s attacks were only ostensibly aimed at Louis Napoleon; their real target was the “revolutionary development of France.” As refugees, Marx and Engels were out of touch with public opinion and unaware of “how little de-monarchized our people is.” Most Prussians, Lassalle thought, rejected radical republican ideas in favor of loyalty to the ruling dynasty. A national war with France would only tie the Hohenzollerns’ subjects more closely to their royal masters. Lassalle’s vision would come frighteningly true in 1870. Eleven years earlier, it marked out profound differences between him and Marx and Engels. All three men were supporters of German nationalism, and all sought to link German nationalism to a revolutionary cause; but the way they did so was almost diametrically opposite—a disagreement on crucial issues of the time that made political cooperation difficult.29

  Beyond policy differences there was the matter of Lassalle’s personality and private life. Flamboyant, egocentric, and self-dramatizing, he was a profoundly polarizing figure. The Cologne communists did not trust him and refused to admit him to the secret Communist League in 1850. They rebuked his self-centeredness—“big-mouth and egotist,” was one comment about him—and feared that he was a police spy. The fact that he was not indicted in the Cologne Communist Trial, unlike all of Marx’s other friends and associates, only increased these suspicions. Stories of how Lassalle showed off his silk dressing gown and lavish apartment to the workers reached Marx during the reaction era. Marx’s informants were motivated by jealousy of Lassalle and personal hostility to him, but that did not make their stories false.30

  The most polarizing aspect of Lassalle’s life was his relationship with women, especially with Sophie Countess von Hatzfeldt, who had been trapped into marriage to an abusive husband. During the 1
840s, Lassalle had come to her rescue, residing with her, managing her divorce trial, systematically mobilizing public support against her husband, and even arranging to steal incriminating documents from him. His assistance had brought her into left-wing circles, where she was known simply as “the Countess,” for there were no other pro-communist aristocratic women with whom she could be confused. During the 1848 Revolution, Marx had lent her money; he and Lassalle had protected her son Paul, years later one of Bismarck’s top diplomats, from his father’s wrath and claims to custody. Heinrich Bürgers, another Cologne communist, was the teenage boy’s private tutor. In 1853, the Countess won her divorce case. She received a very large settlement, and provided Lassalle with a generous portion of it. It was enough for him to have all the silk dressing gowns and beautifully furnished apartments he might wish, and to pursue his intellectual and political career without having to worry about money, a fortunate condition Marx could only aspire to in his dreams. A good part of the hostility Lassalle invoked stemmed from his unconventional private life. It was unclear what was worse—that he was a gigolo, living off the assets of an affluent older woman, or that (his actual relationship with the Countess) he was not a gigolo, that he lived with and off an affluent older woman without providing her any sexual favors.31

  In March 1860, Lassalle invited Marx to come to Berlin, as soon as an amnesty was issued, to discuss with him founding a radical newspaper, a continuation in new political circumstances of the New Rhineland News; and he renewed the offer ten months later, with the proclamation of the amnesty.32 Marx was profoundly torn by this opportunity to rejoin the fray, to raise his voice and have it heard in a critical situation, once more to have the opportunity to engage in the form of political activity he knew best, that of the crusading newspaper editor. It would require, though, close cooperation with Lassalle—a person with whom Marx had crucial disagreements, and whom Marx, like most leftists, did not entirely trust. Marx’s personal attitude toward Lassalle emerges in his correspondence with Engels. The two used a fantastic array of anti-Semitic invectives to describe the controversial activist. He was “the little Yid Braun,” “Itzig,” “Jacob the Weasel,” “Isidor Berlin Blue Dye.” The letters have a particularly ugly ring, but also suggest how Marx and Engels saw Lassalle’s personal faults in terms of anti-Semitic stereotypes: the vulgar, pushy parvenu parading in his silk dressing gowns, his vanity, impudence, and tactlessness on display.33

  For all his personal antipathy to Lassalle, Marx could not reject his offer out of hand; it was the only apparent opening for his return to political activism. But future plans were interrupted by a grave family crisis. In November 1860, Jenny came down with smallpox. The three daughters were hustled out of the house, sent to stay with Wilhelm Liebknecht’s family, and hastily revaccinated. Karl and Lenchen cared for the gravely ill Jenny around the clock, until Engels sent £10 so Karl could hire a nurse to relieve them. Although his letters to Engels about Jenny’s illness are Stoic and laconic, as befitted his classical education, even the slightest reading between the lines suggests that Karl was beside himself at the thought of losing his wife, and unable to contemplate a future without her after their quarter century together. He tried desperately to take his mind off the horrible prospect by reading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and taking up the study of calculus. By New Years Eve 1861, it was clear that Jenny would survive, although facial scars from the illness remained visible for years.34

  With his wife’s health improved and his daughters back in the house, Marx returned to the idea of a voyage to Berlin. He had an additional incentive to explore becoming a German newspaper editor again: in February 1861, the publishers of the New York Tribune, consumed by the impending Civil War on native soil, suspended the services of their European correspondents.35 Marx was now without his chief source of income; the modest sums he received as correspondent of the Viennese newspaper could not compensate. Becoming a Prussian newspaper editor was a prospect that was both politically and personally engaging.

  MARX LEFT LONDON ON the last day of February 1861. He journeyed first to the Netherlands, to speak with his Dutch relatives about yet another advance on his mother’s inheritance. Following almost three weeks of negotiations, he received £160 to help settle his debts. Traveling on to Berlin, there were no problems crossing the Prussian border. (Marx feared he might be arrested, in spite of the amnesty.) After an all-night train trip, pleasant enough “save for a 6½ hours delay at Oberhausen, a tedious little place,” he arrived in the Prussian capital at 7 a.m. on March 18, the thirteenth anniversary of the barricade fighting of 1848.

  Lassalle rolled out the red carpet for his guest. There were elaborate dinners, with prominent guests, including the elderly General von Pfuel, who as prime minister during the 1848 Revolution had defied the king’s orders to carry out a coup d’état. Marx found the eighty-two-year-old soldier still intellectually vigorous, radicalized in his old age, and regarded by the court as an atheist and a Jacobin. Lassalle engaged in a little provocation of that court by taking Marx to the opera and seating the notorious subversive right next to the royal loge. Marx found the performance, a three-hour ballet, extremely tedious, but was very impressed with the scenery—“everything being represented with photographical truth.” Lassalle’s publicity-seeking made its mark, and the official government newspaper, the Prussian News, reported on the “return to the fatherland” of the onetime revolutionary. What the newspaper did not report was that the onetime revolutionary, in investigating political circumstances, especially the likelihood of a clash between the liberal bourgeoisie and the monarch, and between civilians and the army, perceived good preconditions for a future revolution. Marx bargained hard in Berlin with Lassalle and the Countess about the conditions for starting a radical newspaper.36

  But the trip was not all business. He left Berlin for the Rhineland, saw old friends in Cologne, newer ones in the Wupper Valley, and then traveled on to Trier, visiting his mother for the first time in about fifteen years. During most of the 1850s, the two had only communicated via the Dutch relatives, and then only about Karl’s demands for an advance on his inheritance. Marx’s sister Emilie, the one sibling remaining at home with Henriette, had married in 1859, at a quite advanced age, just short of her thirty-seventh birthday. Marx derisively called her husband, Johann Jacob Conradi, the “Prussian NCO.” He was actually a Prussian government official, an engineer, specializing in flood control and river navigation. Henriette had moved in with Emilie and her husband. Karl had written to his mother to say that he suspected the couple of having designs on her estate, after which she refused to consider any more possibilities of an advance on the inheritance and, for a while, broke off all contact with her son.

  These were not the best circumstances for a visit, but it all went off surprisingly well. Tactfully renouncing any discussion of property, Karl spent his two days in Trier catching up on family matters. He seems to have enjoyed the company of his brother-in-law (at least to judge by the friendly letters Conradi later wrote him) and found his mother little changed in her basic attitudes, but elderly and enfeebled. His comment to Lassalle about the visit, that what “interested me in the old lady was her very fine spirit and the unshakeable consistency of her character,” was rather a backhanded compliment, but at least lacking the hostility with which he had referred to his mother for decades. Helping to mellow Marx’s feelings was that Henriette “took the intiative” in financial matters, without his prompting, and tore up the IOUs he had written to her for advances on his inheritance, thus increasing his future claims on her estate.37

  Personal and political business successfully accomplished, Marx returned to England in May 1861, with a proposal for a Berlin newspaper to begin publishing that fall. Engels came down to London toward the end of May; he and Marx spent three days discussing the proposal but ultimately rejecting the idea. There were personal considerations—not so much for Marx himself, but for the people around him. His daughters were ex
tremely unwilling to move. “The thought of leaving the land of their Shakespeare,” their mother wrote to Engels, “is terrible to them; they have become English through and through. . . .” Jenny herself had “little yearning for the fatherland, the ‘precious,’ beloved faithful Germany,” as she wrote sarcastically. Sarcasm aside, she did not want her two older daughters, now young women of sixteen and seventeen years of age, anywhere near the libertine circles in which Lassalle and the Countess moved. And Engels, without whom Marx would not undertake the journalistic enterprise, did not wish to leave his commercial position and place his own hard-won financial security at risk.38

  Another major issue was Marx’s lost Prussian citizenship. Without it, he could be expelled from the country at any time, as had already happened in 1849. While in Berlin, he started renaturalization proceedings. Lassalle, who continued these negotiations for Marx after the latter’s return to London, grew increasingly frustrated with the authorities’ stalling; he repeatedly barged into the offices of the Berlin police commissioner and the Prussian minister of the interior demanding explanations, but never got a straight answer to his inquiries. Count von Zedlitz, the police commissioner, did tell Lassalle that insofar as he had anything to do with the matter, no one of republican opinions like Marx could ever become a Prussian citizen.39

  These were all weighty difficulties, but they paled before the issue of working with Lassalle. He insisted that he and Marx act as co-editors-in-chief of the prospective newspaper, with an equal voice in editorial policy. When Marx asked about Engels’s position, Lassalle replied that if he wanted to have three editors-in-chief, that was fine, but Marx and Engels together could only have one vote, so that Lassalle could not be outvoted by them. This exchange underscored the problem: the newspaper would be Lassalle’s enterprise, with money raised from his Berlin friends and acquaintances, or received from the Countess. Marx would not be in charge and would all too likely end up playing second fiddle.40