Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  12

  The Private Man

  NO SINGLE PERIOD ALLOWS us to peer more insightfully into Marx’s personal life than the twenty-five years between 1850 and 1875. During that time, the challenges of being a father and the head of a growing family were in precarious co-existence with the demands posed of an intellectual and political leader. At the end of the quarter century, Marx was increasingly withdrawn from active political life. His surviving children were grown, and the two who were married had made him a grandfather. Plagued by chronic illness, he faced a premature old age, at a time when modern, scientific medicine had yet to make significant inroads into Victorian life. This quarter century of adult maturity is a good time to observe Marx the private man: husband and father, friend and enemy, bourgeois intellectual, German and Jew. Distinctions between private and public are never absolute, and this admittedly commonplace reflection goes double for a passionately engaged figure such as Marx.

  MARX WAS MOVED TO reflect on manhood after visiting Karl Schapper on his deathbed in April 1870. In the final stages of tuberculosis, Schapper received his onetime ally and rival, and, as Marx wrote to Engels, “behaved in a truly distinguished manner.” While Schapper’s wife and son were in the room, he spoke of his impending demise in French, to spare them the details. Remaining true to his principles, Schapper mocked Arnold Ruge, who had gone back on his Young Hegelian atheism and proclaimed a belief in the afterlife, stating sarcastically that if this were true, “the soul of Schapper would give a pounding to the soul of Ruge in the hereafter.” Schapper was particularly proud that his family was cared for, in spite of his reduced circumstances: his daughter married, his oldest son with his own business, the younger boys apprenticed to a goldsmith, and his wife as his heir. “ ‘Tell all our people,’ ” Schapper said to Marx, “ ‘that I have remained true to principles. . . . During the era of reaction I had enough to do, bringing my family through. I have lived as a hard working worker and die as a proletarian.’ ” Profoundly impressed by Schapper’s bearing and demeanor, Marx observed that “The genuinely masculine in his character now once again appears clearly and strikingly.”1

  Schapper’s manhood lay in being principled and courageous, remaining loyal to his communist ideas, holding fast to the atheism that was integrally related to them, and not allowing fear of his impending death to weaken his beliefs. Marx’s own life embodied these concepts. He, too, remained true to his principles, even when expediency would have dictated otherwise. Marx was not afraid of confronting death, especially by challenging people who had impugned his honor to duels. These challenges were hardly limited to the raucous teenager and touchy young lover, but continued in his years as an adult. Accompanied by Ferdinand Freiligrath and Wilhelm Wolff, he burst into the editorial offices of one German-language London weekly in 1851 and challenged the editor, who had accused Marx of embezzling funds from the refugee committee, to a duel. Twenty years later, then fifty-three years old, he challenged another editor to a duel over printed assertions that he was behind the ostensible atrocities of the Paris Commune. Although Marx regarded dueling as an archaic, feudal survival, he nonetheless saw it as a way for “individuality to assert its rights” in bourgeois society, and so sometimes a necessity. Marx’s endorsement of this expression of masculinity was in line with a very common attitude among Germany’s educated middle class, a deeply entrenched social custom that continued until the mass slaughter of the First World War upended previous ideas about the meaning of death- defying courage.2

  Schapper’s courage and loyalty to principle were embedded in his family life. As a man, he was the head of his family. He had supported his wife and children the best he could. Being a loyal and loving husband and father—a man both commanding a household, but also providing for the dependents in it—was another integral feature of manhood as Marx tried to live it.

  Marx’s marriage to Jenny von Westphalen lay at the center of his life. It had commenced with their wedding day in Kreuznach in 1843 and ended with Jenny’s death in 1881. As with any long-married couple, the two had their share of arguments and disagreements, “the worm that is in every marriage,” as Jenny wrote. Most of these disputes centered on questions of money, and were most frequent during financial crises. At times the quarrels were severe, and led Marx to regret ever having gotten married. He ventilated his complaints to Engels on a number of occasions. Writing in 1858, he stated, “There is no greater stupidity for people with universal aspirations than to marry and so to betray themselves to the petty wretchedness of domestic and private life.”3

  Yet to all observers, Karl and Jenny remained the picture of a loving and devoted couple. Karl’s mature love letters testify to his devotion. One written in 1856, when Jenny was visiting her mother in Trier, encapsulates Karl’s love for Jenny, her place in his life, and his ideas about loving relationships between men and women:

  Great passions, which, due to the closeness of their object, take the form of small habits, grow and once more reach their natural size through the magic effect of distance. . . . My love of you, as soon as you are distant, appears as . . . a giant, in which all the energies of my spirit and all the characteristics of my heart are crowded together. I feel myself again as a man, because I feel a great passion. The many different perspectives in which we are enveloped by university studies and modern intellectual self-cultivation, and the skepticism, with which we necessarily note the problems with all subjective and objective impressions, are designed to make us all small and weak and whining and indecisive. But the love, not of Feuerbach’s human being, not of Moleschott’s metabolism, not of the proletariat, but the love of the beloved, namely of you, makes the man once again into a man.4

  One should not read too much theoretical reflection into a love letter, but Marx was staking out a distinct position for romantic love, separate from and beyond political action, scholarly evaluation, and the class struggle. Love sustained his life, removing him from the doubts and uncertainties, compromises and ambiguities that defined his political and intellectual engagement. His union with Jenny allowed him to be decisive and straightforward, in short, to be nothing less than a fully realized adult male.

  With this attitude, Karl could easily have consigned Jenny to a purely domestic sphere, as women of the European and American middle class so often were in the nineteenth century. He could have excluded her from his intellectual and political engagements. But this was evidently not the case. Jenny was Karl’s secretary or amanuensis, copying out his manuscripts in a good hand, and handling correspondence when he was ill. She had, as Karl noted shortly after his wife’s death, a “passionate interest” in his political strategies and theoretical formulations. Whether she helped her husband devise them is harder to say, especially because Laura and Eleanor Marx burned most of their parents’ correspondence after their deaths. Jenny’s own, fragmentary memoirs, written in 1865 when Karl was visiting his Dutch relatives, dealt with her husband and his causes, but concentrated on the difficulties and pleasures of their family life together.5

  Offspring were an integral part of that family life and Marx was proud of his virility and the children resulting from it. One important reason he and Engels were so contemptuous of Moses Hess was that the latter’s sexual failings, probably impotence, led Hess’s wife to run after lovers and act promiscuously.6 Equating masculinity with virility proved taxing for women, and Jenny did go through seven pregnancies. The practice of birth control, only becoming common in most European countries during the half century following Marx’s death, was in part inspired by the wish to break this equivalence between masculinity and number of offspring.

  Jenny and Karl certainly knew about contraception. In August 1844, when Jenny was visiting her mother in Trier with their first child, she wrote to Karl in Paris: “Little Karl, how long will the little doll play a solo role? I fear, I fear, when papa and mama are together once again, living in their marital community of goods, that soon a duo will take the stage. Or should we begin
to do it in the good Parisian way?”7 Like most questions about intimate behavior in the past, it is impossible to know whether Karl and Jenny tried the “good Parisian way” (most probably the practice of withdrawal) and failed to get it to work, or rejected the possibility altogether. In view of Jenny’s six pregnancies in the eleven years following the letter, it must have been one or the other.

  In Marx’s view, manliness meant fatherhood. Nineteenth-century bourgeois fathers have long had a bad press—regarded as domineering, tyrannical, insensitive, unloving, even violent. Friedrich Engels and Moses Hess, both confidants of Marx, had to endure such paternal tyrants. At best, bourgeois fathers appeared as distant authority figures, wrapped up in their work and unavailable to their children. Recent historical studies, though, have tended to rehabilitate fathers, pointing out that at least some of them—even very buttoned up German or Swiss ones—played with their children and were physically affectionate and emotionally accessible.8 Marx was certainly that sort of father. Visitors to his house as well as his own children commented on his love and affection for them. They noted the way he played with them, told them stories, and read to them. The desolate moods that followed his children’s deaths bespoke a paternal love that was anything but distant. Marx profoundly enjoyed the presence of children—not just his own but all children. Wilhelm Liebknecht, who was constantly in the household during the 1850s, remembered Marx as “the most tender father”:

  One must have seen Marx with his children to obtain a complete notion of the depths of sentiment and the childlike nature of this hero of Wissenschaft. In his free minutes, or while strolling, he brought them along, played the wildest and most lively games with them—in short he was a child among children. On Hampstead Heath we played “cavalry”: I hoisted the one little daughter onto my shoulder, Marx took the other, and we competed in jumping and trotting—and from time to time a little riders’ battle was delivered.9

  Memoirs and reminiscences often sentimentalize the past. But the loving letters Marx wrote his daughters while he was visiting Engels in Manchester, and their replies, all the more affectionate for being in stiff schoolgirl English, testify to the close relationship.10 One of the many things Marx disliked about his son-in-law Charles Longuet was what Marx saw as Longuet’s neglect of his children.11

  All three of Karl and Jenny’s surviving children were girls. Karl made no secret of his preference for male offspring, writing to Engels after the birth of his short-lived daughter Franziska in 1851, “My wife alas, delivered a girl and not a boy.”12 But following the heartrending death of his son Edgar, girls were all Karl had. He was determined that they grow up to be proper young ladies, learning French and Italian, taking drawing lessons, practicing piano or singing. Their future was the reason Karl resisted cutting back his household expenses: “a purely proletarian household arrangement . . . would go well, if I were alone with my wife, or if the girls were boys,” he explained to Engels. In the mid-1860s, when money flowed more freely, Karl increased his spending on Jenny and Laura, by then young adults, allowing them to have parties and balls.13

  The upbringing and social life of the Marx daughters were, in these respects, typical of the nineteenth-century educated middle class, in both England and Germany.14 Some aspects of their lives, though, were a bit more uncommon. Their education, through secondary school, was unusually elaborate, especially considering that in the mid-1860s there were all of twelve girls’ secondary schools in London, with a grand total of just 1,000 pupils. Marx’s daughters took gymnastics classes, exercising vigorously while wearing bloomers, those scandalous pants promoted by mid-nineteenth-century feminists. Unlike the common nineteenth-century practice of bringing daughters up to be devout, even in otherwise freethinking households, Karl and Jenny raised their daughters as the same outspoken atheists that they were. Karl was more than happy to talk to them about his politics. The oldest daughter, Jenny, began in her teens to serve as her father’s secretary, replacing her aging and fatigued mother. She also wrote for left-wing newspapers, expressing her sympathies for Irish nationalism.15

  The daughters were being prepared for a proper, bourgeois marriage, in which they would have the kind of role their mother played for their father: creating a cultured, artistic home, running the household, and having children, but also understanding and supporting a husband’s left-wing political aspirations. Marx had some difficulty balancing these different aspirations for his daughters. Laura, the best-looking of the three (unlike her sisters, she took after her mother rather than her father), became involved in 1866 with Paul Lafargue, a radical French student living in exile, and also a member of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association. Marx made very clear that his daughter’s future financial security would have to take precedence over political agreement or emotional attraction. The formal letter he wrote her would-be fiancé was a loud—deafening—warning shot. It began with some words concerning excessive intimacy:

  If you wish to continue your relationship with my daughter, you will have to give up your way of “paying court.” . . . The habits of an all-too great intimacy would be all the more inappropriate as both lovers will be residing in the same vicinity during a necessarily extended period of rough hardships and purgatory. . . . In my opinion, true love is expressed in reserve, modesty and even in the shyness of the lover towards his idol, but definitely not in letting loose passion and demonstrations of a premature familiarity. If you offer the justification of your Creole temperament, than I have the duty to interpose my reason between your temperament and my daughter. If you do not know how to express your love to her in a form appropriate to London’s latitude, then you will have to content yourself with loving at a distance.

  After making it painfully clear that Lafargue was to keep his hands off his daughter, Marx went on to discuss financial matters:

  Before the final arrangements of your relationship to Laura, I must have serious information about your economic circumstances. . . . You know that I have sacrificed my entire fortune in revolutionary struggle. I do not regret it. Quite the opposite. Were I to start my career over again, I would do the same. Only I would not marry. As much as it is in my power, I wish to keep my daughter from the cliffs on which the life of her mother has been shattered.16

  The letter mentioned Marx’s own life explicitly, but the implicit references were at least as important: his own long engagement to Jenny and their (presumed) premarital sexual relations; his belief, after living with the difficulties his wife faced in their wretched exile existence during the 1850s, and its reprise, following the loss of his correspondent’s post with the New York Tribune, that women should not have to bear the hardships of political engagement and class struggle. It was a man’s duty and a feature of his romantic love to spare his wife the deprivations of his life, and his angry letter to his daughter’s fiancé reflected the frustrations of being unable to do so.

  Marx did not just send angry letters. He at least contemplated sending Laura off to boarding school to remove her from her passionate lover; and some three months after that letter was written, he had a loud shouting match with Lafargue.17 In spite of Marx’s reluctance, the couple were married, and remained so for almost forty-five years. (Marx’s apprehensions about Lafargue’s earning potential proved correct, but Engels came to the rescue of the Lafargues as he had to the Marxes.) Jenny Marx married another French political refugee, Charles Longuet, five years after her sister’s marriage, although her father raised many of the same objections to her choice as he had to her sister’s. Jenny’s marriage, however, was cut short by her premature death in 1883.

  In spite of their father’s fuming, Jenny and Laura Marx fulfilled his expectations. This would not be the case with Eleanor. A decade younger than her sisters, she was kept at home for much of the 1870s to take care of her aging parents—a common fate of youngest children in the nineteenth century. Her life was affected by the late nineteenth-century ideal of the “new woman,” who wo
uld have a professional career before or as an alternative to marriage, and whose sexuality could be expressed more freely than in the high Victorian era. Eleanor demonstrated these attitudes publicly by sitting alone in a restaurant, reading newspapers, and smoking cigarettes. Running through a number of career options in theater, journalism, and left-wing politics, and a couple of lovers as well, she was driven to suicide in 1898 by her last lover, Edward Aveling, a cad and bounder straight out of Victorian melodrama. Her tragic end, in contrast to the less troubled personal lives of her sisters, suggests that Marx’s conflicting expectations for his daughters (both housewives and political activists, subordinate to their men but intellectually self-assured) could no longer be reconciled, at least in avant-garde bohemian circles, at the end of the nineteenth century.18

  As we have seen, there was another woman in Marx’s household besides his wife and daughters. This was of course the servant Lenchen Demuth. She had given Marx a son, albeit one he could never acknowledge. Wilhelm Liebknecht has left an intriguing portrait of her place in the Marx household:

  Lenchen exercised . . . a kind of dictatorship. . . . And Marx bowed to this dictatorship like a lamb. It has been said, that no one is a great man to his valet. To Lenchen, Marx certainly was not. She would have given her life for him, and Frau Marx and each of the children one hundred times over—indeed, she gave him her life—but Marx could never impress her. She knew him, his moods and his weaknesses and she could wrap him around her finger. Was he in such an angry mood, did he storm and rage so much that others were happy to stay far away, Lenchen went into the lion’s den, and, if he growled, she read him the law so impressively, that the lion became tame like a lamb.19