In private, especially in his correspondence with Engels, Marx could be scathing about the working class. Both men referred to the workers organized in mutual benefit and educational societies, trade unions, and nascent socialist political parties—those who came closest to their ideal of class-conscious proletarians—as die Knoten, which might be loosely translated as “the knot-heads.” It was not a friendly accolade and reflected their frustrations in getting potential supporters to follow their own particular political line. Putting this frustration in terms of the workers’ stupidity, though, contained a whiff of bourgeois class prejudice and contempt for less educated and less intelligent manual laborers.55
THE POWER OF WHAT we today call ethnic and religious identities was always a blind spot in Marx’s political and social theories, although as a practical politician—stirring up the Catholics of the Rhineland against Protestant Prussian rule in 1848–49, or trying to make use of German nationalism for a return to political life following 1859—he was willing to exploit these identities. Two versions of these identities played a distinct role in Marx’s private life. One was obvious to him and to his contemporaries: Marx was a German who spent the last thirty-four years of his life living in foreign exile. The other was more subtle: Marx’s Jewishness. Sometimes perceived, albeit in very different ways, sometimes altogether unnoticed, it was a concept surprisingly difficult to grasp, both for Marx himself and his contemporaries.
Marx identified himself as a German, usually in a mocking ironic fashion, talking about “we Teutons,” and his regrettable but unavoidable affiliation with the German people and the German nation. As was true of his fellow political exiles, Marx’s long-term residence in Great Britain weakened his national affiliation and gradually anglicized him. But at times the contrasts between the British and the German way of doing things could also emphasize the German in Marx.56
As an economist, Marx found Great Britain to be the model capitalist country. It was efficient, punctual, and productive, greatly superior to a Germany characterized by delayed work and poor-quality products. This attitude carried over into his private life. Marx’s apology to his Berlin publisher, Franz Duncker, for having accused him of deliberately delaying the publication of On the Critique of Political Economy was an indictment of German business: “For one thing, I have really been gone from Germany for too long and have become accustomed to London conditions, so that I cannot properly appreciate the pace of German business transactions.”57 (This relationship between national character and economy efficiency seems to have gotten reversed over the subsequent 150 years.)
At times, Marx felt a resentment about these comparative conditions. In 1860, the Austrian minister of finance Karl Ludwig von Bruck committed suicide, after accusations of corruption were brought against him. For a sharp critic of matters German, Marx was surprisingly sensitive about English responses, as he wrote to Engels:
The English naturally harass one now, with Bruck. The day before yesterday one guy annoyed me with it again and asked: “Now, what do you say of Bruck’s suicide?” “I’ll tell you Sir. In Austria the rogues cut their own throats while in England they cut their people’s purses.”58
These resentments engaged most drastically in the 1850s, probably during the Crimean War. Marx, Edgar Bauer, and Wilhelm Liebknecht had taken part in a pub crawl one night. After considerable consumption, they came to an establishment where a group of Odd Fellows, working-class members of an English lodge, were drinking. At first the encounter went well, and enthusiastic toasts were offered, denouncing “Russian Junkers,” since, as Liebknecht pointed out, most Englishmen could not tell the difference between Prussia and Russia. But gradually another mood took over and Edgar Bauer denounced English “snobs,” followed by a drunken Marx, who launched into an enthusiastic speech praising German Wissenschaft and German music. No other country, Liebknecht remembered him saying, had produced musical artists like Mozart, Handel, Haydn, and Beethoven. Germany was well ahead of England, and only its current wretched economic and political conditions prevented it from being ahead of all other nations, as it one day would be. Liebknecht noted that he had never heard Marx speak English so well. The assembled Odd Fellows were less than happy and turned on their guests with cries of “Damned foreigners!” Just barely escaping a beating, the three émigrés rushed out into the street, where they began throwing rocks at gas lamps, and had to flee again to avoid being arrested by the Bobbies who had appeared to investigate the tumult. Such usually concealed feelings of nationalist resentment might help explain Marx’s outbursts at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War.59
In spite of these contretemps, Marx gradually became more anglicized over the decades of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s. English phrases crept into his correspondence, although the idea that the letters he exchanged with Engels were a multilingual Tower of Babel is rather exaggerated. Marx used English phrases in his letters primarily as he had used French ones before his move (and afterward for that matter), for emphasis and to express briefly concepts that required a longer and more awkward German exposition. The grammar and syntax of his writing remained distinctly German, and differed considerably from that of his anglicized daughters, who were much more comfortable expressing themselves in both written and verbal form in English or even in French. Marx’s own knowledge of French, stemming from his childhood in Trier, was always deeper and more profound than his knowledge of English.60
Never having regained his Prussian citizenship, Marx was a stateless person. In 1869, he first floated the idea of changing his legal nationality by becoming a naturalized British subject, making it easier and less risky to travel to the Continent. It took him five years to submit a formal request to that effect, which was turned down. This was after the Paris Commune, and Her Majesty’s government was not going to grant its protection to the ostensible sinister mastermind behind that well-publicized outburst of extreme radicalism. Quite unlike their generous policy of granting political asylum, nineteenth-century British governments were very restrictive about naturalizing foreigners and giving them domestic political rights.
The long delay between initial plans and the actual submission of his application reflects some reluctance about taking on a new nationality. Marx was only willing to consider the possibility because changes in the law made it easy to renounce being a British subject after obtaining the condition. As he told Engels, “I am not yet a Freeborn Briton. One naturally resists this sort of thing, as long as current circumstances are acceptable.”61
EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT MARX was Jewish. They expect that he knew it too, that he understood Jewishness in twentieth- and twenty-first-century terms. Because Marx lacked such a more modern understanding, he is often accused of being an anti-Semite. Rather than reiterating these accusations, or the sometimes rather labored responses of Marx’s defenders, it seems more helpful to consider both his attitudes toward his own Jewish ancestry and other people’s perceptions of his Jewishness in the light of nineteenth-century understandings of what it meant to be Jewish.
Marx’s correspondence was filled with contemptuous remarks about Jews. He often denounced individual Jews as greedy and grasping, but his derisive comments (as we have seen) included a wide range of anti-Semitic observations. They ranged from denigrating Jews as pushy and intrusive to perceiving them as not conforming to classical models of beauty and of melodious voice: “that guttural sound, which the selected people is to some degree cursed with.”62 These observations came to the fore in Marx’s descriptions of Ferdinand Lassalle, but he frequently repeated them about much less prominent people. Such remarks by someone of Jewish descent are usually attributed to Jewish self-hatred, accompanied by a denial of Jewish ancestry. Yet Marx was open about his Jewish descent and took a certain perverse pride in it.
The attitude was most clearly expressed in his letters to his uncle Lion Philips, a person Marx greatly admired and who was a father figure to him during his adult life. Marx wrote to Philips in 1864, about the
study of a Dutch Orientalist asserting that the Five Books of Moses were not composed by the biblical hero, but after the return of the Jews to Palestine from their Babylonian captivity. In his letter, Marx stated: “Since, however, Darwin has proven our common descent from the apes, scarcely any shock whatsoever can shake ‘our pride in our ancestors.’ ” In another letter to his uncle four years earlier, Marx had talked about “our tribal comrade Benjamin Disraeli.”63 Both of those letters suggest Marx’s ironic identification with his own Jewish descent, an attitude not unlike that of Disraeli himself.
In this context, Marx’s experiences on a trip from London to the spa town of Karlsbad in 1875 are revealing. One of the passengers in his train compartment leaving London was a “little Yid,” a merchant heading for Berlin on business. Writing to Engels to describe his trip, Marx was merciless about his traveling companion’s Yiddish-inflected German, the dubious business deals that had led to his being swindled out of £1,700, and his equally dubious plans to get the money back. The description is a stereotypical denunciation of an uncultured and greedy Jew.
Stopping in Frankfurt on his way to Karlsbad, Marx met with Leopold Sonnemann, the publisher of Germany’s chief left-wing newspaper, the Frankfurt News. The two men discussed the possibility of political cooperation between the socialists and the radical democrats. As an experienced journalist and editor, Marx greatly admired Sonnemann’s success with his newspaper, attributable to its capitalist virtues as “the best stock-exchange and commercial sheet in southern Germany.” Sonnemann himself was Jewish, but rather than denouncing him, Marx expressed his respect for this “man of the world.”64
What distinguished these two encounters in Marx’s mind was certainly not the respective individuals’ ancestry, their involvement with capitalism, or even their religion. Rather, it was their cultural affiliations, reflected in their speech, physical appearance, and attitudes toward the world. Marx’s rejection of his travel companion—or more precisely, his linking of his rejection to the latter’s religious and cultural affiliations—was certainly bigoted, but it also reflected a primarily cultural understanding of Jewish identity.
Such an understanding was common to Marx’s contemporaries. His correspondents had no hesitation in making hostile remarks about Jews to him and evidently did not feel they were insulting him in doing so. Few were as drastic as the German émigré radical Albrecht Komp, who wrote in 1859 of his plans to leave New York, “this Eldorado of Jewry,” and return to Germany; but hostile mentions of Jews occurred in letters by Engels and Jenny von Westphalen—two people who knew very well Marx’s attitudes and his ancestry.65
This understanding of being Jewish as primarily a matter of religious and cultural affiliation was quite pronounced in contemporaries’ attitudes toward Marx’s own Jewishness, or lack of it. His political enemies sometimes condemned him in these terms: Ruge, Proudhon, and Bakunin all made unflattering denunciations of Marx’s Semitic nature and antecedents. There were also a number of instances when Marx was treated in a way that made him seem distinctly un-Jewish. One was the duels. Jews were frequently considered intrinsically lacking in the personal honor needed to take part in a duel: they were not, as the Germans said, “satisfaktionsfähig.” Marx’s own dueling and his challenges to meet on the field of honor point to a different identity, or at least reflect his desire to present himself as anything but Jewish.66
In private, Arnold Ruge did denounce Marx as Jewish, but in Two Years in Paris, his public reckoning with the German communists, Ruge focused his attack on Moses Hess, calling him the “communist rabbi” (a phrase German historians have loved to quote ever since) and telling stories about his smuggling cigars from Belgium into France designed to present Hess as a greedy and conscienceless Jew. Such accusations were absent from Ruge’s treatment of Marx in the book, which said nothing of his Jewishness, but instead regretfully explained how a once valued co-worker had been seduced by communist ideas.67
Marx’s nemesis, Wilhelm Stieber, along with another political policeman, published the indictment in the Cologne Communist Trial under the lurid title The Communist Conspiracies of the Nineteenth Century. A 128-page biographical dictionary of Germany’s communists, carefully arrayed in alphabetical order, was appended. The entry on Marx contained his “wanted” notice, which described him as “reminding somewhat in speech and external appearance of his Jewish descent.” The entry also stated that his late father was a senior official of the Prussian state-owned Saar Basin coal mines, an error that was widely spread and appeared in quite a number of Marx obituaries. It would be hard to think of a more Gentile occupation than that one.68
All these perceptions of Marx were compatible with mid-nineteenth-century understandings of Jewishness. These did have a certain somatic component in the form of comments about external Jewish qualities, but even this may have related as much to body language as to actual morphology. Primarily, though, they were tied to religious affiliation and cultural practices. In those respects, Marx did not seem very Jewish. The rise of racial thinking about Jews, accelerated in the 1870s, and generally related to the spread of Darwinian conceptions of human society, would change observers’ opinions. Emphasis on Marx’s “Semitic” features in favorable reminiscences of him, written from the 1870s to the early twentieth century, are testimony to this change in attitude.69
Even some of Germany’s earliest racial anti-Semites did not regard Marx-as-Jew to be avoided. When Bruno Bauer, already playing with racial ideas about Jews and European nations more generally, visited England at the end of 1855, he spent hours conversing amiably with Marx about Hegel’s Logic.70 Even more remarkable was Marx’s encounter with Wilhelm Marr, not just Germany’s first prominent racial anti-Semite but the man who invented the phrase “anti-Semitism.” By profession a Hamburg journalist, Marr had been politically associated with Ferdinand Lassalle (a strange affiliation for a nascent anti-Semite) and was part of Lassalle’s odd scheme to proclaim Schleswig-Holstein annexed to Prussia in the name of the labor movement. Marx was introduced to Marr in 1867, when he was in Hamburg seeing to the publication of the first volume of Capital. Marx observed that Marr “in his personal manner . . . is a Lassalle translated into Christian terms, but, naturally, worth much less.” This description may have contained a hint of Marr’s attitudes toward Jews, and perhaps Marx’s low opinion of these attitudes, but it does not suggest any epic confrontation between the two men.71
In this respect, Marx’s private life appears as fairly conventional for its time. He was patriarchal, prudish, bourgeois, industrious, independent (or trying to be), cultured, respectable, German, with a distinct patina of Jewish background. None of this was out of the ordinary for the middle class of the period. A few aspects of Marx’s private life, such as his evident love of children, his rather bohemian work habits, his endorsement of freethinking, even for the women in his life, and his strong emotions, revealed in both friendship and enmity, might have placed him a bit off to one side on the spectrum, but there was little that was drastically unusual. The only way one could tell from Marx’s conventional exterior that he was a radical was his chronic financial woes. Even there, the family did its best to keep up appearances, and with the generous and persistent help of Engels was able to become more conventionally bourgeois. Of course, the real question is why anyone should expect private life and public political stances to coalesce. The answer might be that the demonstration of public commitments in private became a measure of individual authenticity in the twentieth century, as it never was during Marx’s lifetime.
13
The Veteran
DURING THE TWO YEARS following the suppression of the Paris Commune, Marx fought his last struggle: a bitter clash over control of the International Working Men’s Association. The contest was physically demanding and time-consuming, but while engaged in gathering delegates for a political showdown with his anarchist rival Bakunin, and firing off broadsides against him, Marx was simultaneously working on the second
German and French editions of Capital. The combined efforts were too much for his fragile health. He suffered a physical breakdown in 1873, and had to cease work for months while he sought medical treatment. On the completion of his cure, Marx’s campaigning days lay behind him. Increasingly leaving day-to-day relationships with radicals and nascent socialist parties to Engels or his sons-in-law, he cultivated a role as adviser and fount of political wisdom, although, given his irascible personality, the fierce polemicist sometimes prevailed over the elderly sage. This political role was in line with Marx’s public image after 1870 as a veteran: a protagonist of the great and far-off upheavals of 1848, a long-term advocate of the working class, and a predictor of a revolutionary and communist future that he would not live to see. Marx’s private life during his last mortal decade corresponded closely to his public one. He was a doting grandfather, a caring husband during his wife’s fatal illness, and, finally, an aging widower in steadily poorer health contemplating his own demise.
THE PARIS COMMUNE MADE Marx a public figure, in a way that he had never been before. His powerful pamphlet defending the insurgent regime brought him to the attention of radical and socialist activists all across Europe. Italian revolutionaries meeting at a banquet in Rome in September 1871 offered a toast to “Carlo Marx, the indefatigable instrument” of the working class. Nearby, in the little town of Macerata, a workers’ society chose its three honorary presidents: Garibaldi, Mazzini, and Marx. In view of Marx’s and Mazzini’s mutual derision, this was not an ideologically consistent decision, but putting Marx on a par with the heroes of Italian leftists was an indication of his public stature.1
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