A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  The world was nevertheless not large enough for the expanding European Great Powers to be satisfied indefinitely. People had long spoken about an impending war that, with Europe’s dominance at the time, must become a world war. In 1914, this war actually broke out, and now it was European lives that were being obliterated with the same indifference that African lives recently had been.

  This lies well beyond Marx’s lifetime. Marx only experienced the prolonged economic crisis after 1873, and also the growth of a range of social democratic and socialist parties.

  The outlines of his life can be summarized thus: He was born three years after the fall of Napoleon. He was seven when the first train rolled on its rails. He was thirty when the European revolution broke out, and a little over forty when Darwin’s epoch-making work was published. He managed to experience several of capitalism’s periods of prosperity and its crises. Before he died, both the telephone and the light bulb had been invented. But the First World War still lay far off, and it was even longer until the October Revolution in Russia as well as the first governments led by social democratic parties.

  But enough with the preliminaries. Now the story can begin.

  3

  The Darling of Fortune

  Background

  Karl Marx was born in Trier, Germany’s oldest city, which has its origins in the Roman era. Its most famous building is the Porta Nigra, constructed more than 1,800 years ago. Since then, Trier has passed under many masters. Today, it constitutes Germany’s outpost against Luxembourg. When Marx was born, it had just been conquered by Prussia.1

  As part of the Rhineland, Trier had belonged to France only a few years earlier. French troops had taken the city in 1794, and the laws of the Republic had been introduced. The new regime was greeted joyfully, primarily by the young and well educated, who had been deeply affected by the slogan of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Others viewed French anti-religious policy, which affected both the Catholic majority and the Protestant and Jewish minorities, with horror. For the majority of the people in Trier, living in difficult conditions, the changes did not mean as much as the spokesmen of the revolution had hoped. On the one hand, the great French market was opened to them; on the other, endless war meant great trials.

  When Napoleon seized power, he turned the organization of the army into the norm for the whole of society. In the domain of the schools in particular, the military model became a straitjacket. One of its sharpest critics was named Johan Hugo Wyttenbach, a pedagogue who eventually became the headmaster of the high school in Trier – the high school Marx attended. When Wyttenbach became headmaster, Napoleon had already been deposed and Trier had fallen to Prussia. Wyttenbach was among those who greeted the Prussians as liberators, during a period when a previously unknown German nationalism had seized many intellectuals. But, like many, he soon grew disappointed in the new regime when it crushed freedom of speech and turned its back on everything connected with the Enlightenment.2

  Most in Trier, perhaps, never had any illusions about their northern German masters. A period of reaction set in after the fall of Napoleon. The chief instrument of the reaction was the Holy Alliance, which Prussia had entered into with Russia and the Habsburg Empire. The ideal of revolution had to be combated, and the bonds between political power and religious power were to be fastened again, even more firmly.

  This entire atmosphere was foreign to the leading circles of Trier. The new order also meant acute economic difficulties. Now the French market was closed; only the local ones remained. In the countryside outside Trier in particular, poverty had long been severe; now the farmers – especially the grape farmers, creators of the famous Mosel wine – were subject to pure destitution. The prices for agricultural products fell, wine prices hit bottom, and taxes simultaneously became heavier. Even the city dwellers tasted oppression in ample measure. The poor got poorer, craftsmen were reduced to poverty, teachers and priests had less and less to live on, and the standard of living for the previously rather well-to-do markedly worsened. In addition, the least expression of popular dissatisfaction became the subject of repression by the Prussian authorities.

  Certainly, there were reasons for unease and suspicion among the new powers that be. Courts and other local authorities were trying to act on their own. Most of the leading circles of the city had been, and remained, adherents of French Revolutionary ideas, interpreted in a more or less radical spirit.

  Seditious ideas were also aired in books and newspapers. Ludwig Gall, who worked in the city administration, published a pamphlet in 1825 in which he attacked the egoism of the propertied class and claimed that far too few represented the interests that could bind the entire population together. While the ‘capitalists and landowners’ were enriching themselves, the majority of the people were sinking into ever deeper poverty. Things were getting worse for the day labourers, the farmers, and the craftsmen. Something now had to be done for their sake!

  The Trierische Zeitung published lines of thought similar to Gall’s. The newspaper had started printing in 1814, radicalizing gradually until it began advocating socialism around 1840.3

  The Prussian authorities became even more furious when influential men developed ideas that seemed to directly threaten north German supremacy. After the French Revolution, there were various Casino Societies (Casinogesellschaften) founded in numerous German cities; one of them was in Trier. Despite its declared political neutrality, the society became a forum for radical sentiments.

  The July Revolution of 1830 in France, which overthrew the reactionary king Charles X, roused hopes in the Rhineland of a similar development there. Rumours circulated that war would break out between France and Prussia. One of the heads of the city, Johann Ludwig von Westphalen – Karl Marx’s future father-in-law – declared that reactions in the Rhineland would hardly be marked by German patriotism in the event of open conflict.

  Even after the military situation calmed down, hope for change in political structures was sustained for many years, finding its most noteworthy expression in a party the Trier Casino Society arranged in January 1834. Everyone was in high spirits, we are told, and the mood climbed even higher when they sang the Marseillaise in unison. The pro–July Revolution song, La Parisienne, evoked rapture. One of the participants pulled out a tricouleur flag, stood on his chair, and waved it. This symbol of revolution quickly became the subject – as one observer noted – of ‘a nearly religious veneration’. A certain Brixius, a lawyer, declared, ‘Without the French Revolution, we would now be eating hay like cattle.’

  Those who stood out at the event were primarily lawyers. One of them, Heinrich Marx – Karl’s father – acted with greater caution, as far as can be judged. According to reliable witnesses, he left the party before the most provocative demonstrations had begun.4 At the time, his son Karl was a high school student, barely sixteen years old.

  The party inevitably came to the attention of the Prussian authorities. Brixius the lawyer was held primarily responsible for the seditious activity, and was charged with high treason. The court in Trier acquitted him – something the Prussians would not allow, and so appealed the decision. But the higher court in Cologne also found the charge to be groundless, and there the matter rested.

  By the standards of the time, Trier was a politically radical city. Lord Mayor Wilhelm Haw, who also had a background as a lawyer, was a Freemason and quickly became a source of annoyance for the foreign masters. He expressed himself frankly in various contexts – on behalf of his office, no less – and was suspected, like many others, of housing sympathies for the new July monarchy in France. At dinners, he would propose toasts for freedom of the press and of humanity, and turn against the monarchy. His defence of the Casino party of 1834 did not endear him to Prussian eyes. Ultimately the contradictions became acute, and those like Haw who demanded the city’s autonomy met ever stronger resistance. The situation became intolerable. and Haw resigned at the end of 1840. This did not mean that passive re
sistance came to an end. But it was the case that Prussia entered a more reactionary phase as a new king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, ascended the throne.

  Family

  Karl Marx belonged to a family of rabbis. His uncle Samuel was the chief rabbi of Trier, and his grandfather and a number of ancestors were rabbis before him. Karl’s mother was named Henriette, and her maiden name was Pressburg. She was from Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and never learned to speak or write fluent German. Her parents, by all appearances, had come to Nijmegen from Bratislava. Karl’s maternal grandfather was said to have been a merchant and money changer. But there were numerous rabbis in Henriette Pressburg’s family as well. It is possible that through his mother, Karl was distantly related to the great poet Heinrich Heine, who gradually became his close friend. One of Karl’s aunts married Lion Philips, a successful industrialist and grandfather to the founder of Philips, the large, still-flourishing multinational company.

  Henriette Marx bore nine children, but only four survived her (she was born in 1788 and died in 1863): besides Karl, there were three daughters. Tuberculosis put the others into an early grave.5 Their eldest son, Mauritz David, did not even live to four. The story of Marx’s sister Henriette is a gripping one; she fell ill early but persisted in getting married, convinced that marriage would cure her. But she died after a few months. Karl’s next younger brother Hermann lived to be twenty-three. He had gone into commerce, first in Amsterdam and then in Brussels. In a letter to Karl, their father exclaimed that Hermann was truly kind-hearted, but lacked talent. Tuberculosis took his life as well.

  Youngest brother Eduard’s life was even shorter – he was only eleven. ‘Write to him as if he were healthy,’ Heinrich Marx encouraged his son Karl in a letter the same year Eduard died.6 The youngest sister, Caroline, died at the age of twenty-two.

  Karl’s older sister Sophia was the sibling who meant the most to Karl. She admired him immensely and wrote passionate letters to him. In 1842, she married a lawyer in Maastricht, and thus moved to her mother’s old native country. She survived her younger brother, dying in 1886.

  The spouse of younger sister Louise was also a Dutch lawyer, but the family moved to Cape Town in South Africa in the 1850s. Emilie, on the other hand, kept to the area where she grew up, starting a family with a local civil servant and living out her life in Trier. It was she, the youngest surviving daughter, who as time went on took care of their mother. Emilie, who lived until 1893, was in contact with Karl’s family all the time, and claimed herself that in many respects she was similar to her famous brother.7

  Karl Marx also had problems with his lungs, which excused him from military service. Karl’s weak chest sometimes worried his father. For his mother, who otherwise called him ein Glückskind, a darling of fortune, her son’s health was a constant concern.8 Karl lived more than sixty years with his bad lungs, though it was a pulmonary illness that ultimately laid him in his grave.

  Karl’s father, Heinrich Marx, had a French lawyer’s education; after his degree, he returned to his hometown of Trier and began to work as a lawyer. When Prussia took over command of the city, it soon became evident that Heinrich’s Jewish faith would give him difficulties in his career. He quickly converted to Christianity – specifically, the Evangelical, or Lutheran doctrine. Only a minority of the city belonged to it, to be sure – most were Catholic – but on the other hand it was the state religion of the Prussian masters. There is nothing indicating that this was a big step for Heinrich Marx. He was a child of the Enlightenment in its milder version, in which the ideals of reason and tolerance were united with the belief in a sublime, merciful, and just God.9 Karl and his siblings were not baptized before 1825, the year in which Karl would begin attending a Lutheran school. Their mother converted even later, and unwillingly.

  Heinrich Marx was a successful defence lawyer. Caution characterized everything he did. But he was also a man of principle, and turned emphatically against both usury and exceptional laws for Jews. His private finances were in extremely good order, and he left a small fortune behind.10

  Heinrich Marx died on 10 May 1838, at the age of sixty-one. His son Karl had been home a few days earlier, celebrating his twentieth birthday on 5 May. On the 7th, he had travelled back to Berlin. Contemporary sources are surprisingly quiet about Karl’s reaction to his father’s death. Later testimony speaks that much more strongly to the fact that Karl mourned him for as long as he lived. Karl’s youngest daughter Eleanor testifies that ‘Marx was deeply attached to his father. He never tired of talking about him, and always carried an old daguerreotype of his father with him’. They found this photo in his breast pocket when he died, along with a portrait depicting his wife, Jenny, and his recently deceased eldest daughter. Engels placed the three pictures in Marx’s coffin.11

  It is not surprising that the memory of his father followed him throughout his life. They were very close to each other. Family tradition says that Karl was only seven when his father began having intellectual conversations with him. The most eloquent image of the relationship between father and son comes from the letters between them during the son’s student years. We will return to them shortly.

  Many disparaging words have been written about Henriette Marx, particularly over the last few decades. Jerrold Siegel, who in his biography of Marx makes partial use of psychoanalytical keys, asserts that she had an excessive need of control and tried for a long time to intrude into Karl’s life. It was in his attempts to emancipate himself from her, and from a feeling of powerlessness, that her son developed a habit of sudden outbursts of rage. Francis Wheen calls her ‘an uneducated, in fact half-literate woman’, obviously without properly considering that she had a native language other than German and that she had never attended a formal school. Wheen also asserts that Karl’s relationship with her was a poor one, and that for a long time he wished her dead.

  On the other hand, the person who dug deepest into Marx’s family relations – Heinz Monz – reports nothing about Marx disliking his mother. There is at least one document that mentions the opposite: a letter Marx wrote as late as 1861 to socialist leader Ferdinand Lassalle. In it, he says that he has been to Trier and visited the then seventy-three-year-old Henriette Marx. He certainly had every reason to be friendly with her, since she had just torn up some old IOUs. But that was no reason to state the following nuanced opinion: ‘Incidentally, the old woman also intrigued me by her exceedingly subtle spirit and unshakable equanimity.’ Karl Marx, that singularly honest man, would never have stated such an opinion if he detested or despised his mother.12

  Student and Poet

  We do not know much about Karl Marx’s early years. His sisters related a number of anecdotes about him being a real little tyrant, who did things such as making them eat mud pies. Of course, the truth in these stories – which are now standard in Marx biographies – cannot be judged.13

  Only in 1835, when he was to take his school examination in Trier, does he become fully visible in the documents. He had been trained in the kind of high school sketched out by Wilhelm von Humboldt a few decades earlier, where Latin and Greek dominated the curriculum.

  All his student writings have been preserved and are carefully reproduced in the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe.14 In Latin, it was a matter of writing a long essay, in one’s own words, on a given subject. Marx and his fellow students were to answer the question of whether the reign of Augustus could be counted among the happiest in the history of the Roman Empire. Marx’s response is balanced. The era of Augustus is compared on the one hand with the old Republic a few centuries earlier, and on the other hand with the reign of Nero. The latter is quickly and easily dismissed; it was characterized by the most shameful arbitrariness and murders of its foremost citizens. On the contrary, there was a lot to be said of the early Republic: the simplicity of its morals, fulfilment of one’s duties, and the altruism of its civil servants. Spiritual cultivation worthy of the name did not exist, however, and the era was marked by violent pa
rty conflicts between patrician and plebeian. What spoke against the Augustan era was that every semblance of freedom had disappeared. On the other hand, Caesar was lenient, and culture blossomed under him. Moreover, the military successes were superb. In short, the Augustan era is quite rightly counted among the best. QED.

  The essay follows the morals of Latin education of the time. Cato the Elder’s praise of the strict, character-building customs of times past had to find expression, and Nero’s reign of terror dismissed. The loss of freedom under the empire cannot be left unchallenged, but it is well outweighed by the culture, the leniency, and the military successes. Marx’s opinions, in short, are flexible towards the prevalent norms. In addition, he shows that he has a good Latin vocabulary and the ability to write long sentences with many interwoven subordinate clauses.

  Latin also required what was known as an extemporale, in which the teacher slowly read a text in German that the students would translate directly into Latin. In Greek, it was a matter of turning a few paragraphs from Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, a text the class had not previously become acquainted with, into German. The opposite applied in French; a German text was to be translated.

  Mathematics was a subject of which Humboldt thought highly. The mathematics teacher in Trier complained about the students not receiving enough instruction in the subject, and he was therefore lenient in grading their efforts. Four problems were to be solved: two in geometry, and two in algebra. Marx only took up three; one that dealt with money, interest, and amortizations (a subject to which he would later devote a great deal of labour) was left unsolved.