The candidates also had to interpret the text concerning a short Bible quotation, and the results inevitably became a small sermon (however difficult it is to think of Karl Marx in the pulpit, his pious interpretation sounds quite convincing). In his German essay, the freedom to express oneself personally was greatest. The prescribed subject was ‘Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession’. The theme is a classic one: Hercules choosing between the narrow path of duty and the broad path of sin. Marx starts off with one of humanism’s central theses of defiance. Whereas other creatures have their given roles in creation, humans are alone in freely being able to choose what they will do with their lives. Of course, the Deity does not leave them alone, Marx says, but the divine voice can easily be drowned out by fantasy and emotions can lead them astray. The important thing is not to shine, but to deserve respect. It is not good enough to be a passive instrument for others; humans must be independently creative. At the same time, it is a matter of being of maximum benefit for others. We should not egoistically search for our own satisfaction; our happiness belongs to the millions.
That last sentence could be interpreted as a presentiment of Marx’s later ideas. But, in this case, it is illusory; his classmates expressed similar thoughts, and their inspiration was undoubtedly Wyttenbach, the school’s headmaster. His cautious Enlightenment thinking resounded in his students’ written compositions.
Incidentally, Wyttenbach himself corrected the essay. He praised its contents but found fault with ‘an excessive striving after unusual, flowery expressions’ (ein übertriebenes Suchen nach einem seltenen, bilderreichen Ausdruck). This was the reaction of a man of the Enlightenment to a text whose author had obviously imbibed a great deal of the style of Romanticism. There were no Romantics in the collegium in Trier.
Both the Latin essay and the one on religion received good marks. In the extemporale he made a great deal of blunders, but so did his classmates; it was a difficult task. The translation into French, however, was said to indicate certain shortcomings in diligence, whereas the paper in mathematics was clearly marked as passing. The worst was Greek. The translation of Sophocles was ‘mediocre at the most’ according to his teacher, Vitus Loers.
All in all, Marx’s performances were relatively good. He was only seventeen years old – thereby among the youngest – and placed sixth out of twenty-two students who passed (in addition, ten students failed).
It is hardly likely that Karl Marx would have been a high school student who concentrated entirely on the prescribed lessons in school. Later, as a university student, he devoted at least a rather absent-minded interest in the courses he signed up for. Even as a high school student, he had developed a burning interest in contemporary literature, starting to write his own poetry in the Romantic style.
What is more, his relationship with Vitus Loers, the teacher who found his Greek translation so mediocre, was quite tense. He refused to pay the farewell visit to Loers that, according to etiquette, students should have done with their teachers before they set off to university. Loers was offended, and Marx’s father had to try to smooth over the insult. But Heinrich Marx was no admirer of Loers. Loers was the Trojan horse in the high school at Trier. Among his colleagues who preferred to direct their gazes towards Paris rather than Berlin, he was the only one who took the side of the government. The authorities rewarded him by making him headmaster alongside Wyttenbach. Heinrich Marx was shocked.15
Karl was a capable student, but all the same not brilliant. He was young, but Edgar von Westphalen – his closest friend in his class – was a year younger and nevertheless got better grades than he did. Both belonged to the ranks of the privileged, for whom high school studies seemed self-evident right from the beginning. They were surrounded by numerous, far older sons of farmers who had had a longer way to go, and who could only hope for a modest future as Catholic priests in the countryside.
Karl Marx’s career was also regarded as fairly certain: he would become a lawyer, like his father. He therefore set off for the university in Bonn to study law. It is during this time that we can begin to divine more of his personality. The sources begin to speak through his letters. At that time, he also became a studious poet. To be sure, he had already started to try his luck as a poet at the end of his time in high school. But now the inspiration flowed.
As a poet, Marx was chiefly a Romantic. The leading individuals in Trier stood closer to the Enlightenment. Freedom and reason, and moderate religious faith had still been guiding lights long after the breakthrough of Romanticism. But Edgar von Westphalen’s father – Marx’s future father-in-law – may have influenced him early on.
In Bonn worked August Wilhelm Schlegel, one of Romanticism’s most important advocates. Even in the 1790s, Schlegel had been among the central figures of the small circle in Jena that had given wings to the ideas of Romanticism. Now, several decades later, he stood at the lecturer’s desk in Bonn and had the young Karl Marx among his listeners. But it was certainly not he who inspired the young man sitting at his feet to outbursts of Romanticism. Not one line in Marx’s poems indicates that he had been influenced by the typical Romantic conception of the world, with its inspiration from nature. It was instead a younger Romantic, marked by abrupt changes from sincerity to scorn and from rapture to despair, who caught his attention. Heinrich Heine was a master of the genre, but Marx was no Heine. He was only one of many students writing poetry in the Bonn of his time. Together with other like-minded students, he lived a typical student life in the manner of the 1830s, with merry parties and pranks. Poetry was an important element of the environment. Over a few years, Marx wrote large quantities of poetry. In the great edition of his collected writings, poetry takes up a total of 234 large, rather dense pages.16
Heinrich Marx regarded his son’s poetry with a mixture of admiration and alarm. His reactions can be read in the stream of letters he wrote to Karl. ‘I have read your poem word for word,’ he declares in an early letter, but adds: ‘I quite frankly confess, dear Karl, that I do not understand it, neither its true meaning nor its tendency.’ It was surely not his son’s view that happiness could only be found in abstract idealization, in keeping with his enthusiasm?
It is likely that the poem that frightened him so is called ‘Wunsch’ (Desire), included in the collection of copies of poems Karl’s sister Sophie made, thereby saving it for posterity. It is certainly a discordant, wild poem that expresses a young man’s despairing search for something to follow when a ‘dark demon’ is ravaging his inner being. Heinrich Marx was certainly also shocked about the defiant atheism the poem expresses. It could be the reason he brought up the importance of a belief in God in the same letter. Heinrich himself was no fanatic; his son knew this. But faith is a need in human beings, and there are moments in life when even the atheist has to turn to the Most High.17
His father’s reactions did not deter Karl from sending him additional works of poetry. ‘It is kind of you to send me your poems, although you know I am not of a poetic nature,’ writes Heinrich in another letter. He confesses that he himself, even during his first love affair, could not burst out in verse. But he is of course thankful for the poems.18
In a letter from the end of 1836, a mild irony can be divined from Heinrich Marx’s words. Against his son’s poetry, he sets his own prose dealing with money and material security. Karl had evidently hinted that he preferred to aim at a career in academia than one in law. Good, his father says, do so; respectable poetry could perhaps be the first lever in such a career. Although would it not be simpler to be a lawyer? Karl did not have as difficult a path to go on as his father.
When Heinrich Marx turned sixty in April 1837, Karl sent him a full collection ‘as a small token of eternal love’.19 There is a lofty dedication to his father, as well as ballads and romances. But the wild and the beautiful are suddenly broken in a few sarcastic, rather earthy epigrams. In one of them, the German sits in his armchair, ‘stupid and dumb’, and tries to imagi
ne away the drama that history is playing out, which will soon drag him along in it.20 In another epigram, the name Hegel turns up for the first time. He is denoted there sometimes with ‘he’, and sometimes with ‘I’ – a sign of identification. The third stanza is quite interesting:
Kant and Fichte soar to heavens blue
Seeking for some distant land,
I but seek to grasp profound and true
That which – in the street I find.
The lines are not memorable as poetry, but as the first expression of a form of thinking who would play a crucial role in all of Marx’s future writings. We will meet it again and again – heaven set against earth, head against feet, the concrete against the abstract. Hegel is still on the correct, down-to-earth side; in fact, he seems to have woken the young poet up to a new insight. One day, this would sound different.
The epigram, like a number of other poems in the birthday present to his father, suggests a more realistic style in Marx. But the Romantic has not yet been eliminated. The collection concludes with a longer draft of a ‘humorous novel’, Scorpion and Felix.21
We know nothing of his father’s reaction. As we have already seen, he was moderately entertained by his son’s poetry. It could possibly help the boy in an academic career, he thought, but then it had to be solid. The Romantic fittings were foreign in the extreme for Heinrich Marx, a man of the Enlightenment.
Jenny von Westphalen
Another recipient of Karl Marx’s poetry appreciated it all the more. Her name was Jenny von Westphalen and she was an older sister of Edgar, Karl’s classmate and friend. Through Edgar, Karl became like one of the family in the von Westphalen household.
Like Heinrich Marx, Jenny and Edgar’s father Ludwig von Westphalen was a lawyer. He was a great man in Trier, highly placed in the regional government with responsibility for things such as prisons, the police service, fire protection, and statistics. But despite a considerable salary, his financial position was never as solid as Heinrich Marx’s. Both men knew each other well. They were both members of the Casino Society and opponents of Prussia’s claim to power. They were also both cautious men.
According to what Karl Marx told his daughter Eleanor much later, Ludwig von Westphalen was the man who awakened young Karl’s lifelong interest in literature, Shakespeare and Dante in particular. That was likely the fact of the matter. Heinrich Marx was, as we have seen, a down-to-earth type, a stranger to poetry. It could not have been he, or the old-fashioned teachers at the high school in Trier, who stirred up the poetic vein in Karl.22
In the Westphalen household, Karl also found his great love, Jenny, four years his senior. In the beginning, Jenny was somewhat hesitant before Karl’s tokens of love – he was still a very young man and she was decidedly more mature. But she was soon captivated by him.
Their love was never without complications. There was a class distinction between them: she was nobility, and he came from a family of rabbis. Moreover, he was a somewhat unruly young man who often had too much of a good time at university. Her significantly older half-brother Ferdinand, who would gradually have a career in grand style and become a reactionary minister of the interior in Prussia, was a furious opponent of the relationship. Eventually, when Karl’s opinions swung far to the left, Ferdinand even put police spies on his brother-in-law. But Jenny’s and Karl’s relationship had unswerving support in her father, who early on had detected Karl’s unusual gifts and charm.
In the Marx family, the blossoming romance was at first met with joy and wonder. In a letter that is otherwise brimming with indignation, Heinrich Marx stresses that the young man with his splendid gifts, parents who love him, and ‘a girl whom thousands envy you’ is a darling of fortune.23 Karl’s sister Sophie was previously a friend of Jenny’s and was tremendously pleased with the relationship between her and the brother she adored. Your sisters love you ‘beyond all measure’, she wrote to him. And Jenny as well! She visits us often, Sophie told him, and she ‘wept tears of delight and pain on receiving your poems’.24
The poems in question were an extensive collection dedicated to ‘my dear, eternally beloved Jenny v. Westphalen’. The title is not modest: Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs). Its chief source of inspiration is obviously Heinrich Heine’s famous book of poems from 1827, also called Buch der Lieder. Compared with this singular masterwork, the eighteen-year-old’s attempt falls hopelessly short. On the other hand, the emotions Karl Marx expresses are warm, and his Romantic flame is strong and clear. Here harps resound, and a landscape that could be reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog opens out. Cliffs loom large, and under them the fog lies thick. But soon the wanderer stands outside the window of his beloved, and a dialogue à la Romeo and Juliet plays itself out. The young Karl is a good rhymer, and holds rigidly to the meter. He could even write sonnets without trembling at a rhyme or a syllable.
In a poem called simply ‘An Jenny’ (To Jenny), he professes his boundless love, but also an anxiety and a pain that are so great that he could long for annihilation. These are the usual violent swings of a great love affair, depicted in Goethe’s Egmont with the unrivalled lines ‘Himmelhoch jauchzend, zum Tode betrübt…’ (Rejoicing to heaven, grieving to death …).25
Jenny now became the natural centre, not only of Marx’s poetry but of his life as well. But his relationship with his parents – and his father in particular – mark his early life in another way.
Father and Son
The correspondence between Heinrich and Karl Marx contains much more than Heinrich’s reactions to his son’s poetry. In fact, it provides a quite eloquent picture – at least of the father’s relationship to the son. There is only one letter from Karl preserved: a letter that is much longer, to which we will soon return. Other letters from him we can deduce have been lost, since his father comments on them. But a consistent feature of the correspondence is Heinrich’s complaints that his son is so stingy in his letter-writing. ‘You know your mother and how anxious she is, and yet you show this boundless negligence!’ Heinrich writes in the very first letter, three weeks after his son’s departure.26 Karl must have said something indignant in response to this, and his father tried to calm him down. But the reproaches for his inadequate diligence in writing letters recur again and again.
Another more conspicuous theme is money. In his father’s eyes, the young Karl Marx is wasteful. Why does he constantly need more, without saying what he needs it for? His father reminds him that Karl is not the only child in the family. The necessities should be enough, even for a student. Do not forget, a lawyer’s income is not unlimited!27
The son tries to clarify his expenses, but the account makes the father indignant. The figures are completely out of order, he writes. Orderliness must be demanded even from a learned man, to say nothing of a lawyer.28
Heinrich Marx soon concluded that student life in Bonn was entirely too attractive for the young Karl. Better that his studies be located in the capital of Prussia – Berlin, with its military and civil servants. That would straighten the boy out. Heinrich wrote a letter of attorney saying that he not only allowed, but also actively wished for his son to change his place of study.29
And so it was done. The still only eighteen-year-old Karl Marx moved his studies to Berlin. The university there had just inaugurated a new era in the history of higher education by making research a mandatory part of university teachers’ work. Education and research were thereby linked in a single programme of instruction that was nonetheless difficult to realize. But neither did Karl Marx now become the exemplary student his father had hoped for. He gave himself up to philosophy, and was soon lost to any career as a lawyer.
His financial wastefulness did not diminish; quite the contrary. Karl continued to waste unreasonable amounts of money. During his first year in Berlin, he spent almost 700 thalers, his father points out. It was an enormous sum, considering that the richest young men with the same dispositions had to be
satisfied with 500. The father was not even managing to pull in as much money as the son was consuming.
There is concern throughout the father’s letters that his son will not know how to set limits in his life. This concerned not only money, but lifestyle. Particularly in the beginning of the correspondence, there are many anxious admonitions that Karl not forget to exercise, and moreover to be abstinent with food and drink. His mother, who often wrote small additions to Heinrich’s letters, goes into more detail, as officious as she is tender. Order and cleanliness are not side issues, she enjoins him. Scour with soap and a brush! Be careful with wine and coffee, and with pepper as well. Don’t go to sleep too late, and get up early, don’t catch cold, and don’t dance. With the addition: ‘[Y]ou are the kindest and best.’
The father also worried that in his studies the son would try to take on too much. In Bonn, he had applied to entirely too many colleges. He was spreading himself thin, his father complained, adding: ‘The field of knowledge is immeasurable, and time is short.’ It was a matter of limiting himself. But it only got worse in Berlin.
The culmination is the long letter Karl wrote to his father in November 1837. It was preceded by correspondence in which only his parents’ letters remain. In the first letter, Heinrich Marx appeals to his son’s ‘better self’, to his passion and his tenderness of heart, and to his ability to overcome his stormy idiosyncrasies and his unhealthy sensitivity. There is thus a brief description of the young Karl as his father sees him: passionate and kind-hearted on the one hand, and on the other oversensitive and unbalanced. His hope was in the better self. Did not Karl himself say he was the darling of fortune? Should not he at least think of the girl who was sacrificing her distinguished position and her wonderful future prospects to follow him into a ‘greyer future’?
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