The long letter from Karl in response only added to his parents’ worry. In his mind’s eye, Heinrich conjured up an image of his son in a dressing gown, in the gloomy light of an oil lamp, unkempt, ruminating over the mysteries of the world without regard for either respectability or his poor father’s concerns.
His son could not even write home regularly, Heinrich complained. When he did put something down on paper, the result was a fragment that from beginning to end indicated indecision and division. Heinrich wrote of Zerrissenheit – inner turmoil – and at the same time confessed how poorly he thought of that ‘modern word’ that all ‘cowards hide behind’. And now Karl was joining such a contemptible crowd!
Full of indignation, the father – a man of the Enlightenment – exclaimed: ‘Do not blame nature. It has certainly treated you like a mother. It has given you strength enough, the will is left to man.’ But faced with the first difficulties he met on the way, this darling of fortune was gripped by Zerrissenheit (‘shattered heart’ in the Collected Works). It indicated weakness and an unmanly character. On top of it all, Karl was wasting money. This may seem prosaic to you, Heinrich writes sarcastically. A man who discovers a new philosophical system nearly every day cannot devote any attention to trifles like money.
This is the tone of the letters that were now following in quite rapid succession. But in the last letter to his son, the words are more lenient. Out of fatigue, I cannot go on, but lay down my weapons, Heinrich says. He still finds it difficult, however, to put up with the wastefulness, he adds.30
Part of the matter was that during Karl’s years in Berlin, Heinrich had been sick and was getting worse. He as well was succumbing to the family’s curse – tuberculosis. He spent most of his time visiting spas with his wife Henriette. His cough was becoming more and more severe, as was his fatigue.
The correspondence indicates that Heinrich Marx thought highly of his son’s talents. It can also be understood, indirectly, that Karl gladly expressed his positive feelings for his father. Heinrich Marx is often mildly deprecating before the sentimental words Karl clearly directed towards him in his letters, now lost.
The relationship between them both was naturally unequal at heart. Financially, Karl was completely dependent on his father. In his letters, he had to justify all the money he felt he needed for his life as a student. He was therefore eager not only to emphasize how diligently he was studying, but also to point out his devotion.
At heart, father and son were very different. Heinrich Marx was a cautious man. Life had taught him to navigate carefully. When Prussia took power over Trier, he found it difficult to realize his career plans as a lawyer. He was forced to renounce his faith. Even after he became both a Lutheran and successful in his profession, he knew he was vulnerable. Anti-Semitism had blossomed with German nationalism during the Napoleonic Wars, and it did not halt before an approved profession of faith. He did not betray his ideals, but he avoided demonstratively defying the authorities.
He constantly advised his son to secure a profession, preferably as a lawyer. An academic career could also be possible, but it required patrons.
Karl Marx was anything but cautious. He did not doubt his ability to get by in the world. More than that, in fact; he believed he knew he was going to accomplish something big. He was not afraid of defying the authorities and flouting conventions. He believed he was able to devour tremendous amounts of information, applied to a long series of courses, and threw himself into various activities. And he wasted money.
Nothing depicts the image of the very young Karl Marx so clearly as his only preserved letter to his father.
The Letter to His Father
It was on 10 November 1837 that Karl began his letter. But he was not finished with it until just before four o’clock in the morning of the next day. With it, he offered his father an image of the unkempt youth in a dressing gown, pale and brooding in the shifting light, with the dark Berlin night outside.31
It is a long letter; hardly a fragment, as Heinrich Marx alleged. But it certainly indicates Zerrissenheit – inner turmoil, a restless chase among different areas of interest and fields of study, endless wrestling with the great questions of philosophy, and moreover a pining for his chosen one, the beautiful baroness back home in Trier, Jenny von Westphalen.
In print, the letter takes up eight large pages. Its style is lofty and fateful. Karl is facing a new phase in his life; a new era is dawning, and as with world history it is a matter for the individual to scrutinize both the present and what has been. It is easy for the individual to become lyrical, ‘for every metamorphosis is partly a swan song, partly the overture to a great new poem, which endeavours to achieve a stable form in brilliant colours that still emerge into one another’. Grand words – but Karl had mastered this lofty aesthetic prose to perfection; his sentences are strong, well formed, and rhetorically effective.
In his letter, he summarizes the year in Berlin that has passed. It was first marked by longing for Jenny and the flight from everyday life into lyricism. But this lyricism became ‘owing to my attitude and whole previous development … purely idealistic’. In short, reality faded away and nature with it; mere castles in the air remained. But his feelings were warm, and this can certainly be seen in the three notebooks of poetry he sent to his beloved.
Nevertheless, lyricism had to remain a spare-time occupation – he was going to devote himself to law, he quickly added. He had written extensive extracts from legal literature, in which he had also tried to develop principles of legal philosophy. The contradiction between what is and what should be, so typical of idealism, was then revealed in full force. He ended up in forms devoid of content, and material without order. It was necessary to devote himself completely to philosophy, and he hastily created a complete philosophical system that also turned out to be unsustainable.
But his thirst for activity was not satisfied; he seems to have kept up with it all. He read and took careful notes about works on the history of art and of history, he translated Tacitus and Ovid from the Latin, and he obtained textbooks in English and Italian grammar – though without getting anywhere. But after so much learned drudgery, he had to devote himself completely to literary creation for a time. The results were such things as a draft of the fantastical novel in verse in the style of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Scorpion and Felix, which we have already encountered.
The fragment still exists, and it is completely in the style of Hoffmann. A mildly absurd Hoffmannesque spirit rests not only over the narrative, but also over the letter that paints a picture of a young man throwing himself into his many interests, and who seems ready to sacrifice comfort and a bourgeois future in order to make his way to a conclusive insight, regardless of what it is.
Hoffmann had lived in Berlin at the end of his relatively short life. It was not him that the young Marx finally chose as his guiding star, but another great spirit who also passed his final, most successful years in Berlin: the philosopher Hegel. After having floated around in the world of ideas in the company of Kant and Fichte, Karl Marx came to the conclusion that the idea must be sought ‘in reality itself’. ‘If previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, they now became its centre.’ These are thoughts we recognize from the poem about that same Hegel that Marx dedicated to his father. But previously, he now said, he had been repelled by ‘the grotesque craggy melody … which did not appeal to me’. Now he had found his way to it, even if after further digressions into various works of legal and philosophical literature that he sometimes made excerpts from, sometimes translated, and sometimes made the starting point for dialogues in the style of Plato. His many pursuits finally made him sick, and he had to seek out fresh air in the country outside Berlin. The illness was his salvation, because he then managed to acquaint himself with the various parts of Hegel’s philosophy, and additionally get to know ‘most of his disciples’ personally. By those means, he gained entry to a ‘Doctors’ Club’, for whose members Hegel’s philosophy was the common denominato
r.
Faced with these fireworks of thoughts and impulses, his father became thoroughly frightened. His reaction seems rather natural, considering that Heinrich Marx’s greatest wish was that his son would choose an education that led to a profession and a secure income. Karl had chosen his own path. But was it a path, and not more or less untrodden terrain?
The Young Hegelians
The ‘Doctors’ Club’ Marx spoke about was no formal association, but a loose amalgamation of young men who met to discuss the great philosophical questions of the time in a free, jovial atmosphere. The designation ‘Doctors’ Club’ is Marx’s own, and as far as is known there is no instance of it anywhere else.32 Marx was not yet a doctor, but the other members he mentioned had their theses behind them. Oldest among them was the leader, Bruno Bauer. He was nine years older than Marx, and already a good bit into an academic career.
Hegel’s thinking was the magnet that held the Doctors’ Club together. Marx and his friends interpreted Hegel in a radical direction. Hegel was the philosopher of unceasing change, they emphasized. Every stage of history had to create its own antithesis.
An opponent of this radical thinking spoke furiously of ‘Hegelings’. But that designation did not stick; instead, the prevalent name soon became ‘Young Hegelian’. The name gained currency in 1838, and it was codified in an influential 1841 pamphlet by Bruno Bauer: Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel den Atheisten und Antichristen (The Trumpet of the Last Judgement against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist). There were Young Hegelians of this kind not only in Berlin, but also in many other places around the German states, and soon after in other quarters as well. A little later, they were given an alternative name: Die Hegelsche Linke – the Left Hegelians.
In Berlin, these young leftists held animated conversations in various beer halls in the university quarter near Friedrichstrasse and Dorotheenstrasse. It was here Karl Marx (still only a student) was admitted as a full member – in fact, as a central figure. Bruno Bauer soon saw in him his closest collaborator.
Religion occupied the Young Hegelians’ attention. Criticism of the Bible had become an important speciality in Germany of the 1830s, and it did not halt even before the Holy of Holies. David Friedrich Strauss, who learned much from Hegel but left Berlin for Tübingen early on, had by the mid-1830s published Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus), a book that enjoyed great public success.33 Bauer himself was a theologian, and continued along the same path. The Bible was regarded primarily as a historical document and not as holy scripture, and it would thereafter be scrutinized closely. Later, Bauer would go so far as to deny that Jesus ever existed.
But in Prussia, the step from religion to politics was not a long one. Lutheranism was the state religion. The Church was a political power. Criticism of the foundations of Christianity was easily perceived as criticism of the State itself. William J. Brazill, author of a monograph on the Young Hegelians, thus made a mistake when he counted Marx out of the group with the justification that criticism of religion was not his main interest. Politics was very much a concern for the Young Hegelians, and Marx played an important, if brief, role among them.34
Even Marx’s future friend, Friedrich Engels, would acquaint himself with the group in Berlin for a time. Engels was performing his military service in the city then, and took the opportunity to participate in its intellectual life. He did not meet Marx, who had already left, but he socialized with many of the other Young Hegelians. Engels, a rather talented draftsman, depicted a lively scene from November 1842. At the time, the Berlin group had expanded with several new and important members, and with a temporary visitor named Arnold Ruge as well. Ruge, who at the time was otherwise in Halle or Dresden, stands in one corner of the drawing, gesticulating excitedly. A dispute is obviously playing out between him and Bruno Bauer, also gesticulating. Max Stirner, who a few years later in 1844 would publish Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own), also appears to be engaged in the heated conversation. The others present seem to be less interested. A few newspapers are lying on the floor, as well as an overturned chair. A number of glasses are standing on a table, and in the upper left-hand corner, Engels has drawn a squirrel. The squirrel symbolizes the Prussian censor, who signified a constant nuisance for the Young Hegelians. The minister in Prussia who monitored such things as the sanctity of religion and the limits of the printed word, was named Eichhorn – German for ‘squirrel’.35
By the time he made the drawing, Engels had already published a few articles as well as some pamphlets, either anonymously or under the pseudonym Friedrich Oswald. A letter he wrote to Arnold Ruge a few months before the drawing indicates that he was capable of writing more; his style was already easy and flowing. But now he hesitated. He was still young, he wrote; he needed to study more, and he was no philosopher by profession.
As his drawing shows, he nevertheless continued to socialize in the circle of Young Hegelians. At that time, the Berlin group had begun to appear under the joint name of Die Freien, ‘The Free’. It was a designation neither Marx nor Engels wanted anything to do with. On the contrary, ‘The Free’ soon became the subject of their scorn and derision.
The most important thing Engels had written up until then was a series of articles and a few small pamphlets about Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, at one time a herald of new thought in Germany but now an older, conservative philosopher of a clearly theistic and Christian hue.
Schelling had been summoned to Berlin with the task of uprooting the ‘dragon seed of Hegelian pantheism’. Prussia had a new king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and with him a partially new ideology. Many had hoped for a turn to greater liberty. The opposite happened. The king was a Romantic and a deeply Christian conservative, and his closest advisers were of the same type. Hegel and his many disciples, scattered from right to left, were abominations to men with such a conception of the world. God, according to Hegel, was a spirit that was both the driving force and the goal of the development of everything. Early on, many had seen pantheism – the doctrine that God is in everything – in this philosophy. Now, the powers that be in Prussia were talking about the same thing; but unlike Hegel’s earlier adversaries, they could put power behind their words. The summons of Schelling to Berlin was one of their measures – if not the most powerful one, then the most spectacular.
On 15 November 1841, Schelling began holding his lectures. Interest was at a boiling point. Approximately four hundred listeners attended; many of them are found in the history books. We can ignore the leading bigwigs of the city, the generals, and other persons of authority whose presence more marked the goodwill of royal power than it did a burning interest in philosophy. But even the aging Alexander von Humboldt, the discoverer and natural scientist, was there, as was the historian Leopold von Ranke and legal historian Friedrich Carl von Savigny. Was it interest that drove them, or courtesy towards a colleague?
Among the younger – and they made up most of the audience – the passion for the free play of ideas was even greater. Many expected something extraordinary. Mikhail Bakunin, the future revolutionary who at the time was quite well incorporated into the group of Young Hegelians in Berlin, was there; Friedrich Engels was as well. Arnold Ruge had travelled up from Halle for the event (in a letter, he described the excitement prior to Schelling’s appearance as unglaublich, ‘unbelievable’). Jacob Burckhardt, who much later would write his epoch-making book on Renaissance culture in Italy, was in the audience. So was a young Danish man, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, as yet unknown to the world. In fact, only Karl Marx was missing.
Schelling began his lecture by emphasizing ‘the significance of the moment’. Implicit in his message: he intended to found an epoch yet again, as he had done in his youth. At the same moment, confusion broke out in the hall. The doors flew open, and new listeners streamed in. No one wanted to miss out on this singular occasion. But the continuation was tamer than expected. Schelling spoke about his great predecessors, Kant and Fichte. He did not
mention Hegel, and the reason was not just that he was to uproot the dragon seed of pantheism Hegel had sown, in accordance with his task. It was evident as he went on that he saw Hegel as an imitator, who in his thinking had certainly got into various dead ends but in his best moments echoed Schelling’s ideas.
Schelling had named his lecture series Philosophie der Offenbarung, ‘Philosophy of Revelation’, and that title captured the entire philosophical system he had been working on for decades without ever coming to a conclusion. The starting point of the first lecture was the distinction between essence and existence. Through reason we sense the essence of an object – what makes a chair a chair, or a person a person. But existence is a question for experience. It is only with our senses that we can verify whether or not a certain object exists. Schelling calls the philosophy that proceeds from essence negative. Like Hegel, he himself had pursued it once. But now he wanted to go the opposite way and start with experience – in short, with what exists.
At least one of his listeners – Kierkegaard – was deeply moved by this first lecture. It was as if Schelling anticipated his own development towards thought in which the bare existence of humanity is the initial, and most important, question of philosophy. But with the following lectures, Schelling disappointed him. Positive philosophy sought existence in mythology. That was not where Kierkegaard wanted to be. In his diary, he wrote disparagingly about the man at the lecturer’s desk.
Others had been hostile right from the start, and not only because they still stood on Hegel’s side. For them, Schelling above all was a tool of the repression the new king was exercising. It was in that spirit that Friedrich Engels began to speak. He first did so in a few articles in Telegraph für Deutschland in December 1841, and thereafter in two small booklets that came out the following year: Schelling und die Offenbarung (Schelling and Revelation) and Schelling, der Philosoph in Christo (Schelling, the Philosopher in Christ). Both were published under a pseudonym.
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