Prometheus is the principal saint in the philosophers’ calendar, says Marx.49 They are truly challenging words, directed against all types of authority, even the Prussian. But Marx’s need for polemics is not satisfied with this attack. In a particular chapter, he enters into a highly contemporary discussion concerning the inheritance from Hegel, and spares no gunpowder there either. It is handled in a way that allows Marx to draw associations with Plutarch’s depiction of the Roman general Marius, who killed the Cimbri to the last man, leaving so many corpses that the people around Marseilles could fertilize their vineyards with them. The resulting harvest was glorious. In the same way, Marx says, Hegel can serve entirely different purposes than what he himself intended. He is accommodated now to the one, now to the other – but always morally. (Morals, in Hegel’s terminology, are always limited and in that sense abstract; Marx uses them the same way.)
Two extreme parties arise out of the different narrow interpretations of Hegel. One is the positive party, the other is the liberal (Marx italicizes the word). The one turns into itself; the other devotes itself to criticism, and its philosophy is thus directed outward. But both fail to do what they intend to, and are thereby transformed into Lilliputians who, with the help of megaphones, try to make themselves into giants.
With this comparison, both burlesque and grotesque, Marx goes on the attack against not only Right Hegelians and pure defectors from Hegel, but also against certain Left Hegelians who wanted to get closer to the Prussian state as it appeared in the early 1840s. Arnold Ruge, a man Marx would soon collaborate closely with, belonged to the latter.50
Bruno Bauer, his friend who wanted to prepare the way for his academic career, was thoroughly frightened in the face of this succession of rebellious notes. ‘What sort of berserker rage (Berserkerwuth) has seized you again?!’ he exclaimed in a letter. ‘What is it that pushes you and worries you?’51 But he wrote the warning cries in vain: the thesis was in Jena with Professor Bachmann. In a way, it is odd that Bachmann did not react to the attacks. He himself belonged to those who had turned from Hegel, and should therefore have taken them personally. But perhaps he was able to disregard things like that and look to the indisputable qualities of the thesis. Those certainly exist. The author possessed both wide erudition and intellectual acuity. But the text was also marked by haste. It is true that Marx had begun gathering notes on Epicurus a few years earlier, but writing the thesis itself took him only a little over six months. As often happened, a long period of incubation was required before his writing took shape.
With his thesis, Marx makes it clear that he does not intend to become a compliant man of the state. It is true he was aiming for an academic career, but once there he intends to be uncompromising and follow his own reason wherever it leads him.
Bauer also still hoped that he would be able to link the rebellious young man to the university in Bonn. But it soon turned out that the Prussian university was closed, and not only to such provocative candidates as Karl Marx. All Young Hegelians, without exception, were subjected to the same harsh verdict. Bauer never got the appointment that seemed self-evident. On the contrary: he had to leave the academic world. The hope for a daring programme of reforms from within the state’s own institutions of higher education was extinguished.
Now, only one other, more direct way to mould public opinion remained for those who wished to influence the country’s development: newspapers, journals, and books. So, like many of his friends, colleagues, and adversaries, Marx became a man of the press.
The Families
Marx had dedicated his doctoral thesis to Ludwig von Westphalen. His future father-in-law was described as ‘an old man who has the strength of youth’ who hailed every advance of the time with enthusiasm, and whose entire being was characterized by a real idealism. Marx regrets that he only has an ‘insignificant pamphlet’ to present to this ‘fatherly friend’ whose name was so dear to him.52
The words are lofty, but their sincerity cannot be doubted. Ludwig von Westphalen had meant much to the young man; after Heinrich Marx’s death in particular, he had become like a father to Marx.
The delight in the friendship would be brief, however. Ludwig von Westphalen died on 3 March 1842, less than a year after Marx had finished his thesis. Now there was no man in an older generation who was close to him.
There were two older women, on the other hand: his mother and his future mother-in-law. However relations had been between Henriette Marx and her ‘favourite of fortune’, and however it developed later, it became tense in the extreme after Heinrich Marx’s death. The reasons were financial. Karl had ordered his student life according to the generous remittances from home. However much the father complained, the money turned up and made the son’s student life pleasant. After Heinrich’s death, nothing was assured. All the same, he must have received something; he continued his studies until his thesis was finished in 1841. The old promissory notes Henrietta tore up in 1861 were certainly from that time.
Karl wanted to get his inheritance as soon as possible. The dream of being successful all at once followed him throughout his life. But the inheritance after his father did not permit easy conversion into hard cash. Most of it was bound up in real estate, and his mother and some of his sisters needed someplace to live.
The situation led to violent scenes. We know this chiefly through some letters Marx wrote to Arnold Ruge in 1842 and 1843 – while he was defending his thesis and the path of academia turned out to be impracticable for him. In the first letter, he speaks of ‘the most unpleasant family controversies’ due to his family, despite their prosperity, forcing him to live under burdensome financial circumstances for the time being. In another, written in January 1843, he tells Ruge that he has broken with his family and that he has no right to the estate as long as his mother is alive. A few months later, he was ready to get married. He then said that his future bride had had to fight ‘the most violent battles’ with her ‘pietistic aristocratic relatives’ who worshiped ‘the Lord in heaven’ with the same frenzy as ‘the lord in Berlin’. But the Marx family had also tormented her. Some ‘priests and other enemies of mine’ had ‘ensconced themselves’ and given her problems. Marx sighed that he and his bride had had more conflicts than people three times their age who boasted of their life experience. But still: ‘I can assure you, without the slightest romanticism, that I am head over heels in love, and indeed in the most serious way.’53
It is difficult to get a clear notion of what their families’ opposition looked like. We already know that Ferdinand von Westphalen, Jenny’s significantly older half-brother, was from the very start a sworn enemy of the love affair between Jenny and Karl. The sources say nothing about any others. However, we can be sure that Jenny’s mother Caroline was not among their opponents.
To all appearances, Caroline von Westphalen was a cultured person who put no obstacles in the way of Jenny’s and Karl’s future happiness. They lived with her in Bad Kreuznach at the time they married, and it was she who, a few years later, would send Helene Demuth – the woman who would become their indispensable helper – to their household.54
It is even more difficult to know what Marx was referring to when he spoke of ‘the priests’ (die Pfaffen) and other negatively disposed people among his relatives that Jenny had to fight against. ‘Ensconced themselves’ could be interpreted as new in-laws. But it is extremely unlikely that the Maastricht lawyer his older sister Sophie married in 1842 would have played any role in the context. Sophie was the sister closest to both him and Jenny. The younger sisters were still unmarried.
Could the reason have been related to status – that Jenny was too noble a girl? That is unlikely. Even less could the fact that she was not Jewish have played a role. What is likely is that even Jenny – certainly against her will – had been dragged into the turbulence concerning money and inheritance. The Marx family’s assets were greater than the Westphalen’s, but that did not help very much.
What
kind of person was Jenny von Westphalen, then? A beauty, said those who had met her. Certainly, she was more beautiful than the portrait that was painted of her in her youth.55 Marx tells her in a letter from the 1860s that during a brief visit to Trier, he was constantly asked how things were for the prettiest girl in town. Her husband swelled with pride.
And what about Karl Marx’s own appearance? There is a vivid description of him from around the time of his marriage: ‘Karl Marx was an energetic twenty-four-year-old whose thick black hair grew on his jaw, his arms, his nose, and his ears. He was dominant, intense, full of grandiose self-confidence, but at the same time very serious, learned, a restless dialectic.’56 It is not difficult to picture him.
But let us return to Jenny von Westphalen. Posterity only has indirect testimony about her beauty. On the other hand, it can be easily ascertained that she had a brilliant mind and solid schooling from home. Her letters are excellent in every respect: well written, expressive, witty, and full of keen-eyed observations. She could spice them up with expressions in foreign languages, even Latin. One time, she wrote an entire letter to her husband in French, and finally noted with surprise which language she had chosen.57
Once she had decided on the four-years-younger Karl Marx – which she did early on – she did not hesitate for a moment. Bruno Bauer, who met her in Trier, could calmly inform Karl that she was prepared to ‘endure everything with you’, somewhat prophetically adding, ‘and who knows what will come?’58
At the beginning of the relationship, Karl would have outbursts of jealousy. This was when he was living in Berlin, and Jenny in Trier, and they could only meet occasionally. On Karl’s twentieth birthday, he had clearly been gripped by dark suspicions which she passionately repudiated in a letter. She was torn by her feelings; Heinrich Marx had died a few days after Karl’s return to Berlin, and she was crushed. First Karl’s jealousy, and then the old man’s death – it was too much! Barely a month later, she had pulled herself together for a more balanced letter. She tells him how she had sat for hours by the old man’s deathbed and spoken about the most important things: religion and love. She wished that Karl could also have been there. And in the Romantic spirit, she exclaimed: ‘There is a love that extends over this life and is infinite,’ and a love like that possessed Heinrich Marx. She placed a lock of his hair in the letter to Karl.
There are many letters from Jenny to Karl from the period of their engagement (those from Karl have been lost). Jenny’s description gives an idea of the passion in Karl’s feelings: ‘Your beautiful, gripping, impassioned love, the indescribably beautiful expressions thereof, your enthusiastic visions.’ She did not want to lose these under any circumstances. Karl needed to understand that she could sometimes be fairly merry and mischievous – in short, flirty – with other young men, but it meant nothing. He had on one occasion clearly held out the prospect of wanting to duel with some rival, and the idea filled her with horror. Karl was her great love. No one else meant anything to her.59
In the lines concerning her way of chatting lightly with young men and Karl’s annoyance over it, a class difference can be divined. She was a fine girl who learned the stylish rules of the social life of the nobility, while he with his simpler background misunderstood the meaning of the flirtation. But Jenny was also a girl who intended to submit to her husband when the time came. She saw that as destiny, and at times regretted it. A few months before she was to be married, she wrote to her future bridegroom: ‘We have been condemned to passivity by the fall of man, by Madame Eve’s sin; our lot lies in waiting, hoping, enduring, suffering. At most we are trusted with knitting stockings, with needles, keys, and everything beyond that is evil.’60 But despite that, she did not intend to abdicate completely from her freedom. She put in her veto against Karl’s ideas on transferring the publication of a planned periodical, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, to Strasbourg. She did not intend to move there, and it soon turned out that her will was victorious.
Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen were married in Bad Kreuznach, not far from Trier, on 19 June 1843. The wedding took place in an evangelical church – likely the Wilhelmskirche and not, as otherwise usually said, in Pauluskirche.61 The fact that they chose an evangelical church says nothing about their faith. All marriages in Prussia were religious, and both bride and bridegroom were Lutheran in name. Otherwise, religion was a closed chapter for them.
The significance of Jenny Marx in Karl Marx’s subsequent life can scarcely be overestimated. She was not only his beloved wife all those years, and the mother of his seven children. She was anything but his passive discussion partner, and she was universally appreciated by all of the couple’s guests, who certainly did not praise her only for her beauty. She was, and remained until her strength failed her, the first reader of everything he wrote. She was the one who could decipher his unreadable handwriting, and therefore made a fair copy of his manuscripts.
Jenny Marx also could endure all the horrors life was to throw at her and her family over many, many years. She has not left a single word behind her in which she complains about her husband’s inability to provide for her and her children. She only blames society, politicians, and capitalists.
The Journalist
Once Marx had his doctorate conferred in Jena in April 1841, he set out immediately for Bonn. He still cherished hopes of a readership at Bauer’s side. But his plans were soon dashed, and now only one path stood open for him as for his Young Hegelian brothers in misfortune: that of the literary man. If Prussia could not be reformed from within the body of the state itself, it must be done through opinion. An enlightened public could, at best, force the state into greater openness.
‘Public opinion’ was a keyword of the times. Rousseau had spoken about it. But with him, l’opinion publique was above all a negative concept: a faceless mass deluded by morally lax writers into thinking the same thoughts.62 Others saw opinion as the force through which society could be changed into something better. No one expressed this optimism better than the Swedish botanist, economist, and bishop Carl Adolph Agardh. Opinion, he said in a newspaper article, was similar to ‘electricity, which runs through the chain of citizens who, thereby permeated, feel the same way at the same moment, feel the same pleasant jolt, or the same mild healing warmth’.63 He had an image of the still-popular experiments with Leiden jars in mind, in which a row of people took each other by the hand and one of them touched a charged jar. Everyone in the row would then give an involuntary little hop.
The same kind of optimism surely drove Marx when he entered into hectic activity as a journalist for a few years. To start with, he and Bruno Bauer planned together to write a continuation of a pamphlet by Bauer we have already encountered, Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts. Marx was to write about Hegel and art in it, but, as so often happened, he did not finish in time. The censor managed to intervene and confiscated what Bauer had written. Marx instead offered his text for Arnold Ruge’s periodical Anekdota, published in Switzerland. But he had to rework the article first. He was not satisfied with its ‘tone of the Posaune’ – the part Bauer had already put up – and he complained about the ‘irksome constraint of the Hegelian exposition’ that he wanted to replace with a ‘freer, and therefore more thorough exposition’.64
It is clear that, by this time, Marx had already begun to withdraw from Bauer’s positions. Instead, he sought connection with a man whom he had castigated in his thesis without mentioning him by name: Arnold Ruge. Ruge had published the Young Hegelians’ journal for a few years. Sixteen years older than Marx, he had been among Hegel’s students but had been imprisoned for six years in the 1820s, accused of subversive activities. Once released, he established himself as a publisher of periodicals in Halle. After Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s accession to the throne, the censorship became too severe for him and he moved his operations to Dresden in Saxony. There, he published Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst for a time. But even Saxon censorship made his activities i
mpossible; thus he opened the Swiss Anekdota. It was there that Marx intended to publish his article on Hegel’s aesthetics. But this was not finished either. On the other hand, another contribution Marx published under the pseudonym ‘A Rhinelander’ was finished, which dealt with the Prussian censorship instruction. The article signified his debut as a journalist.65
Expectations among his friends of what he could achieve were great. Marx had an ‘eminent head’ and was a ‘brilliant writer’, Ruge wrote in a letter to his publisher. Greater opportunities to satisfy the young man’s thirst for activity also soon opened up. In Cologne, a new newspaper had started in January 1842. It was called Rheinische Zeitung, and it was an organ for the Rhenish opposition to the Prussian authorities. A range of men with money supported it, including two men on the editorial board Marx knew, Georg Jung and Moses Hess. Both were older than Marx, but admired him for his brilliance. The most enthusiastic was Hess, who wrote in a letter to a friend: ‘You should prepare to meet the greatest – perhaps the only real – philosopher of the current generation. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, d’Holbach, Lessing, Heine, and Hegel combined in one and the same person – I say combined, and layered upon each other – and you have Doctor Marx.’66
Marx was welcome to contribute articles. Several of his old acquaintances, such as Bauer and Ruge, were already contributors. For the first time, a daily paper had become a natural forum for Young Hegelians. By April, the authorities had discovered that the kind of people who had just been driven out of the universities had now turned up in the newspaper columns instead. The censor argued they should also be refused admittance there, but the regional authorities refused to enforce the decision.
Marx contributed his first article in May 1842, which became a long series of articles on the negotiations regarding freedom of the press under the sixth Rhenish Landtag, or regional parliament.67 Freedom of the press and censorship thus remained the centre of his attention. But towards autumn, he turned to a burning social issue far from the Young Hegelians’ usual concerns. While Bauer and his peers, to the annoyance of the owners, wrote in an abstract and rather hard to understand manner, Marx took on everyday issues. This strengthened his position in the paper; he was brought into editorial work and soon characterized its political profile. Under his management, Rheinische Zeitung became a leading organ of opinion in Prussia. He gained an entirely new, topical subject when he wrote about communism, attacking the Allgemeine Zeitung in Augsburg for calling his paper ‘communist’ after publishing an article on the housing situation in Berlin.
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