A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  Marx was beside himself with despair. The only one he could turn to was Engels, who was now in Manchester. ‘Just a line or two to let you know that our little gunpowder plotter, Föxchen, died at ten o’clock this morning’, he wrote in a letter. ‘Suddenly, from one of the convulsions he had often had. A few minutes before, he was still laughing and joking. The thing happened quite unexpectedly. You can imagine what it is like here. Your absence at this particular moment makes us feel very lonely.’ He asked Engels to write a few words of comfort to Jenny. His friend did so, and Marx was very grateful. Jenny received the little comfort she could in this terrible situation. She had nursed the child at the risk of her own life. Marx exclaimed: ‘And on top of this, the thought that the poor child was a victim of bourgeois misère …’ Marx was convinced that Heinrich Guido would have survived if his parents had had enough money for a doctor’s care and medicine.17

  At the time of her little boy’s death, Jenny was pregnant again. Her daughter Franziska was born on 14 March 1851. She was also a sickly child. In the spring of 1852, she suffered a severe attack of bronchitis. Jenny wrote in a letter: ‘For three days, the poor child battled death. She suffered horribly. Her small, lifeless body rested in the little room; we all went out of the room into the street, and when night fell we made our beds on the floor; our three surviving children lay with us and we cried over the little angel who rested, cold and white as chalk, next to us.’18 The scene is a gripping one: the family joined together in the face of this bottomless misfortune. But it was not always like this, as we soon shall see.

  1852 was a horrible year, with all its sorrow and the torments of poverty. Jenny, who was brought up with the paraphernalia of German Christmas, was compelled to celebrate the holiday without the least bit of decoration or presents for the children. The following year, at least, was better at times. At the end of the year they could afford both presents and decoration, and she was wholeheartedly delighted with the children and certainly with Karl. It seemed to be brightening a bit on the horizon. But the hardest blow was still to come.

  In the spring of 1855, eight-year-old Edgar fell seriously ill. Karl was supposed to travel to Manchester but stayed at home, beside himself with worry. Jenny broke down. ‘For the last week emotional stress has made my wife more ill than ever before,’ Marx wrote to Engels. ‘As for myself, though my heart is bleeding and my head afire, I must, of course, maintain my composure.’

  On 6 April 1855, the boy died in his father’s arms. It was an even harsher blow than the deaths of both the other children. An eight-year-old is already a fully fledged personality, and Edgar – nicknamed Musch, ‘the fly’, or even Colonel Musch – was, according to all testimony, an incredibly charming boy: affectionate, happy, and moreover brilliantly gifted. The mourning for him became difficult to endure for the surviving members of his family – his sisters and parents. Jenny and Karl, who knew that life in nineteenth-century Europe was easier for men than for women, had placed great hopes in little Musch – and now he was dead.

  Jenny wrote in her memoirs that the day of Musch’s death was the most painful one of her life. ‘He was the love of my life, as he was for almost everyone who gazed into his beautiful, sunny face.’ He was also ‘my dear Karl’s complete pride, joy, and hope’. The boy had loved his father to the same extent, she continued, and during his illness constantly wanted ‘Charley’ by his side. The latter hardly left the boy during the weeks his suffering lasted. Jenny herself could not endure the sorrow; it was entirely too difficult for her to bear.

  Wilhelm Liebknecht bore witness to Karl’s sorrow at the funeral.

  Lessner, Pfänder, Lochner, Conrad Schramm, the red Wolff and I rode together – in the same wagon as Marx – he sat there silently, with his head in his hands. I stroked his forehead: Moor, you have your wife, your girls, and us – and we all think so much of you! ‘You can’t give me my boy back,’ he moaned, and we rode silently on to the graveyard in Tottenham Court Road.

  Liebknecht also said that when the casket was lowered into the ground, Marx was so forlorn that his friends were afraid he would rush down into the depths after it.

  Marx expressed his feelings in a letter to Engels. ‘I’ve already had my share of bad luck but only now do I know what real unhappiness is.’19

  But at the time of Musch’s death, Jenny was already at the beginning of a new pregnancy, and in January 1855 she gave birth to a girl. This was little Eleanor. Like her brother, she was uniquely gifted – the most brilliant of the surviving children. But she did not have Musch’s bright temperament. Her life was lined with troubles and sorrows, not all of which can be put down to external circumstances.

  But she was healthy, and she became the family’s little darling. She developed into a tomboy, says Jacques Attali, and her own father shared that opinion. ‘My father used to say that I was more like a boy than a girl,’ she wrote in a letter. Her father went even further. ‘Tussy is me,’ he could say. He concentrated his hopes in her. It is not strange that he was particular about her education, especially literary – fiction from Aeschylus to Balzac were and remained one of his favourite fields, which he also initiated her into.20

  Jenny gave birth to another daughter, but the child died almost immediately after birth. The circumstances around the event were so terrible that Marx did not wish to go into the details in a letter to Engels; they were not suitable for writing down.21

  Jenny and Karl had now lost four children. Their losses would mark the remainder of their lives. The joyfulness they were able to express throughout their lives would always have a dark background of sorrow and loss.

  It is not surprising that Jenny’s and Karl’s dream in common of a better, more just society was often overshadowed by all their personal sorrows and troubles. Jenny, who bore the heaviest burden, was periodically gripped by what in the language of our time we would call depression. Reality became so hard that she lost herself in passivity. She simply had had enough. Her sorrows also taxed her physical health. The numerous pregnancies likewise wore her out. What is striking, however, is not that she sometimes lost her spirits and her strength; it is everything she accomplished despite all the difficulties.

  Certain of her letters to Karl are almost unbearably gloomy. In June 1852, when he was in Manchester, she went through all the horrors she had to endure, finally exclaiming: ‘My head is about to explode. For eight days I have gathered all my strength; now I can do no more.’ And finally: ‘The lady [that is, she herself] is becoming very repulsive, and rightly so.’22

  But still, everything was not darkness. Even during these gloomy years, the family went on Sunday outings marked by high spirits and practical jokes. Much later, they still brightened up Wilhelm Liebknecht’s memories. ‘A Sunday in Hampstead Heath was the greatest delight for us. The children spoke of it the entire week, and even we adults rejoiced in it. The trip itself was a party.’ Helene, who they called Lenchen, bore the picnic basket on her arm. The main attraction was a thick joint of veal she had prepared for the hungry group. Liebknecht continued: ‘In the wild moorlands of Hampstead Heath we ate and drank exhaustively, and we read and talked politics while the children played and romped.’ On the way home, they sang patriotic songs like O Strassburg, o Strassburg, du wunderschöne Stadt. But above all, Karl and Jenny recited entire scenes from one of Shakespeare’s dramas from memory.23

  No sorrows pervaded these excursions. The family permitted themselves to burst out in joy. Both Jenny and Karl knew that the joint of veal was entirely too expensive for them, and that in a few days the butcher would be standing – by turns pleading and threatening – at their door. But what did that matter while fortune smiled?Jenny’s life during these years was thus marked not only by troubles and sorrows, but also by joy, even happiness. Much the same could be said about her husband. His temperament was just of another kind, more choleric and expansive. In his letters to Engels, he could have intense outbursts over what the hardships their marriage had cost both him
and his wife. During their years in Brussels, when domestic bliss was uninterrupted, he was shocked at Engels’s erotic escapades and the contempt for marriage that accompanied it. But during the 1850s in particular, he could complain numerous times about the variety of horrors that family life entailed when their resources were constantly running short. He could, for example, give a lively description of how he hunted around London in vain in the hopes of procuring some money, thereby losing both work time and power of thought, at the same time as Jenny – hounded by constant worries – was breaking down in nervous troubles.24 Engels tried to comfort him and his wife through his constant remittances, and moreover with an encouraging word or two. But their troubles eased only temporarily. The Marx family would soon be in a jam again.

  Even in the 1860s, when the financial situation had improved, he could express himself dramatically over the torments of family life. He did so above all in a letter to Paul Lafargue, his future son-in-law, who was already longing for Laura’s hand in 1866. Marx wrote that he had sacrificed himself for the revolutionary struggle and never regretted it – quite the opposite. He would do the same again if he had to live his life over. He would only do one thing differently: he would never have got married. And so comes a sentence that is aimed directly at Lafargue: ‘As far as it lies within my power, I wish to save my daughter from the reefs on which her mother’s life was wrecked.’25 Here it is not his own unhappiness he has in mind, but Jenny’s. The marriage had destroyed her life. The girls would not meet the same fate.

  His power turned out to be highly limited on this point. Lafargue soon became an esteemed son-in-law.

  But the darkness in Marx’s life was not solid – far from it. Suddenly everything was once again joy, ecstasy, and great love. In the summer of 1856, when Jenny was visiting her mother in Trier and Karl was visiting Engels in Manchester, Karl wrote a letter to Jenny where he maintained that happiness could be perceived most clearly when people lived apart for brief periods. The little things of daily life then gave way, and people could see what they really had. The true, enormous proportions of love stood out. Karl told Jenny how he kissed her picture with the same passion the pious kissed their icons. Her portrait did not do her any justice, of course; ‘your dear, lovely, kissable, dolce countenance’ was not reflected there. But it nonetheless depicted her!26

  In another, oft-quoted letter from 1863, it was Karl who found himself in the couple’s mutual birthplace. His mother had at last died, and he could collect the inheritance he had been longing for. He therefore had reason to feel a certain degree of optimism before the family’s financial future. But that could not be the only reason for his outburst of joy over the fact that Jenny was his sweetheart. Every day, he said in a letter to her, he made a pilgrimage to the house on Römerstrasse because ‘it reminded me of the happiest days of my youth and had harboured my greatest treasure’. He was delighted that people asked him left and right how the woman who had once been ‘the most beautiful girl in Trier’ was doing, and he asked himself if anyone could experience anything more pleasing than the thought that this belle of the ball was now his beloved?27

  Karl and Jenny could also be exuberantly happy together. Their youngest daughter, Eleanor, talked about how her parents could burst out in uncontrollable laughter until tears ran down their faces. Sometimes it was inappropriate to laugh so unrestrainedly, and at those times they dared not even look at each other, certain that the merest glance would provoke hilarity as uncontrollable as it was inappropriate.28 Eleanor had a tendency to idealize her parents’ marriage. But there is no reason to doubt this sharply outlined image of mutual, exuberant delight.

  The entire Marx family had got accustomed to living under burdensome financial conditions. When the situation eased temporarily, it roused great joy. For many years, the head of the family was compelled to wear a tattered overcoat. At length, he got money enough to buy a new, elegant topcoat, and he then took the opportunity to also be photographed. Both older daughters, Jennychen and Laura, burst out in wild enthusiasm over the new creation and praised his sober, elegant appearance.29

  It is clear that Jenny’s and Karl’s marriage and family life contained both happiness and adversity, radiant light and gloomy darkness. Above all, it was characterized from beginning to end by a unique intensity of feeling.

  So far, most of it seemed obvious and clear. But there was an additional side where the essentials are hidden in darkness – something important, and by the standards of the day extremely shameful.

  In June 1851, Lenchen Demuth, the indispensable housekeeper, gave birth to a strong and healthy baby boy. He was named Frederick, and would be called Freddy. His given name is the English variant of Friedrich, and everyone around them – including Jenny’s and Karl’s children – were told that it was Engels’s child. Engels was still a man known for his loose love life, and a further affair would not affect his image. But most of the information points to the fact that Karl Marx was the actual father.

  There is clear testimony indicating this. There is a letter from Louise Freyberger, an Austrian social democrat who had previously been married to Karl Kautsky, the greatest ideologue of Marxism after Engels. Louise now had a new husband, and together with him she kept house for Engels during his last years. Freyberger said in a letter that Engels, on his deathbed, succeeded in convincing Eleanor Marx that her father, and not Engels, was the father of Freddy Demuth.

  Objections can be raised to the letter. What has been preserved is a typed copy made a year later. The typed copy gives the text a degree of protected anonymity, and its contents can be read as part of the campaign of hate and slander against Marx that has been conducted with greater or lesser vehemence since the 1840s, and continues today. Incidentally, Marx mentioned this campaign in a letter to Engels in August 1851, at the time when Freddy was only a few months old. In it, he brought out not his own suffering, but Jenny’s. She was becoming worn out by all the problems of daily life – and on top of this, terrible slander as well!

  But was it really the rumours about Freddy’s parentage that was the concern here? Around the same time, Marx wrote a brief, unpublished text titled ‘Skizzen über die deutsche kleinbürgerliche Emigration in London im Sommer 1851’ (Sketches of German petty-bourgeois emigration of London in the summer of 1851). These emigrants, he wrote, were distinguished by their unreasoning hatred of Marx (the text obviously was to be published anonymously). Among the assertions, it was mentioned above all that Marx, brother-in-law of Ferdinand von Westphalen, the new Prussian minister of the interior, was a spy charged with providing information on other emigrants. This is assuredly the rumour that hurt Jenny so deeply; Ferdinand was her half-brother.

  Somewhat stronger evidence that Marx was also referring to the rumours of who was father to Freddy is a letter he wrote a few days later in which he spoke about a mystery in which Engels was also involved, which had given the matter a somewhat tragicomic turn. Just as he was writing this, he was interrupted and stated that the matter could wait until he himself came up to Manchester and could take it up face to face.

  If the insinuations really concerned the issue of Freddy’s parentage, and if Engels were in the know about Marx’s actions, such a statement would have seemed comic, even ridiculous. But Engels did not betray himself with any indication that he found Marx ludicrous.30

  There are thus certain arguments against the assumption that the rumours were true. But they still seem rather weak, and Louise Freyberger is not the only one who indicated Marx’s paternity. It is of course not true, as is sometimes asserted, that Jenny was travelling at the time of conception. She was not; both she and Karl, the children, and Lenchen were crowded into the little apartment at the end of August and beginning of September 1850. If Karl were the father, he and Lenchen must have met somewhere else – but where? Or did Marx creep into her bed ‘late at night’, as Sperber has proposed?31

  One possible indication is that after Franziska’s birth in late March 1851 (b
arely two months before Freddy’s!), Jenny did not become pregnant for several years. This could be interpreted as a punishment for her husband’s infidelity. But could her precarious health, alongside the family’s wretched finances, not be reason enough for mutual caution?32

  A weightier argument is that Clara Zetkin, the leading German social democrat and the mother of International Women’s Day, asserted that her friend Eleanor Marx called Freddy her half-brother. Other documents indicate that several leading social democrats were in the know on the matter, as was possibly Freddy Demuth himself. Or were he and the others also victims of the gossip that had plagued Karl and Jenny ever since the early 1850s?33

  But the strongest argument for Karl Marx’s paternity still remains. In 1896, the year after Engels’s death, Eleanor Marx wrote a letter to her sister Laura that Marx had proved his greatness as a politician and a thinker – but not as a human being. What besides the paternity of Freddy, kept in secret, could she have been referring to? What else could have so fundamentally changed her image of her father? Note that she wrote the letter a short time after Engels’s death, when according to Freyberger’s letter she should have been let in on the family secret.34

  Purely psychologically speaking, it is difficult to understand how Marx could have acted indifferently – distantly, in fact – to a boy who might have been his own. Towards the children that were demonstrably his, he showed a fatherliness that was unusual for the times. His relationship with his son Edgar (Musch) is telling enough. Jennychen was the apple of her father’s eye, and even Laura was the subject of his constant care. His love for Eleanor was inexhaustible.

  Little Freddy, on the other hand, was immediately placed with foster parents. How could Marx have done that to his own son? Could he have so totally disinherited his own son – the only one not to die in childhood – just to keep up his family façade? Could he have denied Freddy the kind of knowledge that was so precious and dear to his own self? It is difficult to understand.