Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Hans Röckle himself was a Hoffmann-like magician, who kept a toyshop, and who was always ‘hard up’. His shop was full of the most wonderful things – of wooden men and women, giants and dwarfs, kings and queens, workmen and masters, animals and birds as numerous as Noah got into the Ark, tables and chairs, carriages, boxes of all sorts and sizes. And though he was a magician, Hans could never meet his obligations either to the devil or the butcher, and was therefore – much against the grain – constantly obliged to sell his toys to the devil. These then went through wonderful adventures – always ending in a return to Hans Röckle’s shop. Some of these adventures were as grim, as terrible, as any of Hoffmann’s, some were comic; all were told with inexhaustible verve, wit and humour.51

  In Hans Röckle Marx pokes fun at himself and the absurdities of the bohemian life to which he subjects his family. In this Faustian pact Marx is Hans, and Uncle at the pawnshop in Soho the affable devil. At another level of abstraction, the Hans Röckle cycle offers a neat allegory of surplus value, alienation and the workings of capital, governed by the diabolical debt cycle and the stygian circulation of commodities. Narrating these adventures to Tussy, Marx constructed a transposed child-friendly version of the subject of his great-book-in-progress: his epic critique of the economic system that would come to be known as capitalism.

  The enthralling stories interwove the problems of the different classes of magical and non-magical people attempting to co-exist. The toys, material objects invested with the aura of living things by means of Hans’s compact with the devil, went on all manner of exciting and perilous adventures. Overhearing this tale-telling, his wife, Lenchen and Engels recognised the images of the subjugation of poorer people by the rich, and the elective burden of creative labour that creates the freedom and sustenance of pursuing life-changing ideas and adventures of the mind, but not profit and bread that can be put on the table to eat.

  Underpinned by reality and drawing on familiar images, through the tales of Hans Röckle Marx introduced Tussy in fable form to the lives and many adventures of her family that preceded her birth – illustrating, through entertaining archetypes and fairy stories, the prequel to her own life story. By this means, Tussy learned the romantic story of how her parents met and married, how Lenchen came to be a member of the family, the adventures of the Marxes’ odyssey of European revolutions of the 1840s, of the births of her siblings, of their successive exiles, and how they came to be in England.

  In an as yet unimaginable future when she was an extremely old grown-up in her thirties, Tussy would regret that her father’s Hans Röckle story cycle was not written down. Combining her recollection of the stories Marx recounted her with a series of autobiographical notes penned by her mother, Tussy did write them down, transferring the archetypes and tales of childhood into their adult form. It is in this way that she became the writer and memorialist who documented the history of her family for posterity; and it is, without exception, from her work, but usually without attribution, that all accounts of her famous father and his family have been drawn. Tussy did not transmit a pre-existing family history, she created it: researched, interviewed, wrote it down, edited and published it before she died. Without Eleanor Marx, the life of one of the greatest men of the nineteenth century and his close family would remain a closed door, and we would know less about Karl Marx than we do about Shakespeare. To understand Eleanor it’s necessary to know something of the history of her family. Throughout her life she researched her heritage in preparation for a biography of her father. Tussy never completed this book, but her labour of love left us an atlas of her own origins.

  2

  The Tussies

  The germ of Eleanor’s existence lies in the friendship between two lawyers, one a Royal Prussian Legal Councillor and the other First Councillor of Trier. Eleanor’s maternal grandfather, Ludwig, Baron von Westphalen, was a distinguished lawyer who inherited his title from his father Philipp, ennobled as thanks for his service as chief of staff to the Duke of Brunswick during the Seven Years War. The title came at a useful time for Philipp, the son of a postmaster from Hanover, as it helped him win the hand of a spirited Scottish girl half his age, Jeanie Wishart.

  Jeanie, Tussy’s maternal great-grandmother, was sister-in-law to General Beckwith, commander of the British forces. Aged twenty, she visited her sister in Germany during the war, where she met the forty-year-old chief of staff to the German forces at a dinner party. Philipp went to Edinburgh to ask for Jeanie’s hand. Jeanie’s father asserted descent from the Earls of Argyll and Angus. There was little substance to this claim to old Scottish nobility, but Philipp’s baronetcy appealed to the snobbish Wisharts, for all that he was the son of a petit-bourgeois German postmaster.

  Jeanie and Philipp produced four sons, of whom Johann Ludwig, Tussy’s maternal grandfather, was the youngest. Sent to study law at the University of Göttingen, Ludwig was more interested in reading Shakespeare, Dante and French philosophers than studying case law. The death of his father whilst he was still a student forced him into a job in the civil service, and his marriage in 1797 to Lisette Veltheim, the aristocratic daughter of a big landowner, into a failed stint as a gentleman farmer.

  Ludwig and his first wife Lisette also had four children – two sons, two daughters. Their firstborn was the solemn Ferdinand. Lisette died in 1807 and in 1810 Ludwig married again. His new wife Caroline Heubel, a thirty-five-year-old common-sense woman of the German middle classes, was energetic, conscientious and a good stepmother to his four children. The newly married couple were living in the small north German town of Salzwedel when their first child, Johanna Bertha Julie Jenny von Westphalen, was born on 14 February 1814.

  In 1816 Ludwig was appointed First Councillor in the government of Trier in the Rhineland, close to the French border, under Prussian jurisdiction. Protestant in a dominantly Catholic town and an official in the pay of the reactionary and unpopular Prussian government, von Westphalen and his family were initially outsiders. But they soon found that, beneath the superficial lip-service Trier society paid to French rule and the Catholic church, the citizens were as conflicted as they were about absolute monarchy and lack of democracy. ‘We live,’ Eleanor’s grandfather wrote to a friend whilst her mother Jenny was still an infant, ‘in fateful times, a time in which two contradictory principles are at war: that of the divine right of kings and the new one which proclaims that all power belongs to the people.’1 Von Westphalen struggled all his life to resolve these competing value systems. As a Prussian bureaucrat, Ludwig’s professional and family survival depended on upholding the divine right of his king, but his true sympathies were with the new ideas of the French Revolution, free thought, and his love of art, music, literature and – especially – theatre.

  Though only a small city of some 12,000 people, Trier had a vibrant cultural life. The von Westphalens had easy access to the local opera house specialising in Mozart, and to the first-rate city theatre with its regular programme of drama by Lessing, Goethe, Racine, Corneille, Marlowe and Shakespeare. Ludwig and his wife were active participants in the Casino Society, a free-thinking literary and social club.

  Ludwig’s own ambivalence made him sympathetic to the difficulties of other men subject to the conflict between principles and survival. It was in this context that he met and quickly became firm friends with Eleanor’s paternal grandfather, Heinrich Marx, one of the town’s most successful and sought-after lawyers. In 1817, the same year Ludwig moved his family to Trier, the hitherto named Hirschel ha-Levi Marx became a Lutheran Protestant in order to conform to a declaration by the Supreme Court of the Rhineland declaring that Jews were no longer permitted to hold public office or practise in the professions. Heinrich Marx, as he renamed himself, nominally converted to protect his career, business and family.

  Hirschel ha-Levi Marx was born in 1782 in the town of Saarlouis in Saarland, Germany. His family moved to Trier when his father, Meier ha-Levi Marx, became chief rabbi of the city. Meier ha-
Levi Marx’s gravestone in the Jewish cemetery in Trier records his place of origin as Postoloprty in Bohemia – now the Czech Republic. Heinrich’s mother, Eva Lwow, was the daughter of Moses Lwow – also a rabbi in Trier – and like her husband, Eva was descended from generations of rabbinical Rhineland Ashkenazis. Heinrich’s brother Samuel, the favoured, wise son, succeeded their father as chief rabbi of Trier. Heinrich excelled at law but had no interest in his faith beyond ritual observance.

  Heinrich married Tussy’s paternal grandmother Henriette Pressburg, born in 1780 in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Pressburg was the German name for Bratislava, where Henriette’s father, Rabbi Isaak Heyman Pressburg, was born in 1747. His family came from Cracow, and the family line included scholars and a chief rabbi of Padua. A merchant, Isaak Pressburg moved from Bratislava to the Netherlands, where he met and married Nanette Cohen. Nanette’s family was long established in the Netherlands, and Henriette grew up in a family where German, Dutch and Hebrew were spoken interchangeably.

  Tussy’s grandmother Henriette was semi-literate when she married Heinrich. Brought up in the constraint of a customary household, she was uneducated and her only training was in how to be a good wife and cook. She was the more religiously observant and traditionally conservative of the couple. The improvement in her reading and writing was due to the encouragement of her husband. Heinrich, aware of the limitations of her upbringing and informed by his reading of Rousseau, understood that his wife’s educational disadvantages resulted from being born a woman in a sexist religion and society. Though not bookish, Henriette was numerate and had a clear grasp of domestic economy and the need for a balance of payments between income and outgoings. Her eldest son Karl might have taken closer note of her domestic economy. Heinrich and Henriette Marx had nine children, of whom four survived beyond the age of twenty-three. The children who survived infancy died of tuberculosis. Their firstborn son died; their second child, Sophie, born in 1816, was followed at 1.30 a.m. on the morning of 5 May 1818 by another son, Heinrich Karl. In August 1824 all Heinrich Marx’s children, including Karl, were received into the national evangelical church. Henriette was desperately sad that her only son was baptised and not bar mitzvahed. To a superstitious mind this boded ill for the future.

  Like many men and women of his epoch, Heinrich became more progressive as he got older. Heinrich’s engagement in moderate nationalist politics brought disillusion. He became critical of the incompetence and prejudice of the absolutist Prussian regime and its resort to repression.2 A homebody disengaged from her husband’s political work, Henriette lacked the opportunity to keep step with the changes in her husband’s life.

  Looking for answers and new ideas, Heinrich became an enthusiastic member of the Casino Society. He read widely and learned about free-French thought and Enlightenment philosophy. He sang along to the Marseillaise and other revolutionary choruses at club gatherings. When the Prussians promulgated the ban on Jews holding public office or working in the professions, Heinrich formally appealed to the government to lift the anti-Semitic discrimination on behalf of the whole Trier community of his ‘fellow believers’.3 When they refused, Heinrich had to make a strategic conversion of the family to Protestantism. Henriette felt the impact of the conversion more keenly as an attack on her cultural values.

  Soon after his conversion Tussy’s grandfather Justizrat Heinrich Marx was given the venerable title of Royal Prussian Legal Councillor, earning the amused remark from Uncle Heinrich Heine that by his conversion he had neatly purchased his ‘entrance ticket to European culture’.4 Heine was Henriette’s third cousin and a close friend and frequent visitor to the Marx home in Trier. It was now that Tussy’s grandfathers, the new Royal Prussian Legal Councillor and the First Councillor of Trier, met and became firm friends.

  Thrown together by the friendship between their fathers, the von Westphalen and Marx children were friends almost from infancy. Jenny von Westphalen was an inquisitive, lively and strikingly pretty child of four when she first encountered Karl Marx, and he still a breastfeeding baby. The future great revolutionary lovers met and knew each other before they knew themselves.

  Karl’s older sister Sophie, to whom he was closest in his family, was of similar age to Jenny and the little girls became playmates and later confidantes. Karl was home-educated until 1830, then went to the liberal Trier High School, also attended by Jenny’s younger brother Edgar, where the two boys became close friends. Karl confided to Edgar that his parents expected him to become a lawyer like his father, but he had every intention of following his own desire, to become a poet.

  Meanwhile in Barmen, 250 miles north of Trier, another young man, like Marx, also dreamed of becoming a poet.

  The handsome and athletic first son of a wealthy Rhineland entrepreneur, Friedrich Engels was growing up in great material comfort but spiritual discontent. Named after his father, Friedrich was born on Tuesday 28 November 1820, heir to a textile dynasty who made their fortune first from linen yarn bleaching and later from mechanised lace-making and the manufacture of silk ribbons. Friedrich’s mother Elise von Haar came from a family of intellectuals and teachers. Hers was a slightly risqué background for a woman married into the merchant elite and living in the extremely Puritan climate of the Wupper Valley.

  Friedrich’s father diversified into cotton spinning and set up a new company with two Dutch brothers, Gottfried and Peter Ermen. Ermen & Engels established a string of sewing thread factories in Barmen, Engelskirchen and Manchester, England. This was the business into which young Friedrich, eldest son, was expected to follow his father, without question.

  Confirmed in the Elberfeld Reformed Evangelical Church in 1837, the child Engels was hand-reared on evangelical fire and brimstone. He was browbeaten into theories of Calvinist predestination in which God’s very precise criteria for the pre-selection of the saved and the damned favoured the wealthy, successful and socially elevated. But his mother and her culture-loving father, Gerhard von Haar, an affable unreformed priest, tempered his severe upbringing by introducing him to classical mythology, poetry and novels. When he started school at the Gymnasium in Barmen he showed early flair for languages, history and the classics.

  Fascinated by German romanticism, he was drawn into the literary revival of German nationalism. Nationalist romantic legends were the theme of his schoolboy verse, including a piece entitled ‘Siegfried’, after the swashbuckling hero of the Song of the Nibelungs, lord and master to the trusty and valiant Dwarf Albericht. To Eleanor, the little girl who was to become his surrogate daughter, Engels would carefully pass on the poetic charms of legend and classical literature that made up the imaginative realms of his own youth.

  Approaching manhood, Engels yearned for a life as a poet-journalist who would support his writing by becoming a lawyer or civil servant. His father was having none of this unprofitable, idle dreaming from his eldest son and heir. Friedrich senior plucked Friedrich junior from school and deposited him into mercantile apprenticeship at the age of seventeen. University was out of the question; he would learn the family business.

  The following year, 1837, Engels had to accompany his father to England for the first time, where he learned how to trade in the purchase and sale of silk and encountered the great British cities of Manchester and London. The next stage of the young romantic’s very unsentimental education organised by his resolute father was an apprenticeship to a linen exporter in the seaside city of Bremen, where Engels worked as a clerk. The job was dull, but he enjoyed life in a hustling and bustling port and the liberal freedoms of the household with whom he lodged.

  In The German Ideology (written in 1845–6 and first published in 1932) Marx and Engels poke fun at anarchist philosopher Max Stirner, characterising him as Sancho Panza pontificating to the Duke on the question of the production and supply of bread whilst seated on his high horse of political economy. In one of his own early works on the economic and social conditions of the working classes of Britain, Engels commente
d on the essential role of bakers in servicing and satisfying the needs of the people. Later, in his study of the role of the sexual division of labour in what he described with masterful clarity as the reproduction of the forces of production, Engels got down to the hard tack of the question of women’s domestic labour in holding up not only entire national economies, but the history of the world.

  In the history of Tussy’s childhood world, Helen Demuth, who came from a family of bakers, was an enormously important member of the family, present at the moment of her birth in Soho. Her role in Tussy’s life was as significant as that of Engels. Bread – its price, the lack of it – had often fomented popular revolt. In the person of Helen Demuth, bread, revolution and the universal politics of housework converge in an extraordinary life and personality. Born in the Rhineland village of St Wendel on New Year’s Eve 1820, the same year as Engels, Helen Demuth’s family background was as humble as Engels’s was privileged. Her father was the village baker; little is known of her childhood except that it was short-lived, as she was sent into service as a maidservant in Trier at around the age of eight. Her first employers were brutal, subjugating her as an instrument of child labour within the household. Helen remembered the harshness of the physical work and her mistress for the rest of her life, and always recalled the exact weight of the first, huge baby she was tasked to care for in this job when still just a child herself.

  Homesick, longing for her mother, frightened by the formal household regime, sexual prey above and below stairs and bereft of any access to education, little Helen experienced the typical adversity and frustrated childhood of a young European working-class maidservant. Her luck changed at the age of fifteen when she escaped her draconian employers and entered service with the elite, patrician but philanthropic and liberal family of Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, Eleanor’s grandfather. Mistress of the lively, fashionable household, the easy-going Caroline von Westphalen took a shine to Helen. She saw to it that the bright, attractive maidservant was provided with a new set of clothes and taught to read, write and account, at which Helen proved an adept and quick student.