Karl Marx

by Francis Wheen

  Seven of the eleven defendants were imprisoned. The Communist League was dead, and many years were to pass before Marx joined any other organisation. Understandably weary of Committees and Societies and Leagues, which demanded so much and achieved so little, he retreated into the British Museum reading room, ten minutes’ walk from Dean Street, and applied himself to the ambitious task of producing a comprehensive, systematic explanation of political economy – the monumental project which was to become Capital.

  At the end of 1850 – after six wretched months at 64 Dean Street – Karl and Jenny Marx found a more permanent home a hundred yards up the road, in two rooms on the top floor of number 28. Today the building is an expensive restaurant presided over by the modish chef Marco-Pierre White; a small blue plaque on the front, affixed by the defunct Greater London Council, records that ‘Karl Marx 1818–1883 lived here 1851–56’. This is the only official monument to his thirty-four years in England, a country which has never known whether to feel pride or shame at its connection with the father of proletarian revolution. Appropriately enough, the dates on the sign are inaccurate.

  The annus horribilis was nearly over, but it had a few more cruelties to inflict. Two weeks before the Marxes moved into 28 Dean Street their little gunpowder plotter, Heinrich Guido ‘Fawksey’, died suddenly after a fit of convulsions. ‘A few minutes before, he was laughing and joking,’ Marx told Engels. ‘You can imagine what it is like here. Your absence at this particular moment makes us feel very lonely.’ Jenny was quite distraught, ‘in a dangerous state of excitation and exhaustion’, while Karl expressed his grief in characteristic style by denouncing the perfidy of his comrades. The main target this time was Conrad Schramm, that erstwhile Hotspur who had risked his life only a few weeks earlier to defend Marx’s honour.

  ‘For two whole days, 19 and 20 November, he never showed his face in our house,’ Marx raged, ‘then came for a moment and immediately disappeared again after one or two fatuous remarks. He had volunteered to accompany us on the day of the funeral; he arrived a minute or two before the appointed hour, said not a word about the funeral, but told my wife that he had to hurry away so as not to be late for a meal with his brother.’ Schramm thus joined an ever-lengthening list of traitors. Rudolf Schramm, Conrad’s brother, was already on it, having had the effrontery to organise a meeting of Germans in London without inviting associates of Marx and Engels.

  Another of these outcasts was Eduard von Müller-Tellering, a former correspondent for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung who was known as ‘a first-class brawler’ but met his match when he tried to pick a fight with Marx. As so often with these internecine vendettas, the original casus belli was laughably petty. Tellering asked Engels, at very short notice, for a ticket to a ball organised by the German Workers’ Educational Society; Engels, explaining that the application was too late, couldn’t resist pointing out that Tellering had never attended any meetings of the Society, nor even collected his membership card – ‘and only the day before yesterday an individual in a similar situation was expelled from the society’. Taking the hint, the Society’s ‘court of honour’, presided over by Willich, rescinded Tellering’s membership. He replied with a volley of libellous attacks on the Marx – Engels clique – or, as it was often called by now, the Marx Party.

  At this point the party leader himself entered the fray. ‘For the letter you wrote yesterday to the Workers’ Society, I would send you a challenge, were you still capable of giving satisfaction,’ Marx thundered. ‘I await you on a different field to strip you of the hypocritical mask of revolutionary fanaticism behind which you have so far skilfully contrived to hide your petty interests, your envy, your unassuaged vanity and your angry discontent over the world’s lack of appreciation for your great genius – a lack of appreciation that began with your failure to pass your examination.’ It was Marx who had encouraged Tellering’s journalistic ambitions and had recommended him to the Society; it was now Marx who consigned the unworthy servant to the outer darkness. After one final, flailing counter-strike – a pamphlet of hysterical anti-Semitic insults – Tellering emigrated to the United States and was never heard of again.

  Marx revelled in conflict and was always alert to any slight, real or imagined. Tellering and Rudolf Schramm were ‘those wretches’; the leaders of the Democratic Association – a rival group to the German Workers’ Educational Society – were ‘charlatans and swindlers’; another group of newly arrived refugees was ‘a fresh swarm of democratic scallywags’. If these wretches and scallywags were so negligible, one might well ask, why couldn’t he ignore them? When libelled in print by an obscure politician in Switzerland named Karl Vogt, did he really have to compose a 200-page polemic – Herr Vogt – by way of reply? Marx was not alone in disliking the vain and boastful revolutionary poet Gottfried Kinkel, but no one else thought it necessary to subject Kinkel’s absurdities to a hundred closely printed pages of scabrous mockery, published under the sarcastic title The Great Men of the Exile. Whenever well-wishers suggested that a lion should not waste his time fighting with dung-beetles, Marx would reply that the merciless exposure of utopian charlatans was nothing less than his revolutionary duty: ‘Our task must be unsparing criticism, directed even more against our self-styled friends than against our declared enemies.’

  Besides, he enjoyed the sport. One need only read some of the incidental pen portraits in The Great Men of the Exile to see what pleasure he took in skewering them. Rudolf Schramm: ‘A rowdy, loudmouthed and extremely confused little mannikin whose life motto came from Rameau’s Nephew: “I would rather be an impudent windbag than nothing at all.”’ Gustav Struve: ‘At the very first glimpse of his leathery appearance, his protuberant eyes with their sly, stupid expression, the matt gleam on his bald pate and his half Slav, half Kalmuck features one cannot doubt that one is in the presence of an unusual man …’ Arnold Ruge: ‘It cannot be said that this noble man commends himself by his notably handsome exterior; Paris acquaintances were wont to sum up his Pomeranian-Slav features with the word “ferret-face” … Ruge stands in the German revolution like the notices seen at the corner of certain streets: It is permitted to pass water here.’

  Far from dissipating his vigour, these wild jeremiads actually seemed to renew it. The volcanic rage that erupted over obscure deviationists or dullards was the same fiery passion that illuminated his exposures of capitalism and its contradictions. To work at his best, Marx needed to keep himself in a state of seething fury – whether at the endless domestic disasters that beset him, at his wretched ill health or at the halfwits who dared to challenge his superior wisdom. While writing Capital, he vowed that the bourgeois would have good reason to remember the carbuncles which caused him such pain and kept his temper foul. The Vogts and the Kinkels served the same purpose – not so much butterflies upon a wheel as festering boils on the bum.

  His living conditions might have been expressly designed to keep him from lapsing into contentment. The furniture and fittings in the two-room apartment were all broken, tattered or torn, with a half-inch of dust over everything. In the middle of the front living-room, overlooking Dean Street, was a big table covered with an oilcloth on which lay Marx’s manuscripts, books and newspapers, as well as the children’s toys, rags and scraps from his wife’s sewing basket, several cups with broken rims, knives, forks, lamps, an inkpot, tumblers, Dutch clay pipes and a thick veneer of tobacco ash. Even finding somewhere to sit was fraught with peril. ‘Here is a chair with only three legs, on another chair the children have been playing at cooking – this chair happens to have four legs,’ a guest reported. ‘This is the one which is offered to the visitor, but the children’s cooking has not been wiped away; and if you sit down, you risk a pair of trousers.’

  One of the few Prussian police spies who gained admission to this smoke-filled cavern was shocked by Marx’s chaotic habits:

  He leads the existence of a real bohemian intellectual. Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he
does rarely, and he likes to get drunk. Though he is often idle for days on end, he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has a great deal of work to do. He has no fixed times for going to sleep and waking up. He often stays up all night, and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the comings and goings of the whole world.

  Marx’s reluctance to go to bed seems eminently reasonable, since his whole ménage – including the housekeeper, Helene ‘Lenchen’ Demuth – had to sleep in one small room at the back of the building. How Karl and Jenny ever found the time or privacy for procreation remains a mystery; one assumes that they seized their chances while Lenchen was out taking the children for a walk. With Jenny ill and Karl preoccupied, the task of preserving any semblance of domestic order fell entirely on their servant. ‘Oh, if you knew how much I am longing for you and the little ones,’ Jenny wrote to Karl during her fruitless expedition to Holland in 1850. ‘I know that you and Lenchen will take care of them. Without Lenchen I would not have peace of mind here.’

  Lenchen was indeed attending to Jenny’s usual duties – including those of the conjugal bed. Nine months later, on 23 June 1851, she gave birth to a baby boy. On the birth certificate for young Henry Frederick Demuth, later known as Freddy, the space for the father’s name and occupation were left blank. The child was given to foster parents soon afterwards, probably a working-class couple called Lewis in east London. (The evidence here is only circumstantial: Lenchen’s son changed his name to Frederick Lewis Demuth and spent his entire adult life in the borough of Hackney. He became a skilled lathe-operator in several East End factories, a stalwart of the Amalgamated Engineering Union and a founder member of Hackney Labour Party. Remembered by colleagues as a quiet man who never talked about his family, he died on 28 January 1929.)

  Since Freddy was born in the small back room at 28 Dean Street – and Lenchen’s swelling stomach would have been all too obvious in the preceding weeks – this apparently miraculous conception could not be hidden from Jenny. Though deeply upset and angry, she agreed that the news would provide lethal ammunition to Marx’s enemies should it ever get out. So began one of the first and most successful cover-ups ever organised for the greater good of the communist cause. There were plenty of rumours that Marx had fathered an illegitimate child, but the first public reference to Freddy’s true paternity did not appear until 1962, when the German historian Werner Blumenberg published a document found in the vast Marxist archive at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. It is a letter written on 2 September 1898 by Louise Freyberger, a friend of Helene Demuth and housekeeper to Engels, describing her employer’s deathbed confession:

  I know from General [Engels] himself that Freddy Demuth is Marx’s son. Tussy [Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor] went on at me so, that I asked the old man straight out. General was very astonished that Tussy clung to her opinion so obstinately. And he told me that if necessary I was to give the lie to the gossip that he disowned his son. You will remember that I told you about it long before General’s death.

  Moreover this fact that Frederick Demuth was the son of Karl Marx and Helene Demuth was again confirmed by General a few days before his death in a statement to Mr Moore [Samuel Moore, translator of the Communist Manifesto and Capital], who then went to Tussy at Orpington and told her. Tussy maintained that General was lying and that he himself had always admitted he was the father. Moore came back from Orpington and questioned General again closely. But the old man stuck to his statement that Freddy was Marx’s son, and said to Moore, ‘Tussy wants to make an idol of her father.’

  On Sunday, that is to say the day before he died, General wrote it down himself for Tussy on the slate, and Tussy came out so shattered that she forgot all about her hatred of me and wept bitterly on my shoulder.

  General gave us … permission to make use of the information only if he should be accused of treating Freddy shabbily. He said he would not want his name slandered, especially as it could no longer do anyone any good. By taking Marx’s part he had saved him from a serious domestic conflict. Apart from ourselves and Mr Moore and Mr Marx’s children (I think Laura knew about the story even though perhaps she had not heard it exactly), the only others that knew that Marx had a son were Lessner and Pfänder. After the Freddy letters had been published, Lessner said to me, ‘Of course Freddy is Tussy’s brother, we knew all about it, but we could never find out where the child was brought up.’

  Freddy looks comically like Marx and, with that really Jewish face and thick black hair, it was really only blind prejudice that could see in him any likeness to General. I have seen the letter that Marx wrote to General in Manchester at that time (of course General was not yet living in London then); but I believe General destroyed this letter, like so many others they exchanged.

  That is all I know about the matter. Freddy has never found out, either from his mother or from General, who his father really is …

  I am just reading over again the few lines you wrote me about the question. Marx was continually aware of the possibility of divorce, since his wife was frantically jealous. He did not love the child, and the scandal would have been too great if he had dared to do anything for him.

  Since it was made public in 1962 most Marxist scholars have accepted this document as conclusive proof of Karl’s infidelity. But there are one or two sceptics. Eleanor Marx’s biographer Yvonne Kapp has described the Freyberger letter as a ‘high fantasy’ which ‘forfeits credence on many points’; nevertheless, she concedes, ‘there can be no reasonable doubt that he [Freddy] was Marx’s son’. Professor Terrell Carver, the author of a life of Engels, goes much further. He refuses to believe that either Marx or Engels could have sired Freddy Demuth, and dismisses the letter as a forgery – ‘possibly by Nazi agents aiming to discredit socialism’. He points out that the version in the Amsterdam archive is a typewritten copy whose provenance is unknown, and the original (if there was one) has never been traced.

  Certainly, some of the allegations in the document defy all logic or common sense. Take the ‘letter’ which Marx is supposed to have sent Engels at the time of the birth, and which Louise Freyberger claims to have seen. Since Freyberger was born in 1860 and did not go to work for Engels until 1890, this means that he must have kept it among his papers for many decades. Why, having taken the trouble to preserve it, did he then destroy the only evidence which would ‘give the lie to the gossip that he disowned his son’?

  There is also a rather obvious psychological implausibility. When Jenny Marx discovered that her servant and her husband had been canoodling behind her back – and while she herself was pregnant – she would probably have evicted the treacherous Lenchen from the household forthwith, or at least regarded her with cold mistrust. Yet the two women remained affectionate partners for the rest of their lives. ‘Research into the life of Frederick Demuth and of his relations has yielded nothing concerning the identity of his father, and even Engels’s alleged claim that he had somehow accepted paternity has no other supporting facts,’ Professor Carver concludes. ‘The surviving correspondence and memoirs certainly provide no positive support for Louise Freyberger’s story.’

  This is not quite true. Although the papers of Marx and Engels were carefully weeded by their executors, who did not wish to embarrass or injure the grand old men of communism, a few telling fragments have survived. The first is a letter from Eleanor Marx to her sister Laura, dated 17 May 1882, which shows that Marx’s daughters had accepted the story of Engels’s paternity: ‘Freddy has behaved admirably in all respects and Engels’s irritation against him is as unfair as it is comprehensible. We should none of us like to meet our pasts, I guess, in flesh and blood. I know I always meet Freddy with a sense of guilt and wrong done. The life of that man! To hear him tell of it all is a misery and shame to me.’ Ten years later, on 26 July 1892, Eleanor returned to the subject: ‘It may be that I am very “sentimental” – but I can’t help feelin
g that Freddy has had great injustice all through his life. Is it not wonderful when you come to look things squarely in the face, how rarely we seem to practise all the fine things we preach – to others?’ In the light of that earlier letter, her jibe is clearly aimed at Engels.

  Both Karl Marx and his wife left small but telling clues to the truth. Jenny’s autobiographical essay, ‘A Short Sketch of an Eventful Life’, written in 1865, includes a curious parenthetical revelation: ‘In the early summer of 1851 an event occurred which I do not wish to relate here in detail, although it contributed to increase our worries, both personal and others.’ The event in question can only have been the arrival of Freddy. If Helene Demuth had been impregnated by some other lover, why would it have caused Jenny such lasting and personal grief?

  Odder still is a letter sent by Marx to Engels on 31 March 1851, when Helene was six months pregnant. After an epic grumble about his debts, his creditors and his tight-fisted mother, Marx adds, ‘You will admit that this is a pretty kettle of fish and that I am up to my neck in petty-bourgeois muck … But finally, to give the matter a tragi-comic turn, there is in addition a mystère which I will now reveal to you en très peu de mots. However, I’ve just been interrupted and must go and help nurse my wife. The rest, then, in which you also figure, in my next.’ By the time of the next letter, two days later, he had changed his mind. ‘I’m not writing to you about the mystère since, coûte que coûte [whatever it costs], I shall be coming in any case to see you at the end of April. I must get away from here for a week.’