Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  Heinrich Marx, in sending his son to the university in the Prussian capital, was banking on the sober and serious side of the university’s and the city’s intellectual life. Once there, Karl could put his wild year behind him, and resume a systematic and orderly path toward his goal. Of course, the distance from his family and many features of big city life could combine to thwart Heinrich’s aspirations for his son, by creating a very different kind of distraction than the drinking, brawling, dueling, and disorderly finances in Bonn.

  Detours in and obstacles to the young Karl Marx’s path from Gymnasium pupil to successful jurist, from adolescence to manhood, lurked everywhere—even unexpectedly in Trier itself, from Marx family friends, the Westphalens. Johann Ludwig von Westphalen was a senior Prussian state bureaucrat, a councilor of the Trier district government. He and Heinrich Marx knew each other; they shared similar, liberal, constitutional monarchist yet pro-Prussian political views, and Enlightened Protestant religious ones; they frequented the same social circles—both were members of Trier’s Casino—and probably had professional relations as well, since Johann Ludwig was the official of the district in charge of prisons and Heinrich an attorney whose practice included criminal defense. Their children were playmates: Johann Ludwig’s daughter Jenny with Karl’s older sister Sophie, and Johann Ludwig’s son Edgar with Karl. As the boys grew up, they attended the Gymnasium together.

  At some point in Karl’s adolescence, his attentions turned to his playmate’s sister, and he began to court her. The transition from family friend to lover was far from smooth or simple. Karl was the passionate, importuning suitor, and Jenny the reluctant object of his attentions. She responded to his declarations of love by stating that she was fond of him—in German, a play on words, “I’m fond of you,” expressed Ich habe dich lieb, as opposed to “I love you,” or Ich liebe dich. Jenny later conceded that Karl’s impetuous bearing and his stormy declarations of love frightened her. She feared giving in to him, admitting to herself that her feelings were reciprocal, becoming lost in her love for him, and then seeing his passions cool in the course of a relationship, leaving her loving a man who was “cold and withdrawn.”8 Yet by the summer of 1836, when Karl at eighteen was at home from Bonn before leaving for Berlin, she yielded to his importuning and the two became engaged.

  This engagement, the beginning of a lifelong mutual commitment, has been repeatedly portrayed as a fairy-tale romance, linking a beautiful young woman, “the prettiest girl in Trier,” the “queen of the ball,” an “enchanted princess,” daughter of a high Prussian official, from a distinguished aristocratic family, with a hairy, swarthy commoner, of suspiciously Semitic antecedents—a remarkable triumph of love and affection over prejudice and social differences. Such an account was beginning to make the rounds in Marx’s own lifetime. On his wife’s death in 1881, an obituary of her, written by Marx’s son-in-law Charles Longuet in the French newspaper Justice, stated: “We might guess that her marriage with Karl Marx, son of a Trier attorney, was not made without difficulty. There were many prejudices to vanquish, most of all that of race. We know that the illustrious socialist is of Israelite origins.” Sending the notice on to his and Jenny’s daughter, Marx snorted, “The entire story is simply made up; there were no prejudices to vanquish,” and added some cutting remarks about what a nitwit his son-in-law was.9

  Marx’s sarcastic observation deserves attention. The social differences between the Westphalen and Marx families were less than might appear at first glance, and Jenny’s acceptance of Karl’s proposal is more understandable when we take her own prospects into account. There were aspects of the relationship between Karl and Jenny that were unusual, even downright subversive in their rebellion against accepted ideas of manhood and of proper relations between men and women. These led to skepticism and opposition to the engagement in both families, but were grounded less in Karl’s Semitic past than in his uncertain future.

  Johann Ludwig von Westphalen, was a senior Prussian bureaucrat and also a governmentally recognized aristocrat, having secured his registration in the official list of noblemen living in Prussia’s Rhenish possessions. Yet, examined more closely, this picture of a Prussian aristocrat and high government official begins to blur and dissolve.10

  In the initial decades of the nineteenth century, as the society of orders began to be abolished in Germany, the nobility, enjoying the most special privileges and rights in this society, responded to changes threatening its position with a regrouping and reorientation. The most blue-blooded aristocrats, those who could trace their genealogy back across centuries, began to refer to themselves as the “primeval nobility” (in German, Uradel), rejecting any association with and sometimes personally insulting the “nobility of letters patent” (in German, Briefadel) or the “nobility of [state] service” (in German, Dienstadel), whose nobility was of more recent vintage and bureaucratic origin.11 Johann Ludwig von Westphalen was precisely such a second-rank nobleman, his father having received a title of nobility in 1764, six years before Johann Ludwig’s birth, for his services as privy secretary to the Duke of Braunschweig.

  Not only was Westphalen’s noble status suspiciously second rate, his personal past was suspiciously Napoleonic. He began his bureaucratic career, like his father, in the Duchy of Braunschweig, but when that duchy, along with a big chunk of Prussian territory, was incorporated into the Kingdom of Westphalia—a German state Napoleon had created in 1807, and handed over to his brother Jérôme to rule—Westphalen became a French-style bureaucrat, from 1809 to 1813 subprefect in the town of Salzwedel. Following the collapse of Napoleon’s rule in central Europe, like other Napoleonic officials he was taken over into Prussian state service, first in Salzwedel itself and then in Trier, where he never advanced beyond the rank of councilor in the Prussian district administration. There were many reasons for this truncated career, but one was certainly his political position: like many survivals of the Napoleonic era, including Heinrich Marx, Johann Ludwig was sympathetic to liberal political doctrines, including the idea of a constitutional monarchy—an attitude that did not help his bureaucratic career prospects.

  Finally, Johann Ludwig von Westphalen was married twice, to two very different women. His first wife, Lisette von Veltheim, from an old Prussian noble family of the sort beginning to call themselves the primeval nobility, died as a result of complications from childbirth in 1807. Five years later, Ludwig married Caroline Heubel, from a middle-class family, whose father was a retired Prussian military horse-care expert, a “master of the stalls.” The children of the first marriage, growing up under the influence of Ludwig’s devout mother and his aristocratic in-laws, all became adherents of the Awakening, and politically conservative; while Caroline’s children, Jenny and her younger brother Edgar, following their parents, were religious rationalists and politically to the left. The distinction between the children was greatest in Lisette von Veltheim’s oldest son, Ferdinand, who combined the religious inclinations of his relatives with a distinct animosity toward his stepmother. In the decade of the 1850s, following the suppression of the Revolution of 1848–49, Jenny would be living with Karl and their children as political refugees in London, while her half brother Ferdinand was the Prussian minister of the interior, known as the strongman of the government ministry in the age of reaction.

  In view of these features of Johann Ludwig von Westphalen’s life, friendly relations between his family and that of Heinrich Marx during the 1820s and 1830s do not seem quite so unusual, although the descriptions of their actual nature come not from contemporary accounts but from Karl Marx’s brief reminiscences, told in old age, to his faithful daughter Eleanor. (Eleanor ensured that there would be few contemporary accounts by burning most of her parents’ love letters after their death; just a few fragments survive.) Karl frequently related how Johann Ludwig had taken him under his wing as a boy and teenager, strolling together, and introducing him to the works of Shakespeare, the beginning of a lifelong passion. This admirat
ion for his future father-in-law is often mentioned; less frequently noted is that Jenny von Westphalen knew, liked, and admired Heinrich Marx. Indeed, one of the more interesting emotional contours of Karl and Jenny’s relationship was their respect and affection for each other’s fathers. As in many other aspects of Karl’s emotional life, his mother was left out. Heinrich’s awkward and foreign wife Henriette did not get along with the Westphalens, and they did not care for her either.12

  In spite of the developing feelings between him and Jenny, throughout the engagement Karl remained the anxious, insecure lover, voicing repeated doubts about Jenny’s fidelity, almost getting into a duel over aspersions cast on it, and complaining that she did not write to him. The writing was important because in the five years following their engagement, from the summer of 1836, before Karl went off to the University of Berlin, to the summer of 1841, when he returned to the Rhineland after receiving his doctorate, the young lovers were physically together in the same city exactly once—and during that meeting they had a terrible fight and nearly broke up. Their relationship was almost entirely epistolary, and at times not even that, existing only in their imaginations.13

  Yet Jenny stuck with Karl throughout the entire seven years of their engagement. It is commonly asserted that her devotion to a questionable individual in spite of her widely recognized desirability—five years before Karl’s proposal, she had even been briefly engaged to a Prussian lieutenant—can only be attributable to true love. This, too, is part of the fairy-tale story, and is about as accurate as that of the Westphalens’ social superiority to the Marxes. The assertions that Jenny was the prettiest girl in the city and queen of the ball, to say nothing of an enchanted princess, came from her husband, thirty years after the fact, when he was trying to cheer her up after a scary episode of smallpox that had brought her close to death and left her face scarred. Jenny was certainly an attractive young woman, known for her vivacity and social graces, although in Karl’s company she tended to fall into an awkward silence.14

  One feature of Jenny’s situation is usually overlooked in most accounts of her relationship to Karl; it is documented in a single line of her father’s state confidential personnel dossier, maintained on him, as on all Prussian state officials: “[He has] no fortune.” Johann Ludwig von Westphalen had run through his entire share of his family’s money in the first decade of the nineteenth century, trying, unsuccessfully, to be an estate owner, gentleman farmer, and real estate speculator. After that debacle, he and his family were entirely dependent on his salary as a state official, and following his retirement in 1834 on a modest pension—a sum only three quarters of Heinrich Marx’s yearly earnings. Jenny would not have had a substantial dowry and so would not have been able to make a brilliant match. Out of the question was a young man even from the elite, such as it was, of Trier—a city she despised as petty, backward, and clerical, the “site of complaint, the old nest of those rotten priests, with its miniature humanity.” There was the option of her previous fiancé, from the very lowest rank of the officer corps, and apparently also rather a bore.15

  Karl Marx was a questionable choice, with problematic future prospects, but he did have an exciting side, one that pointed to adventurous prospects beyond narrow and provincial Trier, and so might not have looked so bad compared to other possibilities. Such a calculating attitude might seem incompatible with the strong romantic feelings the young lovers articulated, but Jenny herself, “entirely a person of reason and understanding” as she was, “frequently remind[ed] you [Karl] of external things, of life in reality, instead . . . of forgetting all else in the world of love and finding consolation and blessedness in it.”16

  These practical matters were very much on the minds of the two lovers’ parents, and their reactions point to the truly unusual, strongly rebellious feature of the young couple’s relationship. Karl was just eighteen at the time. He had no means of supporting his future bride—and would be facing a good decade without any income before he might even begin to be in a position to do so. Contemporaries strongly believed that young men from middle-class families should not even think of getting married until they had a position enabling them to support a family. There was nothing peculiar about women from backgrounds similar to Jenny’s getting married at a young age, but they were expected to marry an older man, with better and more settled prospects. Karl’s and Jenny’s parents certainly fit that pattern, as Heinrich Marx and Johann Ludwig von Westphalen each had a good decade on their spouses. A man marrying a woman older than him—Karl was four years younger than Jenny—was scandalous; it violated accepted norms of masculinity and of relations between the sexes. Long before he formulated his communist theories, or absorbed the radical, atheist ideas of the Young Hegelians, Karl Marx’s marriage proposal was his first rebellion against nineteenth century bourgeois society.17

  Like many rebellions, this one had its moments of hesitation. Karl himself was painfully aware of the unusual difference in ages; his insecurity in the relationship and fears of Jenny’s infidelity stemmed from the suspicion that Jenny, using the reason and understanding she eminently possessed, would perceive his unsuitability—in spite of the romantic storm of feelings he could express, and, on good days, conjure up in her. The ever practical Jenny understood the difficulties Karl’s prospects posed for their engagement. A letter from her reminding him of this, unfortunately not preserved, made a strong impression on Karl, leaving him close to a nervous breakdown.

  At first, only Karl’s parents knew of the engagement. Heinrich was supportive of the young couple, even acting as a go-between while his son was in Berlin. Henriette, if not actually opposing the relationship, seems to have been more skeptical. These attitudes were, perhaps, a reflection of their own practical, arranged marriage, with Heinrich regretting the absence, in his own life, of his son’s youthful impetuousness and romantic attitude, and Henriette rather less impressed, especially as they involved a connection to a family that did not much care for her. Jenny was reluctant to let her parents in on the news, but that reluctance was uncalled for. Once informed, they were delighted; her father, in particular, was very enthusiastic about her choice of his protégé, claiming he was “unspeakably happy” over her engagement to “such an excellent, noble and extraordinary” young man.

  For all his enthusiasm, Johann Heinrich saw Karl’s marriage with Jenny as taking place years in the future, when his prospective son-in-law had acquired a steady position and could support his daughter in the style to which she had become accustomed. He made all these observations about Marx in a letter to Jenny’s half brother Ferdinand, who, along with other relatives of her father’s first wife, was far from unspeakably happy about her unconventional choice of a younger man with at best unclear career prospects. It is often speculated that Karl’s Jewish background played a role in this skepticism, but conservative German Evangelicals were by no means opposed to Jews who, like Karl, had converted to Christianity. One of their main leaders, Friedrich Julius Stahl, was just such a converted Jew. But the relatives’ continuous opposition would make Jenny’s life difficult throughout the course of the engagement.18

  WHEN KARL BEGAN HIS studies at the University of Berlin in the fall of 1836, his engagement only intensified the difficulties already inherent in his choice of a career. If he really were to marry Jenny, he would need a secure position as soon as possible. His father did not let him forget the circumstances, reminding him that “for the man [there is] no more sacred duty than the one he has taken up toward the weaker sex,” that “The certainty must proceed out from you that in spite of your youth, you are a man who deserves the esteem of the world, who will conquer that esteem by charging ahead. . . .” Heinrich’s letters to his son always posed the dilemmas raised by Karl and Jenny’s engagement as a question of Karl’s manhood.19

  Karl’s actions, though, showed little in the way of manly charging ahead, or even proceeding at a plodding pace toward a legal career. While the carousing and brawling that
filled much of his year in Bonn were gone, as his father had hoped, Marx found other diversions from the juridical straight and narrow. Distracted by Berlin’s lively cultural scene, he developed strong literary interests, spending a substantial portion of his first semester at the university writing a “Book of Love,” a collection of romantic poetry, which he sent off to Jenny. He attempted to write a play and a satirical novel, then theatrical criticism, and made some—not very successful—efforts to start the publication of a yearbook on that topic. Of these youthful writings, at least the ones that have been preserved (Karl burned a number of them in well-justified dissatisfaction), the less said the better. One useful point could be made: that the poems dedicated to Jenny were not just romantic but Romantic—characterized by strong individualized expressions of longing and passion, and a deep communion with nature. For most of his life, Marx despised Romanticism, both for political and aesthetic reasons. He would later write off his Romantic poetry as a youthful embarrassment, but it does show how much his love for Jenny had affected his view of the world.20

  The greatest diversion from the path to a legal career was Marx’s encounter with the ideas of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel—in its own way as intoxicating as the beer Marx consumed in Bonn and as emotionally stimulating as his love for Jenny von Westphalen. Hegel’s ideas are notoriously complex and convoluted; an adequate account would require (at least) a whole book, so readers will forgive the summary sketch that follows, picking up on those aspects of the philosopher’s thought that would set the stage for Marx’s own ideas.21

  The starting point for Hegel’s philosophy was his criticism of and expansion on the ideas of the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. These two greatest figures of German idealism were both lifelong bachelors, married as it were to the ethereal world of philosophy. They were personally quite different, Kant withdrawn and austere, Hegel active and sociable. Hegel had difficulty in 1806 concluding his Phenomenology of Spirit because of the impending birth of an illegitimate child he had fathered on a barmaid. Intellectually as well, Kant’s austere and stringent reasoning contrasted with Hegel’s complex and baroque philosophical formulations.