Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  Yet if the wellsprings of Marx’s revolutionary aspirations were distinctly rooted in his formative years during the first half of the nineteenth century, these aspirations and his intransigence about proceeding toward them, whether openly expressed or hidden for tactical purposes, might be a key to the long-term resonance of his ideas. It is remarkable how advocates of so many different causes were drawn to the man and his doctrines, or what they imagined his doctrines to be. Leaders of the mass labor movements of early twentieth-century Europe, proponents of violent overthrow of the authority of the czar, cadres of global communist revolution, anti-imperialist activists in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the mid-decades of the twentieth century, or discontented young intellectuals in the consumer society of 1960s Western Europe and North America were all Marxists.

  Also proclaiming their Marxism were the leaders of the twentieth-century communist regimes in Europe and Asia. Their plans to wrench the economically underdeveloped countries they ruled into an industrialized and productive future in drastic, violent, and totalitarian fashion could take a downright genocidal turn, as they did in Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China. These campaigns of Marxist regimes were reminiscent of nothing in Marx’s own writings so much as his descriptions of the brutal British modernization of colonial India or his account, in Capital, of the cruel, early phase of capitalist primal accumulation. The later history of those regimes, was that of a bureaucratic despotism, not without certain similarities to the Prussian and czarist realms Marx so despised.

  All these Marxisms drew the hostility of supporters of the capitalist status quo, who continue to rage against them and their purported founder two decades and more after the end of the ostensibly Marxist Eastern bloc. Marx’s actual ideas and political practice—developed in the matrix of the early nineteenth century, the age of the French Revolution and its aftermath, of Hegel’s philosophy and its Young Hegelian critics, of the early industrialization of Great Britain and the theories of political economy emerging from them—had, at most, only partial connections with the ones his latter-day friends and enemies found in his writings. In some ways, the actual intellectual connections were beside the point. Marx’s passionately irreconcilable, uncompromising, and intransigent nature has been the feature of his life that has had the deepest and most resonant appeal, and has generated the sharpest rebukes and opposition, down to the present day.

  Acknowledgments

  As academics do, I have presented parts of this work in the form of public lectures or conference papers, at the University of Tennessee, Vanderbilt University, the University of Leipzig, the University of Gießen, the annual conference of the German Studies Association, and the St. Louis area German historians’ study group. At these and other venues I have received criticism and advice from many fellow scholars, including Celia Applegate, Harald Bluhm, Warren Breckman, James Brophy, Markus Denzel, Steven Hochstadt, Kenneth Ledford, Suzanne Marchand, Jennifer Miller, Jerry Muller, Warren Rosenblum, Mark Ruff, Corinna Treitel, Meike Werner, Jonathan Wiesen, and John Williams.

  Special thanks for extraordinary assistance are due to Drs. Brian Johnson and Lindall Perry of Boone Hospital Center, who generously put their medical expertise at my disposal. I was fortunate in the people who agreed to read earlier versions of the manuscript and provide trenchant suggestions for its improvement. Jürgen Herres of the MEGA not only did just that, he also uncovered obscure but very useful material buried in the basement of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. Friedrich Lenger of the University of Gießen provided the same kind of excellent advice about the book that I have been receiving from him for almost three decades. Christopher Clark of St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge, and Helmut Smith of Vanderbilt University placed their rigorous, scholarly readings at my disposal. Colleagues at the University of Missouri read my manuscript, and I am very grateful for the comments and criticisms of John Frymire, Abdullahi Ibrahim, John Wigger, and, especially, Steven Watts, master biographer. Robert Weil, of Liveright/W. W. Norton, was a rigorous and severe editor. He played a major role in improving the manuscript I submitted and I have only myself to blame for not accepting all his suggestions. This same observation goes for everyone mentioned above: they deserve their share of any praise a reader might want to bestow on the book, but readers’ reproaches should be directed to me alone.

  My wife, Nancy Katzman, has never taken notes for me or typed my manuscripts, but has been, for a good quarter century, a source of love and inspiration.

  The book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Louis Sperber.

  Source Collections

  The largest, most comprehensive and most scholarly edition of the works of Marx and Engels is the Karl Marx Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe, referred to in the notes as MEGA. Volumes appearing between 1975 until 1990 were edited by the Institutes of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow and East Berlin, and published by the Dietz Verlag in East Berlin. More recent volumes have been edited by the International Marx Engels Foundation and published by the Akademie Verlag in Berlin.

  The MEGA, after over thirty-five years of work, is still not complete, so that for some of Marx’s writings and correspondence it is necessary to have recourse to other, less comprehensive and less scholarly text editions. Unlike the MEGA, in which all material is printed in the language in which it originally appeared, the older editions are monolingual, translating material into the respective languages of publication. Since most of what Marx wrote was in German, the most useful of the older editions is Karl Marx Friedrich Engels Werke, 39 vols. plus 2 supplementary vols., edited by the Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED (East Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–77), abbreviated in the Notes as MEW. For material originally written in English, I used the English-language edition of Marx’s and Engels’s works, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols. (New York: International Publishers Co.; Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975–2004), abbreviated in the Notes as MECW. There are three different French-language editions of the collected works, none of which is complete (cf. Attali, Karl Marx, p. 548). I have used the version of the Editions Sociales (Paris 1945– ) for letters originally written in French (cited as MEC) and its volume of the Poverty of Philosophy published in 1961 (cited as MdP).

  There are three other document collections useful for a Marx biography. One is a collection of materials concerning the Communist League, Der Bund der Kommunisten. Dokumente und Materialien, 3 vols., edited by the Institutes of Marxism-Leninism in East Berlin and Moscow (East Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1970–84), cited as BdK. Another is the collection concerning the 1872 Congress of the IWMA: The Hague Congress of the First International September 2–7, 1872, 2 vols.: Vol. 1, Minutes and Documents, Vol. 2, Reports and Letters, edited by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the C.C., C.P.S.U. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976–78), cited in the Notes as HCFI. Finally, for the history of the Rhineland News, and Marx’s political activity in Cologne more generally, a very helpful edition of sources is Rheinische Briefe und Akten zur Geschichte der politischen Bewegung 1830–1850, 3 vols.: Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, part 1, edited by Joseph Hansen (Bonn: Peter Hanstein Verlag, 1919–42); Vol. 2, part 2, and Vol. 3, edited by Heinz Boberach (Cologne & Bonn: Peter Hanstein Verlag 1976; Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1998); this citation is abbreviated as RhBA.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1 Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maénchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, trans. Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1936), v. The standard life of Marx, and an excellent work, is David McLellan, Karl Marx: A Biography, 4th ed. (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2006). Just a few of the more important or more notorious biographies are Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Leopold Schwarzschild, The Red Prussian: The Life and Legend of Karl Marx, trans. Margaret Wing (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947); Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000); Robert Payne, Marx (New York
: Simon & Schuster, 1968); Jacques Attali, Karl Marx, ou l’espirit du monde (Paris: Librarie générale française, 2007); and Wolfgang Schieder, Karl Marx als Politiker (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1991).

  2 Eric Hobsbawm, ed., The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition (London: Verso, 1998), 17–18; http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/16/eric-hobsbawm-trist-hunt-marx, accessed 1/27/11.

  3 James Brophy, “Recent Publications of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA),” Central European History 40 (2007): 523–37.

  4 Heiko Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008); Constantin Goschler, Rudolf Virchow: Mediziner—Anthropologe—Politiker (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2002); Friedrich Lenger, Werner Sombart 1863–1941. Eine Biographie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994).

  PART I: SHAPING

  1: THE SON

  1 On the history of the city of Trier, see Heinz Heinen et al., eds., 2000 Jahre Trier, 3 vols. (Trier: Spee-Verlag, 1985–96); more briefly, Eric David, “Trèves: De la capitale d’empire à la ville moyenne; Une ville moyenne frontalière dans la perspective des occupations françaises successives,” Revue d’Allemagne 26 (1994): 69–81.

  2 Cited in Klaus Gerteis, “Sozialgeschichte der Stadt Trier 1580–1794,” in 2000 Jahre Trier, 3: 61.

  3 Most generally, on Jews in old regime Europe, see David Vital, A People Apart: The Jews in Europe 1789–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1–25; or Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750, 3rd. ed. (London: Valentine Mitchell & Co., 1998), 165–66.

  4 Cilli Kasper-Holtkotte, Juden im Aufbruch. Zur Sozialgeschichte einer Minderheit im Saar-Mosel-Raum um 1800 (Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1996), is a model monograph on the Jews of Trier and vicinity at the end of the old regime and in the age of the French Revolution.

  5 Heinz Monz, Karl Marx Grundlagen der Entwicklung zu Leben und Werk (Trier: Nco-Verlag, 1973), 215–18; a family tree of Marx’s paternal ancestors is in Manfred Schönke, Karl und Heinrich Marx und ihre Geschwister: Lebenszeugnisse—Briefe—Dokumente. (Bonn: Pahl-Rugenstein Nachfolger, 1993), 6–8. Samuel Levi would later move to Trier, to become the rabbi there.

  6 On the twenty-year period of the French occupation of Trier, there is the excellent collection of essays and exhibition catalog, Elisabeth Dühr and Christl Lehnert-Leven, eds., Unter der Trikolore Sous le drapeau tricolore Trier in Frankreich—Napoléon in Trier Trèves en France—Napoléon à Trèves 1794–1814, 2 vols. (Trier: Städtisches Museum Simeonstift, 2004); a good overview is Michael Müller, “Die Stadt Trier unter französisscher Herrschaft (1794–1814),” in Kurt Düwell and Franz Irsigler, eds., Trier in der Neuzeit, Vol. 3 of 2000 Jahre Trier, 377–98. Any otherwise not explicitly cited assertions about Trier under French rule come from these two works.

  7 Quoted in Hans-Ulrich Seifert, “Dialektik der Abklärung—Literarische Gegenentwürfe und deutsch-französische Wechselbeziehungen unter napoleonischer Herrschaft (unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der unveröffentlichten Korresondenz zwischen Charles de Vilers und Johann Hugo Wyttenbach),” in Dühr and Lehnert-Leven, eds., Unter der Trikolore, 1: 473.

  8 Gabriele B. Clemens, “Die Notabeln der Franzosenzeit,” in ibid., 1: 105–80.

  9 Elisabeth Wagner, “Die Rückführung des Heiligen Rockes nach Trier und die Heilig-Rock-Wallfahrt im Jahre 1810,” in ibid., 1: 419–32; Wolfgang Schieder, Religion und Revolution. Die Trierer Wallfahrt von 1844 (Vierow: SH-Verlag, 1996).

  10 Quoted in Kasper-Holtkotte, Juden im Aufbruch, 200.

  11 In admirable detail, ibid., 190–433.

  12 Quoted in ibid., 383.

  13 Ibid., 341–44, 414.

  14 Heinz Monz, “Neue Funde zum Lebesnweg von Karl Marx’ Vater,” Osnabrücker Mitteilungen 87 (1981): 59–71; Schönke, Karl und Heinrich Marx, 122–27.

  15 Luitwin Mallmann, Französische Juristenbildung im Rheinland 1794–1814. Die Rechtsschule von Koblenz (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1987), 104–25; Schönke, Karl und Heinrich Marx, 127–31.

  16 For claims that Heinrich studied law, almost certainly false but often repeated in biographies, see Kasper-Holtkotte, Juden im Aufbruch, 383, and Schönke, Karl und Heinrich Marx, 123.

  17 Mallmann, Französische Juristenbildung, 122.

  18 For Trier in the initial decades of Prussian rule and during the Revolution of 1848, see Elisabeth Dühr, ed., “Der Schlimmste Punkt in der Provinz”: Demokratische Revolution 1848/49 in Trier und Umgebung (Trier: Selbstverlag des Städtischen Museums Simeonstift, 1998); Manfred Heimers, “Trier als preußische Bezirkshaupstadt im Vormärz (1814–1848),” in Düwell and Irsigler, eds., Trier in der Neuzeit, 399–419; and Jonathan Sperber, Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848–1849 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 154, 181–83.

  19 Clemens, “Die Notablen der Franzosenzeit,” in Dühr and Lehnert, eds., Unter der Trikolore, 1: 106, 178–79; Monz, Karl Marx, 160–68; Karl-Georg Faber, “Verwaltungs- und Justizbeamte auf dem linken Rheinufer während der französischen Herrschaft,” in Max Braubach, ed., Aus Geschichte und Landeskunde: Forschungen und Darstellungen Franz Steinbach zum 65. Geburtstag (Bonn: L. Röhrscheid Verlag, 1960), 350–88.

  20 Schönke, Karl und Heinrich Marx, 148, 153–61; Mallmann, Französische Juristenbildung, 176–78; Sperber, Rhineland Radicals, 38–39, 117–18; Jonathan Sperber, Property and Civil Society in South-Western Germany 1820–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 9–10.

  21 Suzanne Zittartz-Weber, Zwischen Religion und Staat: Die jüdischen Gemeinden in der preußischen Rheinprovinz 1815–1871 (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2003), 63–74.

  22 Monz, Karl Marx, 243–45. The exact date is unknown because the Protestant pastor in Trier, in very un-Prussian fashion, was sloppy about keeping the register of baptisms.

  23 See, e.g., Jerrold E. Seigel, Marx’s Fate: The Shape of a Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); or, more cosmically, Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 63, 83.

  24 Wilhelm Füssl, Professor in der Politik: Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802–1861) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988); Kasper-Holtkotte, Juden im Aufbruch, 432.

  25 Stefan Rohrbacher, Gewalt im Biedermeier: Antijüdische Ausschreitungen im Vormärz und Revolution (1815–1848/49) (Frankfurt & New York: Campus Verlag, 1990), 94–156.

  26 Uri R. Kaufmann, “Ein jüdischer Deutscher: Der Kampf des jungen Gabriel Riesser für die Gleichberechtigung der Juden 1830–1848,” Aschkenas: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden 13 (2003): 211–36.

  27 Kasper-Holtkotte, Juden im Aufbruch, 432; Schönke, Karl und Heinrich Marx, 429–69.

  28 Schönke, Karl und Heinrich Marx, 294–96, 342; MEGA 3/1: 290–91. The only trace of Heinrich’s Jewish past in his personal library was one otherwise unspecified “Hebrew book.”

  29 Lucian Hölscher, Geschichte der protestantischen Frömmigkeit in Deutschland (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005), 215–18; Christoph Weber, Aufklärung und Orthodoxie am Mittelrhein: 1820–1850 (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 1973); Wolfgang Schieder, Religion und Revolution.

  30 Schönke, Karl und Heinrich Marx, 142.

  31 Jan Gielkens, Karl Marx und seine niederländischen Verwandten (Trier: Karl-Marx-Haus, 1999), 32–63. Henriette Presburg’s father was not a rabbi, contrary to the assertions of many biographers.

  32 Monz, Karl Marx, 229–30; Schönke, Karl und Heinrich Marx, 4–5; Marian Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 85–99.

  33 Schönke, Karl und Heinrich Marx, 291, 300. On dowries and their role in marriage, see Sperber, Property and Civil Society, 21–31; Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 93–98.

  34 Schönke, Karl und Heinrich Marx, 358.

  35 These and many similar quotes are in Gielkens, Karl Marx und seine niederländisch
en Verwandten, 33–34.

  36 MEGA 3/1: 292, 294–95; Monz, Karl Marx, 230–38.

  37 Schönke, Karl und Heinrich Marx, 188; Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 64–81.

  38 Family dates are from Monz, Karl Marx, 230–38. On the practice of wet-nursing, cf. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 48–49.

  39 Monz, Karl Marx, 255–58, Schönke, Karl und Heinrich Marx, 166, 170, 175, 180, 188–91, 201, 209, 217–19, 221–24, 297; Jürgen Herres, “Cholera, Armut und eine ‘Zwangssteuer’ 1830/32: Zur Sozialgeschichte Triers im Vormärz,” Kurtrierisches Jahrbuch 39 (1990): 161–203.

  40 Sources cited in previous note and Gielkens, Karl Marx und seine niederländischen Verwandten, 105; Hans-Joachim Henning, Das westdeutsche Bürgertum in der Epoche der Hochindustrialisiesrung 1860–1914 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steinver Verlag, 1972), 51–52, 470–72.

  41 Wheen, Karl Marx, 8.

  42 Monz, Karl Marx, 297; MEGA 3/2: 471.

  43 Karl-Ernst Jeismann, Das preußische Gymnasium in Staat und Gesellschaft, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1996).

  44 Quoted in James C. Albisetti, Secondary School Reform in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 47.

  45 Wilhelm Liebknecht, Karl Marx zum Gedächtniß. Ein Lebensabriß und Erinnerungen (Nuremberg: Wörlein & Co., 1896), 38; MEGA 3/11: 380.

  46 Monz, Karl Marx, 297–316.

  47 Ibid., 160–78.

  48 James Brophy, Popular Culture and the Public Sphere in the Rhineland 1800–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 100–02; Schönke, Karl und Heinrich Marx, 230–31; Monz, Karl Marx, 135–37.