Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  Lord Jesus Christ, God's only son,

  O step down from Thy heavenly throne

  And save my soul for me.

  Come down in all thy blessedness,

  Light of Thy Father's holiness,

  Grant that I may choose Thee.11

  In contrast to such evangelical niceties, the other side of Pietism was a ruthless engagement with the material realities of the world drawn from the Calvinist notion of predestination: at the dawn of time, God had marked out the saved and the damned and, while no one could be certain of their status as chosen or condemned, one of the surest signs of election was worldly success. With a nod to Max Weber, the Protestant ethic and spirit of capitalism were hard at work among the churches and factories of the Wupper valley. Industriousness and prosperity were signs of grace and the most ardent pietists were often the most successful merchants – amongst them Johann Caspar II, whose sense of prudence and sobriety dictated both his religious and business ethos. ‘We have to look to our own advantage even in spiritual matters,’ he told his son Friedrich Engels senior in 1813. ‘I think as a merchant in these matters too and seek the best price, as no person with whom I might like to waste an hour on trivial things can give me back a single minute of it.’12

  If all time was God's time, and wasting a minute was a sin, then life was certainly not meant for enjoyment and socializing. As Engels's first biographer, Gustav Mayer, recorded, in the early nineteenth century the evangelical parishes in Elberfeld-Barmen petitioned the government against the erection of a local theatre, claiming that the allure of the stage could not coexist with industriousness in the Wupper valley. For the pietists, ‘pleasure’ was one of the heathen blasphemies.13 The poet Ferdinand Freiligrath condemned Elberfeld as ‘a cursed nest, prosaic, small-townish, sombre and reviled’, and the adult Engels always recalled with a shudder its dour public culture.14 ‘Why, for us, the philistine Wuppertalers, Dü sseldorf was always a little Paris, where the pious gentlemen of Barmen and Elberfeld kept their mistresses, went to the theatre, and had a right royal time,’ he told the German Social Democrat Theodor Cuno, before adding sourly, ‘But the sky always looks grey where one's own reactionary family lives.’15 Such Puritan public morals were the product of a close alignment between political power and Church authority. Elberfeld's powerful Church elders, who governed the congregations, also held sway over the municipal institutions with a writ running right through the spiritual and secular realms.

  And the Church's power was only growing in influence. In the wake of an agrarian crisis and economic downturn during the 1830s, the pietist message became more doctrinaire, mystical, even chiliastic. A revivalist sensibility gripped the Wupper valley, led by a charismatic preacher, Dr Frederick William Krummacher. ‘He thrashes about in the pulpit, bends over all sides, bangs his fist on the edge, stamps like a cavalry horse and shouts so that the windows resound and the people in the street tremble,’ recorded the young Engels. ‘Then the congregation begins to sob; first the young girls weep, then the old women join in with a heart-rending soprano and the cacophony is completed by the wailing of the enfeebled drunken pietists… through all this uproar Krummacher's powerful voice rings out pronouncing before the whole congregation innumerable sentences of damnation, or describing diabolical scenes.’16

  The Engelses were not such hot Protestants as that. Indeed, so zealous was this godly upswing that many leading Barmen families began to retreat from church activity during the 1840s to focus instead on hearth and home. Just as the evangelical revival in England led the way for the Victorian celebration of patriarchy and domesticity (think of the sentimental poetry of William Cowper, the garden aesthetic of John Claudius Loudon or the novels of Hannah More), so in the picturesque merchant homes of Barmen there was a renewed cultural stress on the value of a tight-knit household. This vehement championing of the family unit expressed itself in an almost suburban ethic: a high-bourgeois desire to draw the curtains tight, seal off the corrupting outside world and seek spiritual renewal in the simple pleasures of domestic ritual – reading, embroidery, pianoforte performances, Christmas celebrations and birthday parties. ‘It is really nice and homely to have a piano!’ Engels's father put it with almost Pooterish delight.17 In the coming years, this parlour culture would be summed up in the cutting term Biedermeier, which combined the adjective bieder, a condescending designation of plainness, with the common surname, Meier, to describe the middle-class visual style, literature and values of the period.18

  Despite the later sneers, this was a safe and caring if not always joyful environment for Engels, his three brothers and four sisters to grow up in. Best of all, their parents adored each other. ‘You may not believe it but I was thinking about you all day and I could not find contentment in anything in the house,’ Engels senior wrote to Elise, then visiting her parents in Hamm, before signing off with ‘a few tender words for you… Look, I suddenly feel like someone head over heels in love again. In all seriousness I can feel a spot of longing under my waistcoat (the one with the mother of pearl buttons, you know it). I don't think I will be able to last the four weeks.’ Indeed, his correspondence from the early 1820s is replete with the most passionate protestations of love for his wife. ‘Truthfully, dearest Elise, my heart yearns for us to be reunited, because I now feel a constant need to share everything with you.’19 Engels's mother, descended from a family of intellectual rather than commercial bent (the van Haars counted headmasters and philologists amongst them), owned a far more generous, humorous, even subversive nature than her husband. One Christmas she went so far as to give Engels a book of Goethe's poetry – a writer generally dismissed in Barmen circles as ‘a godless man’, but for Engels ‘the greatest of Germans’.20 Meanwhile, Elise's own father, the pastor Gerhard van Haar, introduced the adolescent Engels to the legends of classical mythology – a subject which found fertile ground in his grandson's energetic imagination. ‘O you dear Grandfather, who always treat us so kindly,’ Engels began one poetic thank you note,

  Always helping us when our work isn't going so smoothly,

  While you were here, you told me many a beautiful story

  Of Cercyon and Theseus, and Argus the hundred-eyed monster,

  The Minotaur, Ariadne, and Aegeus drowned in the ocean,

  The Golden Fleece, the Argonauts and Jason defiant…21

  Within this comfortable setting, Engels's father is traditionally portrayed as an unhappy, rigidly religious, money-hungry philistine thanks in no small part to his son's later bitter characterizations. Philistine, it should be added, was a favoured term of abuse which Engels had co-opted from Goethe: ‘A Philistine is an empty gut filled with fear who hopes that God will take pity on him.’ But a reading of Engels senior's letters to Elise reveals a very different side to the man: commercial-minded, yes, patriotic and God-fearing, but also a loving son, doting father and uxorious husband, who shared numerous business decisions with his wife and frequently sought her advice. For all his puritanical reputation, he was also a keen musician who could play the piano, cello and bassoon and enjoyed few things more than a family concert. Nevertheless, it was his mother to whom Engels remained close long after his acrimonious split from his father. ‘Were it not for my mother, who has a rare fund of humanity… and whom I really love,’ Engels wrote some years later, ‘it would not occur to me for a moment to make even the most paltry concession to my bigoted and despotic old man.’22 If his childhood occasionally seemed to gasp for air under the weight of commerce and piety, there was also a warm foundation of music, laughter and love.

  ‘Friedrich had a pretty average report last week. As you know, he has become more polite, outwardly, but in spite of the severe chastisements he received earlier, not even the fear of punishment seems to teach him unconditional obedience,’ Engels senior wrote censoriously to Elise in August 1835 while she was back in Hamm caring for her dying father. ‘Thus today I was again distressed to find in his desk a smutty book which he had borrowed from the lend
ing library, a story about knights in the thirteenth century. The careless way he leaves such books about in his desk is remarkable. May God watch over his disposition, I am often fearful for this otherwise excellent boy.’23

  Much to his father's chagrin, from an early age Friedrich started to chafe against the pietist strictures of Barmen life. His initial tutoring was in the local Stadtschule, where intellectual ambition was generally not encouraged. At age fourteen, he was transferred to the municipal Gymnasium in Elberfeld, where he lodged with a Lutheran schoolmaster. Purportedly one of the finest schools in Prussia, the more liberal Gymnasium certainly fostered Engels's gift for languages and, under the tutelage of a Dr Clausen (‘the only one who can arouse a feeling for poetry among the pupils, a feeling which would otherwise be bound to perish miserably among the philistines of Wuppertal’), nurtured his growing interest in the myths and romance of ancient Germania. As his final school report put it, ‘Engels showed commendable interest in the history of German national literature and the reading of the German classics.’24

  Indeed, a romanticized patriotism was to be one of the earliest intellectual influences on the young Engels. In later decades he would often come to be unfairly decried as a dull, mechanistic Marxist – indeed, Marxism itself would frequently be described as a reductionist offshoot of Enlightenment thought – but the first seedlings of Engels's philosophical development are to be found in some of the most idealized writings in the Western cultural canon. Across Europe, part of the response to the political excesses of the French Revolution and the universalist rationalism of the Enlightenment was a flourishing of Romanticism. For the guiding principle of Aufklärung – as laid out in the French philosopher Marquis de Condorcet's icily Cartesian Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, with its prediction of infinite human development – was soon ridiculed as wildly hubristic. While the Enlightenment varied across national contexts, what the writings of Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Voltaire and the French Encyclopédistes shared was a collective reverence for the power of universal, human reason. Isaac Newton, whose gravitational discoveries had revealed God as a mathematician and the universe as clockwork, was their apostle. And in this new mechanical age, the differences of nations and cultures, along with the value of customary authority, religion and tradition, were put at naught in the face of an unbending scientific calculus. In this new cosmopolitan consensus, man was fundamentally the same in all times and all places and the job of legislators – Frederick the Great in Prussia; Joseph II in Austria; Catherine the Great in Russia – was to allow for the development of human self-expression through the liberation of reason.

  Opposition to this Enlightenment ideal was as old as the movement itself and few led the reaction with more verve than the Whig politician and conservative philosopher Edmund Burke.25 ‘We are not the disciples of Voltaire,’ he announced to his fellow Englishmen and, even before the rumbling of the tumbril through the streets of Paris, his Reflections on the Revolution in France connected the awful rationality of Enlightenment thought with the bloodletting of the French Revolution. The insurgents of 1789, who ‘despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men’ and ‘reduce men to loose counters merely for the sake of simple telling’, assumed that reason alone could construct a commonwealth. The so-called ‘rights of man’, Burke averred, were no substitute for the slow, elemental mystery of a state and civil society crafted down the generations. ‘But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.’26

  Yet the age of chivalry was exactly what the Romantics had in mind. From the late 1700s particularities of language, culture, tradition and custom confidently reasserted themselves across European intellectual life. In Scotland, the movement was led by the Celtic myth-maker James Macpherson and then by Walter Scott, author of the Waverley novels. In France, Chateaubriand's Le Génie du Christianisme venerated the much decried Catholic Church, while Joseph de Maistre excoriated the Enlightenment for its shallow understanding of human nature. And in England, the poetry of Wordsworth, Blake and Coleridge dwelled on the unique attributes of a national tradition with the ‘Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’, a conscious affront to any cosmopolitan notion of common culture, language and reason. ‘In England, in Germany, in Spain, old native traditions, even superstitions, acquired a new force, a new respectability,’ as Hugh Trevor-Roper put it. ‘The old, customary organs of society, the old established beliefs, which had seemed so contemptible to the rationalists of the Encyclopaedia, now acquired a new dignity.’27

  And nowhere more so than in Germany. As an aesthetic, cultural and political movement stretching over many decades and assuming simultaneously complementary and contradictory forms, Romanticism remains awkward to codify. However, if the Enlightenment was committed to a uniform and predictable human nature, Romanticism stressed the opposite – the irrational, emotional, imaginative and restless desire amongst its adherents to escape the narrow, prosaic present.28 In terms of the German tradition one could begin with the work of the Sturm und Drang dramatists or Goethe's remarkable novel of passionate self-immersion, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Intellectually, German Romanticism might trace its roots to the mid-eighteenth-century writings of Johann Gottfried von Herder and J. G. Hamann, both of whom reacted to enlightened French civility by stressing the centrality of earthy German language to the construction of national culture. In his essay ‘Treatise on the Origins of Language’, Herder described language as a lyre with a tone all its own, with each national tongue the peculiar product of a specific people, or Volk. As such, it was traceable through a nation's primitive folk-tales, songs and literature; a peculiarly democratic notion of culture which helped to spur a growing interest in the German national, notably medieval past. Strasbourg's high Gothic cathedral, the pre-Reformation Catholic Church, hoary fairy-tales and the art of Durer all became unique totems of Germany's communal greatness. As Madame de Stael put it in her bestselling history Germania, because the Teutonic people had never been conquered by the Romans and had passed straight from barbarism to medieval Christianity, ‘Their imagination disports itself in old towers and battlements, among knights, sorceresses and spectres; and mysteries of a thoughtful and solitary nature form the principal part of their poetry.’29

  Friedrich Schiller served to aestheticize this romantic impulse with his influential essay of 1795, ‘On the Aesthetic Education of Man’, presaging the role of art and culture in generating human self-formation (Bildung). Schiller suggested that the collapse of the organic cohesion of medieval society – that which Herder had venerated and Edmund Burke traced the disintegration of in revolutionary Paris – could be reversed only by a broad ethic of beauty and creativity. This was the call which the Schlegel brothers answered in 1798 when they launched the golden age of German Romanticism with their Jena-based journal, Athenaeum. Through its pages, the romantic artist, poet, wanderer or mystic appeared centre-stage embodying the spirit of the age whilst also battling with the awful personal angst which came from this higher calling. Caspar David Friedrich's moody paintings of heroic subjects confronting themselves in the face of vast forests and pounding waterfalls; E. T. A. Hoffmann's elusive, transcendent scores; and Schiller's poetry of freedom, rebellion and betrayal caught this introspective, romantic spirit in which individual experience was all.

  But whilst Schiller and the Schlegels stressed the calling of the artist to rebind the social ties, their contemporaries the philosophers Novalis and Johann Gottlieb Fichte sought to revive the proto-nationalist ideas of Herder. His patriotic notion of the Volk (‘the invisible, hidden medium that links minds through ideas, hearts through inclinations and impulses, the senses through impressions and forms, civil society through laws and institutions’) proved particularly prescient in the aftermath of 1806 when Prussia succumbed to the might of the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Jena.30 Despite the generally
enlightened nature of subsequent imperial French rule – with its Civil Code granting greater freedom of speech, constitutional liberty and Jewish rights than the Hohenzollern monarchy had allowed in Prussia – foreign occupation is rarely a popular condition and the years of French governance served only to intensify an aggrieved sense of Germanic identity. Fichte nursed this sentiment with a provocative series of lectures, ‘Homilies to the German Nation’, delivered at the Berlin Academy in 1807–8, in which he elevated Herder's idea of nationhood to emotional new heights. Only through the nation and its Volk could individuals realize their full freedom, he announced to a Berlin audience labouring under French rule, whilst the nation itself was a beautiful, organic entity with a soul and a purpose.

  The result was a renewed outpouring of interest in the vernacular German past as embodied by the country's most famous philologists and fairy-tale aficionados, the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Having already published a journal entitled Altdeutsche Wälder (Old German Forests), which provided an archaeology of German customs, laws and language, in 1815 they issued a new appeal. ‘A society has been founded that is intended to spread throughout all of Germany and has as its goal to save and collect all the existing songs and tales that can be found among the common German peasantry.’ It was a work of ‘imaginative state-building’ and, despite the fact that many of the fairy- and folk-tales which the Grimms collated into their best-selling Kinder- und Hausmärchen came from middle-class ladies of French Huguenot origin, they had successfully added another inventive layer to the national German tradition.31