Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  Engels's sketch of ‘The Free’ enjoying a typically boozy Berlin evening.

  For another of Engels's creative acts with The Free was a mock-epic poem co-authored with Edgar Bauer. The Insolently Threatened Yet Miraculously Rescued Bible, Or: The Triumph of Faith was written in protest at Bruno Bauer's dismissal from Bonn and took the form of a Paradise Lost-style meditation on the struggle between Satan and God for the souls of the Young Hegelians (who are all destined for hell). A heavy-handed medley of theology and philosophy, it reads now as little more than a cleverly done student skit. Still, the description of Bruno Bauer has about it something of the catchiness of Gilbert and Sullivan's ‘I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General’.30

  I've studied matters Phenomenological,

  Theological also, to my distress,

  Aesthetical too, Metaphysical, Logical,

  Not entirely without success

  Similarly, Hegel's cameo appearance is wittily done.

  To Science I've devoted every hour,

  And I've taught Atheism with all my power.

  Self-consciousness upon the Throne I seated,

  And thought that God had thereby been defeated…

  Behind the farce, some more revealing elements to these character sketches are discernible – not least, Engels's own depiction of himself. ‘Friedrich Oswald’, the aspirant Siegfried and author of high-flown feuilletons, had metamorphosed amidst the Berlin beer cellars into an altogether more fiery figure, nothing less than a French revolutionary Montagnard nursing his guillotine.

  Right on the very left, that tall and long-legged stepper

  Is Oswald, coat of grey and trousers shade of pepper;

  Pepper inside as well, Oswald the Montagnard;

  A radical is he, dyed in the wool, and hard.

  Day in, day out, he plays upon the guillotine a

  Single solitary tune and that's a cavatina,

  The same old devil-song; he bellows the refrain:

  Formez vos bataillons! Aux armes, citoyens!

  And close behind him appeared another figure who, in the coming years, Oswald – and Engels – were to come to know rather well.

  Who runs up next with wild impetuosity?

  A swarthy chap of Trier, a marked monstrosity.

  He neither hopes nor skips, but moves in leaps and bounds,

  Raving aloud. As if to seize and then pull down

  To Earth the spacious tent of Heaven up on high,

  He opens wide his arms and reaches for the sky.

  He shakes his wicked fist, raves with a frantic air,

  As if ten thousand devils had him by the hair.31

  What is there left to say of Karl Marx, the ‘swarthy chap of Trier’? ‘He is a phenomenon who made a most deep impression,’ was how Moses Hess described him. ‘Be prepared to meet the greatest, perhaps the only real philosopher living now. When he will appear in public he will draw the eyes of all Germany upon him… he combines deepest philosophical seriousness with cutting wit. Can you imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel combined – not thrown together – in one person? If you can, you have Dr Marx.’ Gustav Mevissen, a Cologne businessman, depicted an equally mesmerizing figure: ‘a powerful man of 24 whose thick black hair sprang from his cheeks, arms, nose and ears. He was domineering, impetuous, passionate, full of boundless self-confidence, but at the same time deeply earnest and learned, a restless dialectician who with his restless Jewish penetration pushed every proposition of Young Hegelian doctrine to its final conclusion.’32

  Marx was born two years before Engels, into a similarly bourgeois household along the banks of another tributary of the Rhine (the Mosel, rather than the Wupper), but his upbringing was signally different from the tight Pietism of the Engelses. In this south-western region of the Rhineland, the post-1806 Napoleonic occupation had fostered a notably more liberal outlook amongst the middling sort. Marx's father, Heinrich, an attorney and small-scale vineyard owner, was imbued with the ideals of the French Enlightenment and precisely the kind of Rhineland liberalism which Ludwig Börne and others of the Young Germany school had sought to disseminate. He knew his Voltaire and Rousseau by heart, his heroes were Newton and Leibniz, and he was active in Trier's Casino Club, where like-minded progressives spent their evenings mulling over the political and cultural controversies of the day.

  However, Heinrich was really Hirschel (or Heschel), having changed his name, abjured his Jewish faith and been baptized into the Lutheran Church in 1817. The Prussian annexation of Rhineland from the French in 1815 had deprived the Jews of Trier of their Napoleonic freedoms, subjecting them to a range of sanctions that forbade them to hold public office or practise law. Rather than becoming ‘breadless’, Heinrich converted. In doing so, he abandoned a rabbinical lineage stretching back to the early 1700s, which had included Karl Marx's grandfather and uncles as rabbis of Trier. However, Heinrich – the Enlightenment acolyte of Newton and father of nine hungry children – did not seem overly upset about extinguishing his Judaic lineage. His wife, Henriette, found it a more difficult departure: she spoke Yiddish and kept certain Jewish customs alive in the household long after she and the children had been baptized.

  Despite Heinrich's politic conversion, his broad outlook could not have been more different from the evangelical conservatism of Friedrich Engels senior. He was also a more obviously affectionate father. His lengthy letters to the adolescent Karl are heartfelt, indulgent and full of earnest, paternal trepidation. His often febrile, anxious tone was aggravated by Henriette who turned a myopic love of family into a habit of congenital worrying. Nonetheless, Marx's childhood, like Engels's early years, was all in all a happy one spent making mud-pies with his sisters and getting into scrapes at school. But by the time Karl entered the University of Bonn at the age of seventeen, he had begun to distance himself from his family. Indeed, Marx's subsequent, steely separation from his parents and siblings was far more systematic than Engels's tortured efforts at detachment.

  Instead, Marx directed his emotional energies towards another family altogether: the von Westphalens. Baron Ludwig von Westphalen was a Protestant in a predominantly Catholic Trier, a liberal-minded career civil servant within the Prussian government. Despite his aristocratic ancestry he became friends with the bourgeois Heinrich Marx and enjoyed taking his gifted son, Karl, on long country hikes during which he would recite great chunks of Shakespeare and Homer. However, Karl was more interested in Ludwig's daughter, the beautiful Jenny von Westphalen. And, to everyone's surprise, Jenny – the sophisticated daughter of a Prussian aristocrat and ‘the most beautiful girl in Trier’ – fell in love with the lively wit and dashing bravado of the hairy Jewish boy. In 1836 she broke with her officer fiancé and promised herself to the man she would come to call her ‘wild black boar’, her ‘wicked knave’ – and, the tag that finally stuck, her ‘Moor’ (or ‘Mohr’) with all its implications of Levantine mystery and hirsute Oriental ‘otherness’. While Marx's own family expressed horror at his increasingly reckless activities, Jenny only revelled in his troublemaking, student radicalism and fiendish impetuosity. They married in 1843. ‘Their love survived all the trials of a life of constant struggle,’ in the words of Stephan Born. ‘I have rarely known such a happy marriage, in which happiness and sorrow (mostly the latter) were shared and all pain was overcome in the assurance of complete, reciprocal belonging.’33

  The young Marx was certainly wild. Indulged and scolded in equal measure by his parents, when he was given the freedom of campus life in 1835 the results were predictably transgressive. At Bonn, he skipped Law Faculty lectures to become president of the Trier Tavern Club, which involved raucous drinking sessions, nights in police cells and even a duel with a Prussian officer, from which he was lucky to escape with only a cut above the left eye. ‘Is duelling then so closely interwoven with philosophy?’ vainly enquired Heinrich. ‘Do not let this inclination, and if not inclination, this craze, take root. You could in the end deprive
yourself and your parents of the finest hopes that life offers.’

  Engels's swordmanship was far more reliable – as was his constitution. While Engels was very rarely under the weather, Marx lived constantly at the very edge of his intellectual and physical capacities. ‘Nine lecture courses seem to me rather a lot and I would not like you to do more than your body and mind can bear,’ Heinrich warned him as he started university. ‘A sickly scholar is the most unfortunate being on earth. Therefore, do not study more than your health can bear.’ Marx took no notice as he embarked on his life-long habit of smoking, reading and working late into the night. When he combined this workload with prodigious drinking bouts the consequences were nearly lethal. After one ‘almighty binge’ many years later, the oxen-like Engels emerged punctually for work the next morning clear headed, while Marx was knocked out for two weeks.

  After a wasted year at Bonn, Marx departed for Berlin to complete his legal studies. Heinrich despatched him with a warning of the intellectual perils awaiting him in the heartland of Hegelianism, where ‘the new immoralists twist their words until they themselves do not hear them’. Naturally discarding such advice, Marx exchanged his legal training for philosophy just as swiftly as Engels would flee the parade ground for the lecture hall. His conversion to the Hegelian system was not long in coming. In true Die Freien fashion, he celebrated it in the beer cellars of Franzosische Strasse with the Young Hegelian circle. Together with Arnold Ruge and Bruno Bauer, he formed the heavy-drinking, heavy-philosophizing Doktorclub run out of Hippel's Weinstube.

  At home in Trier, Heinrich was mortified. ‘Alas, your conduct has consisted merely in disorder, meandering in all the fields of knowledge, musty traditions by sombre lamplight; degeneration in a learned dressing gown with uncombed hair has replaced degeneration with a beer glass,’ he wrote to his son. ‘Your intercourse with the world is limited to your sordid room, where perhaps lie abandoned in the classical disorder the love letters of a Jenny and the tear-stained counsels of your father…’ But the philosophical fire had been lit and Marx now had even less time for the petty concerns of his parents – despite continuing to extract money from them. Despairing to his final days at the way his son's life was unfolding, Heinrich died of tuberculosis in 1838. Karl Marx failed to attend the funeral – and then, with characteristically lachrymose self-indulgence, carried a portrait of Heinrich with him for the rest of his days.

  Freed from his father, the following year Karl abandoned his law degree and began a PhD on what appeared a dry-as-dust topic – ‘The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy’ – but which was, in fact, a comparative critique of contemporary German philosophy in the aftermath of Hegel in light of a similar period in Greek thought. Its conclusion embraced the Young Hegelian project of philosophical criticism in the name of ever-widening human self-consciousness. Under the beady eyes of Eichhorn, Schelling and the ‘Right Hegelian’ university administration, it had little chance of passing in Berlin, but the University of Jena was altogether more pliable, and in 1841 Karl Marx emerged with a doctorate dedicated to Baron von Westphalen.

  The question was then, what to do next? Family funds were running low after his father's death, while plans for academic work with Bruno Bauer at the University of Bonn were quashed together with the latter's 1842 dismissal. The solution was journalism. Marx started channelling his philosophical analysis into more concrete political directions with a series of articles on censorship (which were instantly censored), property rights, economic distress and the Prussian administration. Slowly, Marx was turning his revolutionary intellect from philosophical reflection to social realities. He wrote initially for Arnold Ruge's Deutsche Jahrbücher, then joined the Cologne-based Rheinische Zeitung. By October 1842 his energy, political chicanery and obvious writing talent had secured him the editor's chair.

  Under his stewardship, the paper's circulation doubled and it gained a national reputation for provocative, close-to-the-wind reporting. ‘It was immediately clear that he had the qualities which are essential in all great journalists: a determination to speak truth to power, and absolute fearlessness even when writing about people whose friendship or support he might need.’34 There is much in this assessment by Francis Wheen of Marx as editor and hack, but he was never above the usual journalistic weakness of keeping the proprietors happy. And, in this case, the funders of the Rheinische Zeitung – ‘For Politics, Commerce and Industry’ – were a Cologne-based mercantile elite committed to protecting the liberal advances of the Napoleonic years from Prussian absolutism. For commercial if not necessarily political reasons, they wanted to retain religious toleration, freedom of speech and constitutional liberty and to work towards national German unification. Marx was happy to do their bidding even if it meant ditching some old friends.

  To these staid Rhineland liberals, the notorious Berlin antics of Die Freien – the atheism, loose lifestyles, political extremism and drunken rows – risked torpedoing their gently reformist agenda. Marx realized The Free were jeopardizing his career prospects. ‘Rowdiness and blackguardism must be loudly and resolutely repudiated in a period which demands serious, manly and sober-minded persons for the achievement of its lofty aims,’ the former president of the Trier Tavern Club and drunken stalwart of the Doctors' Club now sternly informed his readers. He was even blunter in a letter to Ruge complaining how irresponsible Young Hegelian contributors were raising the censor's hackles and the threat of closure.

  [Eduard] Meyen & Co. sent us heaps of scrawls pregnant with world revolutions and empty of thought, written in a slovenly style and flavoured with some atheism and communism (which these gentlemen have never studied)… I declared that I considered the smuggling of communist and socialist ideas into casual theatre reviews was unsuitable, indeed, immoral, and a very different and more fundamental treatment of communism was required if it was going to be discussed at all.

  Given this bad blood, it was little surprise that one of the most influential friendships in Western political thought got off to such a thoroughly unpromising start. When in November 1842, Engels dropped into the Rheinische Zeitung offices,

  I ran into Marx there and that was the occasion of our first, distinctly chilly meeting. Marx had [meanwhile] taken a stand against the Bauers, i.e. he had said he was opposed not only to the Rheinische Zeitung becoming predominantly a vehicle for theological propaganda, atheism, etc., rather than for political discussion and action, but also to Edgar Bauer's hot air brand of communism… Since I corresponded with the Bauers, I was regarded as their ally, whereas they caused me to view Marx with suspicion.35

  There was also, perhaps, not a little jealousy on Marx's part. He was notoriously touchy about any hint of ideological competition and by the early 1840s the young Engels had gained a name for himself. Despite the cloak of anonymity, his ‘Letters from Wuppertal’, pamphlet on ‘Schelling and Revelation’ and much of his journalism for the Telegraph füi Deutschland and the Rheinische Zeitung had marked him out as an up-and-coming man in radical print. Trying hard to establish his own journalistic presence, Marx was not overly inclined to welcome the young Berlin officer.

  Engels too was searching for a new role as he headed back to Barmen from Berlin. He had finished his military service in October 1842, receiving the standard approbation for his one year's volunteering and an acknowledgement that he ‘conducted himself very well during his period of service in respect both of morals and service’.36 Engels senior, though, was not convinced by such official commendation, and in a letter to his brother-in-law Karl Snethlage expressed grave concerns about how he and Elise were to manage his radical heir's homecoming. ‘I have known since childhood his tendency to extremes and was convinced, although he never wrote to me about his views since he was in Bremen, that he would not keep to those ordinarily held.’ But they were not willing to compromise their own beliefs. ‘I shall make clear to him that merely for his sake or because of his presence I shall neither change nor conceal my view
s, either in respect of religion or politics; we shall continue entirely our former way of living and read the word of God and other Christian books in his presence.’ The anxious, pious father could only be patient: ‘His conversion must come from above.’… ‘Until then it is hard to bear having a son in the house who is like a black sheep in the flock and adopts a hostile attitude to the faith of his fathers.’ There was one possible solution. ‘I hope to be able to give him a fair amount of work, and wherever he may be I shall watch over him unnoticed with the greatest care so that he does not take any dangerous step.’37 The plan was to send Engels away to Manchester to look after the Ermen & Engels investment in Salford where he would learn something of the ‘English commercial method’ before returning to assist in the Engelskirchen factory. Surely the thunderous mills and dour merchants' parlours of ‘Cottonopolis’ would prevent any further radicalization? It was another forlorn hope. On his way to Manchester, Engels encountered communism.

  Eric Hobsbawm has written of how late Marx and Engels arrived at communism; they were equally slow when it came to socialism.38 In the 1830s and early 1840s, even though the terms were often used interchangeably, socialism and communism constituted relatively distinct philosophical traditions, each with a different intellectual and political lineage and each flourishing long before the arrival of our two Prussian protagonists.*