Helen’s surname is derived from the word Demut, German for humility. Like nannies Mary Poppins and canine Nana in Peter Pan, it is true that Helen was good-natured and reliable, but these clichéd virtues are not what make her interesting. Helen’s expertise at childcare and reliability as a highly skilled servant were consequences of her class and early training. She was gentled by Caroline’s decent treatment and encouraged by the improvement in her circumstances. Caroline von Westphalen valued Helen’s logical intelligence, insight and good humour. She became a favourite and Caroline gave her discreet but pretty accessories that complemented her fine features, including crimped ribbons and delicate enamelled flower earrings. She also gave her a nickname, Lenchen, and it stuck for the rest of her life.
Jenny was twenty-two years old when Lenchen joined the family. Like her mother, she treated Lenchen respectfully and without affectation. ‘Nobody ever had a greater sense of equality than she,’ a relative remarked; ‘no social differences or classifications existed for her.’5 Jenny’s impartiality to rank defined her character from an early age. Amiable and interested in each other, a friendship developed between Jenny and Lenchen.
Whilst Jenny and Lenchen got to know each other, Jenny’s father Ludwig began to take a particular interest in his friend Heinrich’s glaringly bright son. Karl was inquisitive, argumentative, attentive and scholarly, and he was physically strong and sporty; more the son Ludwig had hoped for than his own charming but indolent boy Edgar. Ludwig invited Karl to join their long family hikes in the parks and woodlands around Trier.
On these walks, Ludwig introduced the rapt youngsters to the worlds of Aristotle, Aeschylus, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Rousseau and Shelley. Jenny followed closely, asking questions and arguing with her father. Karl joined in and Ludwig discussed points of aesthetics, ethics and morals.
Between them, the Marx and von Westphalen families spoke five primary languages. In Karl’s home, German, Dutch and Yiddish were spoken; in Jenny’s, German, French and English. By his maternal Scots heritage, English was Ludwig’s second language. This enabled Jenny to pick it up as a mother tongue. On their open-air walks, Jenny quoted Shakespeare and Voltaire in the original, enchanting the youngster Karl, who did not understand English or French. As a little boy, Karl had known Jenny as his big sister Sophie’s friend; now he saw her from a new perspective. He was just a diligent and disputatious schoolboy but Jenny was the talk of Trier: an enthralling, desirable and, even to the pugnacious Karl, slightly intimidating young woman of glittering intellect and wit as bright as her beauty.6
By all accounts, Jenny was strikingly lovely. Few, it seems, were immune to her beauty, but if it was her bloom that captured Karl’s adolescent attentions, it was her intellect that held them and made his heart follow. He loved to hear her speak. It was from Jenny’s lips that he first heard the words of Shakespeare and Shelley, and followed, absorbed, the movements of her enquiring mind as she questioned, challenged and debated with all around her.
Ludwig discussed politics with the youngsters, explaining the causes and failures of the French Revolution. The French people rightly revolted against the divine right of monarchy, aristocracy and plutocracy, Ludwig explained, but the Terror and Napoleon’s military dictatorship failed to achieve its intentions. He urged them to read the ideas of Saint-Simon, primogenitor of French socialism, who looked for structural economic solutions to the causes of inequality, extreme wealth and inescapable poverty.
The walks gave young Karl cherished opportunities to be with the older Jenny, whom he idolised. But she was inaccessible: a grown-up seventeen-year-old popular at parties, picnics, balls, the theatre, and radical youth league meetings and rallies. Wooed by well-heeled professional men twice her age, Jenny was already a debutante, likely to be spoken for and married before Karl had finished school.
Jenny enjoyed socialising but was at heart an activist and intellectual. Whilst other girls of her age and class practised their coming-out curtsey and vacillated over ribbon shades and glove-lengths, Jenny pinned the tricolour in her hair and got on with reading the work of Genoese Giuseppe Mazzini and her campaigning in the Young Germany youth movement for which she was an elected representative for Trier.7
Part of the Young Europe international federation founded in London by Mazzini, Young Germany was led primarily by writers, poets, journalists and theorists opposed to Christian fundamentalism and the apolitical aesthetics of German romanticism. It advocated the separation of church and state, emancipation of Jewry, and the education and equality of women. The Prussian state regarded its democratic, socialist, rationalist principles as seditious and encouraging social instability; it censored many of the publications and authors associated with the movement, including work by Heinrich Heine.
Jenny von Westphalen’s leadership role in Young Germany was controversial. No wonder her conservative older half-brother Ferdinand felt dismay. By the measure of Trier society, Jenny was a borderline libertine with breathtakingly progressive views. Ludwig, a follower of Rousseau, strong believer in the education of women and purblind with adoration for his favourite daughter, gave her full rein and shielded her from the criticism. For her numerous suitors, Jenny’s loveliness and influential, rich father offset her alarming political and intellectual tendencies that, they no doubt believed, would be subdued by the harness of marriage and baby-making.
However, for one ineligible younger man in Trier, it was precisely that which alarmed other admirers about Jenny’s firebrand nature that enticed him. For Karl Marx her analytical mind, passionate politics and disregard for social propriety made her a woman in a million.
Young Karl had no means by which to draw her attention. His very familiarity in her extended family life made him invisible. In October 1835, when he was seventeen, he left Trier to study at the University of Bonn, taking with him unspoken feelings and a good deal of bad love poetry dedicated to the object of his secret desire. Karl worked hard and played hard. Reports of young Marx’s ‘excellent’ academic ‘diligence and attention’ as a scholar were accompanied by his robust freshman schedule of extra-curricular activities, especially in the Poets’ Club, and as co-President of the Men of Trier Society (the euphemistic title for a drinking club). His antic mishaps resulting from his purchase of a duelling pistol prompted his exasperated father to inquire, ‘Is duelling then so closely interwoven with philosophy?’8
With the willing collusion of his overanxious mother, Karl dodged the draft at eighteen on the tenuous excuse of a weak chest. Henriette wrote him many letters at university imploring him to ‘not get over-heated, not drink a lot of wine or coffee, and not eat anything pungent, a lot of pepper or other spices. You must not smoke any tobacco, not stay up too long in the evening, and rise early. Be careful also not to catch cold and, dear Carl, do not dance until you are quite well again.’9 These maternal admonitions were of course a comprehensive list of his regular activities.
And still he dreamed of unattainable Jenny. Whatever else might be said of Marx’s impetuosity, arrogance and obstinacy, he knew his own heart when it came to Jenny von Westphalen. This was no amour fou. Twenty-seven years later he would still describe her as the ‘most beautiful girl in Trier’ and ‘queen of the ball’.10
Conscription avoided, Marx transferred to study law at the University of Berlin, described by alumnus Ludwig Feuerbach as ‘a temple of work’. He persuaded his father that Berlin was the best place for legal studies, but in truth it was a ruse for him to follow his desire to be taught by one of Germany’s most contentious philosophers, Georg Hegel, who earned his living as a professor at the university to support his philosophising. From Berlin, Karl was heartbroken to hear from his sister Sophie that Jenny’s engagement to Lieutenant Karl von Pannewitz had been announced.
It was an accidental engagement. Jenny accepted Pannewitz’s proposal after dancing all night and drinking too much champagne. He had an elite pedigree, but Jenny’s father Ludwig was sceptical. His first mother-i
n-law was from the Pannewitz family and he had no good memories of the experience. He needn’t have worried. The effect of the young officer’s elegant uniform wore off as fast as the Wachau Valley champagne hangover when Jenny discovered his conversation to be dull, politics neo-conservative and sense of humour banal. The episode was over in a few months. Jenny broke the engagement and Karl, prompted by the close shave, seized his moment and declared himself to her when he went home to Trier from Bonn for his vacation before leaving for Berlin.
After a year away he was newly confident, fashionably hirsute and burnished by scholarship and young man’s adventures. He had many new stories to entertain his sisters and friends. Karl’s charisma and newly broad shoulders brought him into focus for Jenny in an arresting new way. Stirred by his maturing manly persona, Jenny found herself blushing over the boy she’d known from babyhood.
Jenny probed Sophie for information about Karl. Already alert to her brother’s passion for her best friend, Sophie assumed the role of go-between. Lenchen, witness to the exchange of private letters and the arrangement of trysts, was soon taken into Jenny’s confidence. Jenny opted for her dark anti-hero, ‘my darling little wild boar’ – ‘Schwarzwildchen’ as she called him in her love letters.11 Karl and Jenny were betrothed, clandestinely, in 1836. Sophie, Edgar and Lenchen were their first confidants. Missives flew thick and fast between them and Karl filled three volumes with love verses all dedicated to Jenny:
Truly, I would write it down as one refrain,
For the coming centuries to see –
LOVE IS JENNY, JENNY IS LOVE’S NAME.12
The fact that Jenny was four years older than her fiancé made the match unconventional by the standards of their society; Karl’s Jewishness, even more so. Despite their conversion, to all intents and social purposes the Marxes were still culturally Jewish and regarded by Trier society, of which Jenny was a part, as socially and ethnically other.
Jenny’s mother Caroline adored Karl and wanted her daughter to follow her heart; but though loyal and supportive, she worried about Jenny’s financial security. Karl’s mother Henriette was desperately sad and anxious that Jenny was not Jewish. Ferdinand, Jenny’s patrician half-brother, was infuriated that she intended to marry a trouble-making Jewish intellectual. He did everything possible to thwart the relationship and tried to bully his father into forbidding it. After several years of civil war more within than between the families, the friendship between the fathers carried the day and the betrothal was formally announced. Ferdinand never forgave either of them.
Jenny’s fiancé had to finish his studies. Eleanor summarised the many trials and tribulations of her parents’ long engagement with biblical allusion: ‘they were betrothed, and as Jacob for Rachel he served her for seven years before they were wed’.13 Whilst Jacob was working to earn a cash dowry for Rachel, Marx spent seven eventful years in Berlin accumulating intellectual capital and expending his father’s money, rather than earning his own.
Regretful but sympathetic, Heinrich conceded to his son giving up law in favour of the study of philosophy whilst at the University of Berlin. Henriette berated Karl. He was abnegating the requirement to be a good husband and father, and avoiding his future responsibilities as head of the family when his father died.
As Jacob for Rachel, Marx’s seven years waiting for Jenny ‘seemed unto him but a few days, for the love he had for her’,14 nourished by zealous love letters, ardent literary and political debate, and occasional precious periods of time together during his university vacations. In 1841, on an unchaperoned visit to him in Bonn, Jenny cheerfully lost her virginity to Karl, an event that prompted a sparkling and frank letter on the guiltless joys of premarital sex. ‘I cannot feel any repentance . . . I know very well what I have done and how the world would dishonour me, I know it, I know it – and yet I am blissfully happy and would not surrender the remembrance of those hours for any treasure in the whole world.’15
For Jenny, the seven-year separation caused a great deal of misery and stress. Karl was a young man at large, far busier and more mentally stimulated, his world expanding exponentially faster than hers. She craved further education and occupation. Approaching thirty, she waited faithfully for her absent fiancé, wearying of attending the weddings of her girlfriends and congratulating them on their firstborn babies.
It was during this period, in November 1842, that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels met for the first time. Their first encounter took place in the offices of the Rheinische Zeitung in Brussels. In defiance of his father, Engels had quit his job in Barmen and was trying to make a living as a journalist. Neither made much impression on the other at this initial meeting, but over subsequent months Karl became increasingly interested and impressed by Friedrich’s journalism on social history and economics. Neither could have guessed that the intense friendship imminent between them would become a formative factor in the future life of Marx’s youngest daughter.
3
Hans Röckle’s Toyshop
On a summer morning, 19 June 1843, Jenny and Karl were finally married in the plain Protestant church of the spa town of Bad Kreuznach. Jenny glowed in folds of pale green silk. Her hair was interwoven with pink roses given to her by Karl. In the absence of her father, Edgar gave his sister away to Herr Doktor Karl Marx.
Caroline von Westphalen, the only one of their parents present, wistfully observed how much her husband would have been satisfied to see this day. Ludwig had died the year before, in March 1842. Acknowledging the role of his ‘dear fatherly friend’ and mentor in 1841, Karl dedicated his PhD dissertation to Ludwig, ‘as a token of filial love’. His own father had died in May 1838 whilst Karl was at university.
Karl’s mother did not come to his wedding. How could her eldest son get married to a Christian in a church? Why could he not have married a nice Jewish girl? She did, however, witness on Karl’s behalf the prenuptial contract that gave the pair common ownership of property, each partner promising to pay those debts that the other had ‘made, contracted, inherited or otherwise incurred before the marriage’,1 so excluding these debts from community of property. All the debts were on Karl’s side, racked up at university and now compounding due to Henriette’s refusal to hand over his paternal inheritance.
These debts were far from their minds on their brief but halcyon honeymoon along the Rhine. Caroline gave them a handsome coffer of cash as a wedding present that they spent freely.
Jenny’s new husband was between jobs when they got married. Karl’s first professional role as editor of the radical Rheinische Zeitung, to which he’d been appointed in October 1842, ended in January 1843 when the exasperated government censor shut the paper down. Arnold Ruge responded by inviting Karl to join him in setting up a new publication in liberty-loving Paris, hopefully beyond the iron reach of Prussian censorship. So began the new Herr and Frau Marx’s family migration around Europe, an odyssey that lasted seven years.
The newlyweds set up home in Paris in October. The new journal, Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher, was short-lived, running to just one edition, but this first year of their marriage in the centre of the revolutionary world was nevertheless productive. Karl wrote some important developmental work, including his essay ‘On the Jewish Question’ and the introduction to ‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’. On 1 May 1844 their first child was born, a girl named for her mother and known ever after by her parents and family as Jennychen.
Karl started writing for Vorwärts whilst Jenny returned to Trier to nurse their newborn with her mother’s support. Paris remained the centre of progressive politics and art, but France laboured under the bourgeois monarchy of the pear-shaped Citizen King Louis Philippe with his fat-cat motto, ‘enrichissez vous’. In August 1844 Marx and Engels met again in Paris. After their initial encounter in 1842, Marx continued to follow Engels’s journalism. Marx was particularly impressed by a series of essays and reviews Engels submitted to the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher. He
was also curious about Engels’s first-hand experience of English industrialisation in the cotton mills of Lancashire. When he heard that Engels was passing through Paris on his way home to Germany, Marx suggested that they meet at a café for aperitifs. That night Marx and Engels started a conversation casually over drinks at the Café de la Régence that lasted ten days and nights, and went on for the remainder of their forever-after combined lifetimes.
During that summer of 1844, Karl poked fun at King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia in a playful piece for Vorwärts. Friedrich complained to Louis Philippe by personal royal dispatch, demanding redress for the insults and libels. A knock on the door in the middle of the night heralded the arrival of a superintendent of the Paris police with an expulsion order for Karl, effective immediately. Brussels provided a safe haven but, in order to stay in Belgium, Karl had to make a statutory declaration that he would abstain from all political activity. This forced him to stop working as a journalist, and he lost his chief source of income.
In September 1845 their second child Laura was born. The new friends Marx and Engels worked together on The German Ideology over the hard winter of 1845–6. The Marxes were so overstretched that Jenny dubbed their home ‘the pauper colony’. Distressed by her daughter’s struggles, Caroline von Westphalen dispatched Helen Demuth to Brussels as ‘the best that I can send you, my dear faithful Lenchen’.2 Dear faithful Lenchen was now a slim, blonde and blue-eyed twenty-five-year-old, six years Jenny’s junior but sufficiently similar-looking to her mistress to be mistaken for Mrs Marx, if you didn’t see them together. Lenchen took over the running of the household whilst Jenny transcribed her husband’s articles and manuscripts, wrote letters and articles of her own, joined in the politicking and activism, and brokered her first deals pawning the silver and fine linen her mother had given her as wedding presents. Effectively, Jenny became first lady and Lenchen mistress of the household. Little Jenny and Laura soon came to regard her as their second mother.
Eleanor Marx Page 5
