Karl Marx Read online

  Pretty rich coming from a man whose own rabbinical forebears were also called Levi, a name dropped purely to assimilate themselves into Prussian society.

  No publisher in Germany would touch the book, and so Marx had Herr Vogt printed in London after a whip-round to cover the production costs: Lassalle and the Countess von Hatzfeldt provided £12, another £12 came from the wine merchant Sigismund Borkheim, an old ally from the ’48 uprising; and Engels sent a fiver. Anyone reading the book today will feel that these well-wishers might have performed a more useful service if they had dissuaded him from wasting so much time on this nonsense; but apparently the madness was contagious. Engels praised Herr Vogt as ‘the best polemical work you have ever written’, superior even to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; Jenny, who transcribed the manuscript, found it a source of ‘endless glee and delight’. As usual, Marx expected to cause a sensation and become the sole topic of conversation throughout Germany, if not the whole of Europe; as usual, he was disappointed. Herr Vogt made its entrance on 1 December 1860 with as little fanfare or applause as the Critical Economy.

  He consoled himself in traditional fashion. ‘A circumstance that has been of great help to me was having an appalling toothache,’ he wrote to Engels in publication week. ‘The day before yesterday, I had a tooth pulled out. While the fellow (Gabriel, he’s called) did, in fact, pull out the root, after causing me great physical pains, he left in a splinter. So, the whole of my face is sore and swollen, and my throat half closed up. This physical pressure contributes much to the disablement of thought and hence to one’s powers of abstraction for, as Hegel says, pure thought or pure being or nothingness is one and the same thing.’

  This mental anaesthetic was more necessary than ever; quite apart from his disappointment at the failure of Herr Vogt, he was also numbing his grief at the condition of his wife, who had succumbed to smallpox a couple of weeks earlier. While Karl and Helene nursed the invalid, the girls went off to stay with the Liebknechts for a month – though sometimes they returned to stand forlornly outside the window, so that she could at least catch a glimpse of them from her sick-bed. ‘The poor children are very scared,’ Marx told Engels. The physician, Dr Allen, said that if Jenny hadn’t been twice vaccinated she would not have pulled through, and her own account in a letter to Louise Weydemeyer confirms that it was touch and go:

  I became hourly more ill, the smallpox assuming horrifying proportions. My sufferings were great, very great. Severe, burning pains in the face, complete inability to sleep, and mortal anxiety in regard to Karl, who was nursing me with the utmost tenderness, finally the loss of all my outer faculties while my inner faculty – consciousness – remained unclouded throughout. All the time, I lay by an open window so that the cold November air must blow in me. And all the while hell’s fire in the hearth and ice on my burning lips, between which a few drops of claret were poured now and then. I was barely able to swallow, my hearing grew ever fainter and, finally, my eyes closed up and I did not know whether I might not remain shrouded in perpetual night.

  When the three children were at last allowed to return home, on Christmas Eve, they wept at the sight of their beloved mother. Five weeks earlier she had been a well-preserved woman of forty-six, without a grey hair on her head, who ‘didn’t look too bad alongside my blooming daughters’. Now her face was disfigured by scars and a dark purple-red tinge. She saw herself as a rhinoceros or hippopotamus ‘which belonged in a zoological garden rather than in the ranks of the Caucasian race’. Meanwhile her husband, anxious and exhausted, was once again suffering tortures from his liver; and then there was the problem of how to pay the hefty medical bills, especially as he had been unable to work for more than a month. The only pleasure in an otherwise miserable Christmas was Engels’s gift of a few bottles of port, which Jenny found a most effective medicine. But even this pick-me-up was denied to Karl, whose doctor had imposed a strict diet of lemonade and castor oil. ‘I am as tormented as Job,’ he moaned, ‘though not as God-fearing.’

  By all the laws of aerodynamics the bumble-bee should be unable to fly. Marx had a similar gravity-defying talent: just when he seemed certain to crash under his weight of woes, news arrived from Germany which kept him airborne. On 12 January 1861 the new Prussian King, Wilhelm I, celebrated his coronation by declaring an amnesty for political émigrés, thus raising the hope that Marx could regain his long-lost citizenship; one week later Lassalle proposed that Marx and Engels return home to edit a new ‘party organ’ modelled on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

  Though Marx had no faith in the project, guessing that ‘the tide in Germany hasn’t risen high enough yet to bear our ship’, he was nevertheless tempted – especially when he learned that the newspaper would be backed by 300,000 thalers from the Countess von Hatzfeldt’s fortune. Now that the New York Daily Tribune had more or less abandoned him because of the American Civil War, he needed an income of some kind more desperately than ever. At the very least, Lassalle’s proposition justified some on-the-spot reconnaissance. Travelling with a false passport and money borrowed from Lassalle, he set off for Germany at the end of February – stopping en route at Zaltbommel in the Netherlands, where he squeezed £160 out of his rich uncle Lion Philips as an advance against the inheritance that would be due to him under Henriette Marx’s will when that redoutable old buzzard finally fell off her perch.

  Lassalle and the Countess entertained Marx regally during his month-long visit to Berlin – thus showing how little they understood his character, since the last thing an anti-monarchist wants is to be treated like royalty. One evening they took him to see a new comedy, full of Prussian self-glorification, which disgusted him. The next night he was at the opera-house, forced to endure three hours of ballet (‘deadly dull’), sitting in a private box only a few feet away from King Wilhelm himself. At a dinner in his honour, attended by a swarm of Berlin celebrities, Marx was stuck next to the literary editor Ludmilla Assing (‘the most ugly creature I ever saw in my life’), who flirted with him throughout the meal – ‘eternally smiling and grinning, always speaking poetical prose, constantly trying to say something extraordinary, playing at false enthusiasm, and spitting at her auditor during the trances of her ecstasies’.

  After a month of Lassalle’s excruciating hospitality, Marx was screaming with boredom. ‘I am treated as a kind of lion and am forced to see a great many professional “wits”, both male and female,’ he wrote to the German poet Carl Siebel, a friend of Engels. ‘It’s awful.’ The only reason for prolonging the ordeal was that he still awaited a decision on his application for citizenship, which Lassalle had delivered in person to the chief of the Prussian police. The reply came on 10 April. Since Marx had given up his rights as a Prussian subject voluntarily in 1845, the Police Presidium ‘can only regard you as a foreigner’. He was thus ineligible for the royal amnesty.

  The Countess pleaded with him to stay for yet more dinners and divertissements. ‘This, then, is the thanks for the friendship we have shown you,’ she chided, ‘that you leave Berlin as soon as your business will permit?’ But he couldn’t abide the place any longer: the prevalence of men in uniform and ardent bluestockings made him exceedingly uncomfortable. Germany, he decided, was a beautiful country only if you didn’t have to live there. ‘If I were quite free, and if, besides, I were not bothered by something you may call “political conscience”, I should never leave England for Germany, and still less for Prussia, and least of all for that ghastly Berlin.’ Jenny, too, was vehemently opposed to any more uprooting. During his absence she confided to Engels that ‘I myself feel small longing for the fatherland, for “dear”, beloved, trusty Germany, that mater dolorosa of poets – and as for the girls! The idea of leaving the country of their precious Shakespeare appals them; they’ve become English to the marrow and cling like limpets to the soil of England.’ Besides, she had no wish to see her little darlings fall under the influence of the giddy, gilded ‘Hatzfeldt circle’.

  Marx h
imself was rather fond of the Countess – ‘a very distinguished lady, no bluestocking, of great natural intellect, much vivacity, deeply interested in the revolutionary movement, and of an aristocratic laissez aller very superior to the pedantic grimaces of professional “clever women”’ – even if she did wear far too much make-up to conceal the ravages of age and decay. For him, the clinching argument against taking a job in Berlin was his unwillingness to be a colleague or neighbour of Ferdinand Lassalle. In more than a decade of regular correspondence he had somehow failed to detect the man’s vanity, pomposity and incipient megalomania, but after a month under the same roof he understood why the Düsseldorf communists had tried to warn him off. In letters to Engels, Lassalle was now dubbed ‘Lazarus’, ‘Baron Izzy’ or ‘the Jewish nigger’. This last epithet began as a piece of whimsy: though Lassalle was certainly dark – as was Marx – he had no Negro ancestry. But Marx repeated the joke so often that he came to believe its essential veracity: ‘It is now quite plain to me – as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify – that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’s flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandfather interbred with a nigger),’ he wrote. ‘Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also niggerlike.’ As with his comments about the amazing nose of Mr Levy, editor of the Daily Telegraph, one can only assume that it seemed funny at the time.

  The German trip was not wholly unprofitable: before leaving the country Marx spent two days in Trier with his mother, who rewarded this rare effort at filial solicitude by cancelling several of his ancient debts. He thus returned to London on 29 April with £160 in cash from Uncle Lion and a pocketful of torn-up IOUs. By the middle of June, however, he was sponging off Engels once again. ‘The fact that I have already spent what I brought back with me will not surprise you,’ he wrote, ‘since, besides the debts which occasioned the trip, nothing has been coming in for nearly four months, while school and doctor alone ate up nearly £40.’ He was soon back in the old routine of subterfuges and emergency measures. Whenever the landlord came to collect the rent Jenny would send him off empty-handed, explaining that Karl was away on business – while in fact he was cowering in his upstairs study. More and more household effects were sent to the pop-shop, including the children’s clothes ‘right down to their boots and shoes’. Through the winter of 1861–2 Jennychen was continuously ill: Marx deduced that at the age of seventeen she ‘is now already old enough to feel the full strain and also the stigma of our circumstances, and I think this is one of the main causes of her physical indisposition’. Engels immediately sent his patent restorative for ‘weak blood’ – eight bottles of claret, four of hock and two of sherry – which lifted her spirits but did nothing for her weak and emaciated body.

  The mood in the Marx household became even more forlorn during the summer of 1862 while the rest of London was en fête for the second Great Exhibition, a fanfaronade of mid-Victorian pride and achievement. ‘Every day my wife says she wishes she and the children were safely in their graves, and I really cannot blame her, for the humiliations, torments and alarums that one has to go through in such a situation are indeed indescribable,’ he wrote. ‘I feel all the more sorry for the unfortunate children in that all of this is happening during the Exhibition season, when their friends are having fun, whereas they themselves live in dread lest someone should come and see them and realise what a mess they are in … No one comes to see me, and I’m glad of it.’

  He spoke too soon. Three weeks later who should turn up on his doorstep but ‘Baron Izzy’ Lassalle, in town to inspect the industrial marvels on display in Hyde Park. It was a hideously inopportune moment, but Marx felt duty-bound to make some show of returning the hospitality he had accepted – if not enjoyed – in Berlin the previous year. Everything not actually nailed or bolted down was taken to the pawnbroker, and for the next three weeks Lassalle played the part of the guest from hell – eating and drinking like a starved glutton while holding forth about his limitless talents and ambitions. Though he knew that Marx’s income from the New York Daily Tribune had dried up, Lassalle seemed astonishingly insensitive to the family’s plight: he boasted of losing £100 on a rash stock-market speculation as if it were nothing, and spent more than a pound a day on cabs and cigars without offering a penny to his hosts. Instead he had the insolence to ask Karl and Jenny if they would mind handing over one of their teenage daughters to la Hatzfeldt as a ‘companion’ – i.e. a glorified maidservant.

  ‘The fellow has wasted my time,’ Marx noted during the third week of this ordeal, ‘and, what is more, the dolt opined that, since I was not engaged upon any “business” just now, but merely upon a “theoretical work”, I might just as well kill time with him!’ The whole family had to escort Lassalle on sightseeing tours of London – and further afield, to Windsor and Virginia Water – while listening to his interminable self-aggrandising monologues. Looking at the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, he turned to Marx and asked. ‘What do you think? Should I spend six months making my mark as an Egyptologist?’ Had Marx not been so infuriated by the way ‘this parvenu flaunted his moneybags’, he might have found it all quite amusing. ‘Since I last saw him a year ago he’s gone quite mad,’ he told Engels. ‘He is now indisputably not only the greatest scholar, the profoundest thinker, the most brilliant man of science, and so forth, but also and in addition, Don Juan cum revolutionary Cardinal Richelieu. Add to this the incessant chatter in a high falsetto voice, the unaesthetic, histrionic gestures, the dogmatic tone!’ One day Lassalle disclosed the ‘profound secret’ that the Italian liberators Mazzini and Garibaldi, like the government of Prussia, were pawns directed by his guiding hand. Unable to contain themselves, Karl and Jenny began teasing him about these Napoleonic fantasies – whereupon the German messiah lost his temper, screaming that Marx was too ‘abstract’ to comprehend the realities of politics. After Lassalle had gone to bed, Marx disappeared into his study to write another letter to Engels mocking his guest’s ‘niggerlike’ characteristics.

  Jenny’s account of the Lassalle invasion has rather less rancour and more humour:

  He was almost crushed under the weight of the fame he had achieved as scholar, thinker, poet and politician. The laurel wreath was fresh on his Olympian brow and ambrosian head or rather on his stiff bristling Negro hair. He had just victoriously ended the Italian campaign – a new political coup was being contrived by the great men of action – and fierce battles were going on in his soul. There were still fields of science that he had not explored! Egyptology lay fallow: ‘Should I astonish the world as an Egyptologist or show my versatility as a man of action, as a politician, as a fighter, or as a soldier?’ It was a splendid dilemma. He wavered between the thoughts and sentiments of his heart and often expressed that struggle in really stentorian accents. As on the wings of wind he swept through our rooms, perorating so loudly, gesticulating and raising his voice to such a pitch that our neighbours were scared by the terrible shouting and asked what was the matter. It was the inner struggle of the ‘great’ man bursting forth in shrill discords.

  It was only when he was leaving, on 4 August, that Lassalle acknowledged the Marxes’ predicament – as he could hardly fail to, since the landlord and a posse of other creditors had chosen this moment to batter on the front door, loudly threatening to send in bailiffs. Even then his generosity was pretty strained. He offered Marx £15, but only as a short-term loan and then only subject to a promise from Engels that he would guarantee it.

  Over the next couple of months Lassalle made such a fuss about this minor transaction – insisting on ‘signed bonds’ from Engels, haggling over the repayment date – that Marx regretted ever taking the money. After a thoroughly ill-tempered exchange of letters, however, he offered a semi-apology. ‘Is there to be an outright split between us because of this? … I trust that,
despite everything, our old relationship will continue untroubled.’ He was a man sitting on a powder-barrel, a despairing wretch who would like nothing better than to blow his brains out: was this not enough to excuse his thoughtless ingratitude?

  Lassalle never replied. Though he blamed ‘financial reasons’ for the end of the friendship, the two men’s political differences would have caused a rupture soon enough. Lassalle had an Old Hegelian respect for the might of the Prussian state, and was now advocating co-operation between the old Junker ruling class (represented by Bismarck) and the new industrial proletariat (represented, naturally, by himself) to thwart the political aspirations of the rising liberal bourgeoisie. In June 1863, two weeks after founding the General German Workers’ Association, Lassalle wrote to the Iron Chancellor, bragging about the absolute power he had over his members, ‘which perhaps you’d have to envy me! But this miniature picture will plainly convince you how true it is that the working class feels instinctively inclined to dictatorship if it can first be rightfully convinced that such will be exercised in its interests, and how very much it would therefore be inclined, as I recently told you, in spite of all republican sentiments – or perhaps on those very grounds – to see in the Crown the natural bearer of the social dictatorship, in contrast to the egoism of bourgeois society.’ (This letter gives the lie to a claim by one of Marx’s biographers, Fritz J. Raddatz, that ‘the notorious “conspiracy” with Bismarck never took place’.) What the workers required was not a monarchy created by the bourgeoisie, like that of Louis Philippe in France, but ‘a monarchy that still stands as kneaded out of its original dough, leaning upon the hilt of the sword …’