Karl Marx Page 4

  The truth was that Marx had left his family behind. The distance between them can be gauged by a letter from Heinrich in March 1837 suggesting that Karl make his name by writing a heroic ode: ‘It should redound to the honour of Prussia and afford the opportunity of allotting a role to the genius of the monarchy … If executed in a patriotic and German spirit with depth of feeling, such an ode would itself be sufficient to lay the foundation for a reputation.’ Did the old man really think that his son would wish to glorify either Germany or its monarchy? Perhaps not. ‘I can only propose, advise,’ he conceded ruefully. ‘You have outgrown me; in this matter you are in general superior to me, so I must leave it to you to decide as you will.’

  Heinrich Marx died, aged fifty-seven, on 10 May 1838. Karl did not attend the funeral. The journey from Berlin would be too long, he explained, and he had more important things to do.

  2

  The Little Wild Boar

  During his three years at Berlin University, Marx was seldom in the lecture hall and often in debt. The death of his father meant an end to the regular stipends but also relieved the paternal pressure to apply himself to legal studies. ‘It would be stupid,’ Bruno Bauer advised, ‘if you were to devote yourself to a practical career. Theory is now the strongest practice, and we are absolutely incapable of predicting to how large an extent it will become practical.’ The task of the Young Hegelians was to infiltrate the academy and establish their theories as the new received wisdom. Marx began work on a doctoral thesis which would qualify him for a lectureship, taking as his subject ‘The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy’.

  He could not have chosen a less propitious moment, since it coincided with a new and thoroughgoing purge of Hegel’s left-wing disciples. Eduard Gans, the last Hegelian in the faculty of law, died unexpectedly in 1839 and was replaced by the severely reactionary Julius Stahl. Bauer himself was evicted from the theology department soon afterwards and forced to seek refuge at the University of Bonn. As recently as 1836 Bauer had argued, with some vehemence, that religion should remain above and beyond philosophical criticism; now he was proclaiming his atheism from the rooftops. He urged Marx to get on with the dissertation and join him in Bonn as soon as possible. Another young radical predicted that ‘if Marx, Bruno Bauer and Feuerbach come together to found a theological – philosophical review, God would do well to surround Himself with all His angels and indulge in self-pity, for these three will certainly drive Him out of His heaven’. Luckily for God, He had Prussian friends in high places. After the accession of Friedrich Wilhelm IV to the throne in 1840 the persecution of dissidents was redoubled, strict censorship imposed on all publications and academic freedom extinguished.

  Stranded in inhospitable Berlin, Marx no longer bothered to attend the university. By day he sat in his lodgings, reading and writing and smoking; in the evenings he colloquised and caroused with the kindred souls at the Doctors’ Club, who were keeping their spirits up by meeting almost daily. Though his explorations of Epicurus and Democritus might seem harmless enough, he knew that there was no question of submitting his thesis to the Berlin professors – especially since it would be scrutinised by F. W. von Schelling, a veteran anti-Hegelian philosopher who was brought into the university in 1841 at the personal command of the new king to root out unhealthy influences. Despite its apparently dry subject, Marx’s comparative study of Democritus and Epicurus was actually a daring and original piece of work in which he set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy, and that scepticism will triumph over dogma. His argument was laid down like a gauntlet on the first page:

  As long as a single drop of blood pulses in her world-conquering and totally free heart, philosophy will continually shout at her opponents the cry of Epicurus: ‘Impiety does not consist in destroying the gods of the crowd but rather in ascribing to the gods the ideas of the crowd.’ Philosophy makes no secret of it. The proclamation of Prometheus – ‘In one word, I hate all gods’ – is her own profession, her own slogan against all gods in heaven and earth who do not recognise man’s self-consciousness as the highest divinity. There shall be none other beside it.

  In the spirit of belligerent mischief that was to be such a feature of his later polemics, Marx added a brief appendix mocking his own tutor’s loss of liberal faith. Quoting from an essay Schelling had written more than forty years earlier – ‘The time has come to proclaim to the better part of humanity the freedom of minds, and not to tolerate any longer that they deplore the loss of their fetters’ – he asked, ‘When the time had already come in 1795, how about the year 1841?’

  Schelling did not have a chance to reply. Marx submitted his thesis instead to the University of Jena, which had a reputation for awarding degrees without delay or debate. He was obliged to attach his leaving certificate from Bonn (which mentioned the escapades with drink and firearms) and a reference from the Deputy Royal Government Plenipotentiaries at Berlin University, who found ‘nothing specially disadvantageous to note from the point of view of discipline’ except that ‘on several occasions he has been the object of proceedings for debt’. The Dean of Philosophy at Jena, Dr Carl Friedrich Bachmann, decided that these trifling misdemeanours could be disregarded, since the essay on Democritus and Epicurus ‘testifies to intelligence and perspicacity as much as to erudition, for which reason I regard the candidate as pre-eminently worthy’. On 15 April 1841, just nine days after sending his dissertation to Jena, Karl Marx collected a Ph.D.

  Herr Doktor Marx was now ready to launch himself in the world. But for the next year he shuttled aimlessly between Bonn, Trier and Cologne, apparently uncertain of what to do next. His thesis had been dedicated ‘to his dear fatherly friend, Ludwig von Westphalen … as a token of filial love’, and during several visits to Trier he pointedly ignored his own surviving parent, devoting himself to the ailing Baron (who was to die in March 1842) and the patient Jenny, whose adoration of her ‘little wild boar’ was as intense as ever in spite of his lengthy absences. ‘My little heart is so full, so overflowing with love and yearning and ardent longing for you, my infinitely loved one,’ she wrote. ‘It is certain, isn’t it, that I can marry you?’ Of course, of course, he agreed, but not just yet. The marriage would have to be postponed until he had found gainful employment, since his wretched mother had stopped his allowance and withheld his share of Heinrich Marx’s estate.

  In July 1841 Marx went to stay with Bruno Bauer in Bonn, where the two reprobates spent an uproarious summer shocking the local bourgeoisie – getting drunk, laughing in church, galloping through the city streets on donkeys and (rather more subversively) penning an anonymous spoof, The Last Trump of Judgement Against Hegel the Atheist and the Anti-Christ. At first glance this was a pious broadside, supposedly written by a devout and conservative Christian who wished to prove that Hegel was a revolutionary atheist; but its true intent soon became apparent, as did the identity of the authors. One Hegelian newspaper commented knowingly that every ‘bauer’ (the German word for ‘peasant’) would understand the real meaning. Bruno Bauer was expelled from the university, and with him went Marx’s last chance of academic preferment.

  ‘In a few days I have to go to Cologne,’ Marx told the radical Hegelian philosopher Arnold Ruge in March 1842, ‘for I find the proximity of the Bonn professors intolerable. Who would want to have to talk always with intellectual skunks, with people who study only for the purpose of finding new dead ends in every corner of the world!’ A month later, he was having second thoughts: ‘I have abandoned my plan to settle in Cologne, since life there is too noisy for me, and an abundance of good friends does not lead to better philosophy … Thus Bonn remains my residence for the time being; after all, it would be a pity if no one remained here for the holy men to get angry with.’

  But the lure of Cologne was hard to resist, since the ‘noise’ of which he complained sounded remarkably like an echo of the Doctors’ Club meetings in the Hippel café – the main dif
ference being the quality of the alcohol. ‘How glad I am that you are happy,’ Jenny wrote to Karl in August 1841, ‘and that you drank champagne in Cologne, and that there are Hegel clubs there, and that you have been dreaming …’ Champagne seemed a more appropriate lubricant than the ale favoured in Berlin: Cologne was the wealthiest and largest city in the Rhineland, which was itself the most politically and industrially advanced province in the whole of Prussia, and the local bankers and businessmen had lately begun to agitate for a form of government more suited to a modern economy than the wheezing, ancient apparatus of absolute monarchy and bureaucratic oppression under which they laboured. As Marx himself pointed out often enough in later years, the nature of society is dictated by its forms of production; now that industrial capitalism had established itself, the talk in the bars of Cologne was that democracy, a free press and a unified Germany would have to follow. It was no surprise, then, that the city acted as a magnet for heretical thinkers and Bohemian malcontents who offered their wealth of knowledge in exchange for the tycoons’ knowledge of wealth. The child of this union was the Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper founded in the autumn of 1841 by a group of wealthy manufacturers and financiers (including the President of the Cologne Chamber of Commerce) to challenge the dreary, conservative Kölnische Zeitung.

  With hindsight, it was sublimely inevitable that Marx would write for the paper and quickly install himself as its presiding genius. But although Marxism has often been caricatured as a doctrine of ‘historical inevitability’, he knew very well that individual destinies are not preordained – though he did tend to underestimate the importance of accident and coincidence in shaping a life. What if Bruno Bauer had not been driven out of academe? What if Dr Marx had found a university sinecure instead of being forced – faute de mieux – to express his restless intelligence through journalism?

  Chance may have helped to decide his fate; but it was a chance he had himself been seeking. This was another of those frontier posts marking the unexplored territory beyond. Hegel had served his purpose, and since leaving Berlin Marx’s thoughts had been moving from idealism to materialism, from the abstract to the actual. ‘Since every true philosophy is the intellectual quintessence of its time,’ he wrote in 1842, ‘the time must come when philosophy not only internally by its content, but also externally through its form, comes into contact and interaction with the real world of its day.’ He had come to despise the nebulous and blurry arguments of those German liberals ‘who think freedom is honoured by being placed in the starry firmament of the imagination instead of on the solid ground of reality’. It was thanks to these ethereal dreamers that freedom in Germany had remained no more than a sentimental fantasy. His new direction would, of course, require another exhaustive and exhausting course of self-education, but that was no discouragement to such an insatiable auto-didact.

  He composed his first journalistic essay in February 1842, while visiting the dying Baron von Westphalen in Trier, and sent it to Arnold Ruge in Dresden for inclusion in his new Young Hegelian journal, the Deutsche Jahrbücher. The article was a brilliant polemic against the latest censorship instructions issued by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV – and, with glorious if unintended irony, the censor promptly banned it. The Deutsche Jahrbücher itself was closed down a few months later, by order of the federal parliament.

  Grumbling about the ‘sudden revival of Saxon censorship’, Marx hoped for better luck in Cologne, where several of his friends were already installed at the Rheinische Zeitung. The editor, Adolf Rutenberg, was a bibulous comrade from the Doctors’ Club (and brother-in-law to Bruno Bauer), but since he was usually sozzled the burden of producing the paper fell mostly on Moses Hess, a rich young socialist. Moses Hess later became a fierce enemy, as did almost all of Marx’s friends, but at this time his attitude to the combative youngster was reverential. He wrote to his friend Berthold Auerbach:

  He is a phenomenon who made a tremendous impression on me in spite of the strong similarity of our fields. In short you can prepare yourself to meet the greatest – perhaps the only genuine – philosopher of the current generation. When he makes a public appearance, whether in writing or in the lecture hall, he will attract the attention of all Germany … Dr Marx (that is my idol’s name) is still a very young man – about twenty-four at the most. He will give medieval religion and philosophy their coup de grâce; he combines the deepest philosophical seriousness with the most biting wit. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel fused into one person – I say fused not juxtaposed – and you have Dr Marx.

  Marx had the same effect on almost everyone he encountered at this time. Though the men in the Berlin Doctors’ Club and the Cologne Circle were eight or ten years older than him, most treated him as their senior. When Friedrich Engels arrived in Berlin to do his military service, a few months after Marx’s departure, he found that the young Rhinelander was already a legend. A poem written by Engels in 1842 includes a vivid description of his future collaborator – whom he hadn’t yet met – based entirely on the breathless reminiscences of fellow intellectuals:

  Who runs up next with wild impetuosity?

  A swarthy chap of Trier, a marked monstrosity.

  He neither hops 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.

  He was indeed swarthy (hence his lifelong nickname, ‘Moor’) and the effect was accentuated by thick black hair which seemed to sprout from almost every pore on his cheeks, arms, ears and nose.

  It is easy to overlook the obvious, which may be why so few writers on Marx have noticed what is staring them in the face: that he was, like Esau, an hairy man. In the recollections of those who knew him, however, the awe-inspiring effect of that magnificent mane is mentioned again and again. Here is Gustav Mevissen, a Cologne businessman who invested in the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842: ‘Karl Marx from Trier was a powerful man of twenty-four whose thick black hair sprang from his cheeks, arms, nose and ears. He was domineering, impetuous, passionate, full of boundless self-confidence …’ And the poet George Herwegh, who came to know Marx in Paris: ‘Luxuriant black hair overshadowed his forehead. He was superbly suited to play the role of the last of the scholastics.’ Pavel Annenkov, who encountered Marx in 1846: ‘He was most remarkable in his appearance. He had a shock of deep black hair and hairy hands … he looked like a man with the right and power to command respect.’ Friedrich Lessner: ‘His brow was high and finely shaped, his hair thick and pitch-black … Marx was a born leader of the people.’ Carl Schurz: ‘The somewhat thick-set man, with broad forehead, very black hair and beard and dark sparkling eyes, at once attracted general attention. He enjoyed the reputation of having acquired great learning …’ Wilhelm Liebknecht, writing in 1896, still trembled to recall the moment half a century earlier when he had first ‘endured the gaze of that lion-like head with the jet-black mane’.

  This apparently careless luxuriance was contrived quite deliberately. Both Marx and Engels understood the power of the hirsute, as they proved in a sneering aside half-way through their pamphlet on the poet and critic Gottfried Kinkel, written in 1852:

  London provided the much venerated man with a new, complex arena in which to receive even greater acclaim. He did not hesitate: he would have to be the new lion of the season. With this in mind he refrained for the time being from all political activity and withdrew into the seclusion of his home in order to grow a beard, without which no prophet can succeed.

  Perhaps for the same reason, Marx grew a set of whiskers at university and cultivated them with pride throughout his adulthood until he was as woolly as a flock of sheep. (A Prussian spy in London, reporting to his Berlin masters in 1852, thought it significant that ‘he
does not shave at all’.)

  Friedrich Engels, too, seems to have formulated a political theory of facial hair at an early age. ‘Last Sunday we had a moustache evening,’ the nineteen-year-old Engels wrote to his sister in October 1840. ‘I had sent out a circular to all moustache-capable young men that it was finally time to horrify all philistines, and that that could not be done better than by wearing moustaches. Everyone with the courage to defy philistinism and wear a moustache should therefore sign. I had soon collected a dozen moustaches, and then the 25th of October, when our moustaches would be a month old, was fixed as the day for a common moustache jubilee.’ This pogonophiles’ party, held in the cellar of Bremen town hall, concluded with a defiant toast:

  Philistines shirk the burden of bristle

  By shaving their faces as clean as a whistle.

  We are not philistines, so we

  Can let our mustachios flourish free.

  Though the growth later spread over his cheeks and chin, Engels’s wispy beard was no match for the magnificent Marxist plumage. The image of Karl Marx familiar from countless posters, revolutionary banners and heroic busts – and the famous headstone in Highgate cemetery – would lose much of its iconic resonance without that frizzy aureole.