Karl Marx. Francis Wheen

Marx could only speculate. Had the authorities panicked when they noticed the paper’s swelling popularity? Had he been too outspoken in his defence of the other victims of censorship, such as Ruge’s Deutsche Jahrbücher? The likeliest reason, he guessed, was a long article published only a week before the edict, in which he had accused the authorities of ignoring the wretched economic plight of Moselle wine-farmers who were unable to compete with the cheap, tariff-free wines being imported into Prussia from other German states.

      Little did he realise – though he might have been gratified to hear it – that there were more potent forces working behind the scenes. The Prussian king had been asked to suppress the paper by no less a figure than Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, his closest and most necessary ally, who had taken exception to an anti-Russian diatribe in the 4 January issue of the Rheinische Zeitung. At a ball in the Winter Palace four days later, the Prussian ambassador to the court of St Petersburg was harangued by the Tsar about the ‘infamy’ of the liberal German press. The ambassador sent an urgent dispatch to Berlin reporting that the Russians could not understand ‘how a censor employed by Your Majesty’s government could have passed an article of such a nature’. And that was that.

      ‘Today the wind has changed,’ one of the Rheinische Zeitung’s censors wrote on the day after Karl Marx had vacated the editor’s chair. ‘I am well content.’ Marx himself was pretty happy too. ‘I had begun to be stifled in that atmosphere,’ he confided to Ruge. ‘It is a bad thing to have to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom.’

      He had no future in Germany, but since most of the people and institutions for which he cared were now dead – his father, the Baron von Westphalen, the Deutsche Jahrbücher, the Rheinische Zeitung – there was nothing to keep him anyway. What mattered was that, at the age of twenty-four, he was already wielding a pen that could terrify the crowned heads of Europe. When Arnold Ruge decided to quit the country and set up a journal-in-exile, the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher, Marx gladly accepted an invitation to join him. There was only one caveat: ‘I am engaged to be married and I cannot, must not and will not leave Germany without my fiancée.’

      Seven years after pledging himself to Jenny, even the thick-skinned Karl Marx was beginning to feel prods and stabs of guilt. ‘For my sake,’ he admitted in March 1843, ‘my fiancée has fought the most violent battles, which almost undermined her health, partly against her pietistic aristocratic relatives, for whom “the Lord in heaven” and “the lord in Berlin” are equally objects of a religious cult, and partly against my own family, in which some priests and other enemies of mine have ensconced themselves. For years, therefore, my fiancée and I have been engaged in more unnecessary and exhausting conflicts than many who are three times our age.’ But the trials and torments of this long betrothal could not all be blamed on others. While Karl was making whoopee in Berlin or fomenting trouble in Cologne, Jenny stayed at home in Trier wondering if he would still love her tomorrow. Sometimes these anxieties surfaced in her letters – which were then misinterpreted by Marx as evidence of her own inconstancy. ‘I was shattered by your doubt of my love and faithfulness,’ she complained in 1839. ‘Oh, Karl, how little you know me, how little you appreciate my position, and how little you feel where my grief lies … If only you could be a girl for a little while and, moreover, such a peculiar one as I am.’

      It was, as she tried to explain, different for girls. Condemned to passivity by Eve’s original sin, they could only wait, hope, suffer and endure. ‘A girl, of course, cannot give a man anything but love and herself and her person, just as she is, quite undivided and for ever. In ordinary circumstances, too, the girl must find her complete satisfaction in the man’s love, she must forget everything in love.’ But how could she forget everything while premonitions of grief buzzed in her head like angry bees? ‘Ah, dear, dear sweetheart, now you get yourself involved in politics too,’ she wrote in August 1841, while Marx was gallivanting in Bonn with Bruno Bauer. ‘That is indeed the most risky thing of all. Dear little Karl, just remember always that here at home you have a sweetheart who is hoping and suffering and is wholly dependent on your fate.’

      Actually, his political agitation was the least of her worries: it was dangerous, to be sure, but also thrillingly heroic. She expected nothing less from her ‘wild black boar’, her ‘wicked knave’. What stopped Jenny surrendering to happiness was fear of the agony ‘if your ardent love were to cease’. There were good reasons for these misgivings. While studying in Berlin, he fell under the spell of the famous romantic poet Bettina von Arnim – who was old enough to be his mother – and on one occasion, with clodhopping insensitivity, even took her back to Trier to meet his young bride-to-be. Jenny’s friend Betty Lucas witnessed the miserable encounter:

      I entered Jenny’s room one evening, quickly and without knocking, and saw in the semi-darkness a small figure crouching on a sofa, with her feet up and her knees in her hands, resembling more a bundle than a human figure, and even today, ten years later, I understand my disappointment when this creature, gliding from the sofa, was introduced to me as Bettina von Arnim … The only words her celebrated mouth uttered were complaints about the heat. Then Marx entered the room and she asked him in no uncertain tone to accompany her to the Rheingrafenstein, which he did, although it was already nine o’clock and it would take an hour to get to the rock. With a sad glance at his fiancée he followed the famous woman.

      How could a half-educated girl compete with such sirens? Marx’s intellectual strength intimidated Jenny. When chatting to aristocratic mediocrities in gilded ballrooms she was witty, lively and supremely self-assured. When she was in the presence of her beloved, one look from those dark and fathomless eyes was enough to strike her dumb: ‘I cannot say a word for nervousness, the blood stops flowing in my veins and my soul trembles.’

      One need hardly add that Jenny was a child of the Romantic Age. Like many restless spirits of that generation she read and reread Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, whose hero was shackled to a rock for defying the gods and enlightening mankind. (‘Prometheus,’ Marx declared in his doctoral thesis, ‘is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar.’ An allegorical cartoon published after the suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung showed Marx himself in Promethean guise, chained to a printing press while a Prussian eagle pecked at his liver.) Unable to keep pace with Karl’s striding impetuosity, she began to dream that he too would have to be hobbled:

      So, sweetheart, since your last letter I have tortured myself with the fear that for my sake you could become embroiled in a quarrel and then in a duel. Day and night I saw you wounded, bleeding and ill, and, Karl, to tell you the whole truth, I was not altogether unhappy in this thought: for I vividly imagined that you had lost your right hand, and, Karl, I was in a state of rapture, of bliss, because of that. You see, sweetheart, I thought that in that case I could really become quite indispensable to you, you would then always keep me with you and love me. I also thought that then I could write down all your dear, heavenly ideas and be really useful to you.

      Though she conceded that this fantasy might sound ‘queer’, in fact it is a common enough romantic motif – the dark, dangerous hero who must be maimed or emasculated before he can win a woman’s heart. Only a few years later Charlotte Brontë used the same idea in the denouement of Jane Eyre.

      Jenny’s wish was granted, more or less. During their four decades of marriage Marx was often ‘bleeding and ill’; and, since his handwriting was indecipherable to the untrained eye, he depended on her to transcribe his dear, heavenly ideas. Rapture, however, proved rather more elusive in real life than in her giddy dreams.

      Half Prometheus, half Mr Rochester: if this is how his adoring fiancée saw him, the attitude of her more conventional relations can well be imagined. To marry a Jew was shocking enough, but to marry