Karl Marx. Francis Wheen

on their eating the “cakes” he made with dirty dough and dirtier hands. But they stood the “driving” and ate the “cakes” without a murmur, for the sake of the stories Karl would tell them as a reward for their virtue.’ In later years – when the playful girls had become respectable married women – they were rather less indulgent towards their wayward sibling. Luise Marx, who emigrated to South Africa, once dined at his house while visiting London. ‘She could not countenance her brother being the leader of the socialists,’ a fellow guest reported, ‘and insisted in my presence that they both belonged to the respected family of a lawyer who had the sympathy of everybody in Trier.’

      Marx’s determined efforts to cut loose from the influence of his family, religion, class and nationality were never wholly successful. As a venerable greybeard he remained forever the prodigal son, firing off begging letters to rich uncles or ingratiating himself with distant cousins who might soon be drawing up their wills. When he died, a daguerreotype photograph of his father was found in his breast pocket. It was placed in his coffin and interred in Highgate cemetery.

      He was tethered – however unwillingly – by the force of his own logic. In a precocious schoolboy essay, ‘Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of Profession’, the seventeen-year-old Karl Marx observed that ‘we cannot always attain the position to which we believe we are called; our relations in society have to some extent already begun to be established before we are in a position to determine them’. His first biographer, Franz Mehring, may have exaggerated when he detected the germ of Marxism in this one sentence, but he had a point. Even in ripe maturity Marx insisted that human beings cannot be isolated or abstracted from their social and economic circumstances – or from the chilly shades of their forebears. ‘The tradition of all the dead generations’, he wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, ‘weighs like a mountain on the mind of the living.’

      One of Marx’s paternal ancestors, Joshue Heschel Lwow, had become the rabbi of Trier as long ago as 1723, and the post had been something of a family sinecure ever since. His grandfather, Meier Halevi Marx, was succeeded as the town rabbi by Karl’s uncle Samuel. Yet more dead generations were added to the load by Karl’s mother, Henriette, a Dutch Jew in whose family ‘the sons had been rabbis for centuries’ – including her own father. As the oldest son of such a family, Karl might not have escaped his own rabbinical destiny but for those ‘social and economic circumstances’.

      Added to the weight of dead generations was the smothering spiritual tradition of Trier, oldest city in the Rhineland. As Goethe noted gloomily after a visit in 1793, ‘Within its walls it is burdened, nay oppressed, with churches and chapels and cloisters and colleges and buildings dedicated to chivalrous and religious orders, to say nothing of the abbacies, Carthusian convents and institutions which invest, nay, blockade it.’ During its annexation by France in the Napoleonic Wars, however, the inhabitants had been exposed to such unGermanic notions as freedom of the press, constitutional liberty and – more significantly for the Marx family – religious toleration. Though the Rhineland was reincorporated into imperial Prussia by the Congress of Vienna three years before Marx’s birth, the alluring scent of French Enlightenment still lingered.

      Karl’s father, Hirschel, owned several Moselle vineyards and was a moderately prosperous member of the educated middle class. But he was also Jewish. Though never fully emancipated under French rule, Rhenish Jews had tasted just enough freedom to hunger for more. When Prussia wrested back the Rhineland from Napoleon, Hirschel petitioned the new government for an end to legal discrimination against himself and his ‘fellow believers’. To no avail: the Jews of Trier were now subject to a Prussian edict of 1812 which effectively banned them from holding public office or practising in the professions. Unwilling to accept the social and financial penalties of second-class citizenship, Hirschel was reborn as Heinrich Marx, patriotic German and Lutheran Christian. His Judaism had long been an accident of ancestry rather than a deep or abiding faith. (‘I received nothing from my family,’ he said, ‘except, I must confess, my mother’s love.’) The date of his baptism is unknown, but he had certainly converted by the time of Karl’s birth: official records show that Hirschel began to work as an attorney in 1815, and in 1819 he celebrated the family’s new respectability by moving from their five-room rented apartment into a ten-roomed property near the old Roman gateway to the city, Porta Nigra.

      Catholicism might appear to have been the more obvious choice for what was, essentially, no more than a spiritual marriage of convenience: the Church to which he now belonged had barely 300 members in a city with a population of 11,400. But these adherents happened to include some of the most powerful men in Trier. As one historian has observed, ‘To the Prussian state, the members of its established religion represented the solid, reliable and loyal core in a predominantly Roman Catholic, and somewhat dangerously gallicised, Rhineland.’

      Not that Hirschel was immune to Gallic charm: during the years of Napoleonic dominance he had been steeped in free French ideas of politics, religion, life and art, becoming ‘a real eighteenth-century “Frenchman” who knew his Voltaire and Rousseau by heart’. He was also an active member of Trier’s Casino Club, where the more enlightened citizens gathered for political and literary debates. In January 1834, when Karl was fifteen, Heinrich organised a banquet at the club to pay tribute to the newly elected ‘liberal’ deputies to the Rhineland Assembly, winning raucous applause for his toast to the King of Prussia – ‘to whose magnanimity we are indebted for the first institutions of popular representation. In the fullness of his omnipotence he has of his own free will directed that the Diets should assemble so that the truth might reach the steps of the throne.’

      This extravagant flattery for a feeble and anti-Semitic king might sound sarcastic, and was probably taken thus by the more boisterous revellers. (‘The fullness of his omnipotence’, forsooth.) But Heinrich was perfectly sincere; no revolutionary he. Nevertheless, the very mention of ‘popular representation’, however carefully muffled in sycophancy and moderation, was enough to alarm the authorities in Berlin: irony is often the dissident’s only weapon in a land of censors and police spies, and the agents of the Prussian state – ever alert for mischief – were adept at detecting satire where none was intended. The local press was forbidden to print the speech. After a Casino Club gathering eight days later, at which members sang the Marseillaise and other revolutionary choruses, the government placed the building under police surveillance, reprimanded the provincial governor for permitting such treasonous assemblies and marked Heinrich Marx down as a dangerous troublemaker.

      What did his wife make of all this? It is quite possible that he kept the news from her. Henriette Marx did not share her husband’s intellectual appetites: she was an uneducated – indeed only semi-literate – woman whose interests began and ended with her family, over whom she fussed and fretted ceaselessly. She admitted to suffering from ‘excessive mother love’, and one of her few surviving letters to her son – written while he was at university – amply justifies the diagnosis: ‘Allow me to note, dear Carl, that you must never regard cleanliness and order as something secondary, for health and cheerfulness depend on them. Insist strictly that your rooms are scrubbed frequently and fix a definite time for it – and you, my dear Carl, have a weekly scrub with sponge and soap. How do you get on about coffee, do you make it, or how is it? Please let me know everything about your household.’ The picture of Mrs Marx as a congenital worrier was confirmed by Heinrich: ‘You know your mother and how anxious she is …’

      Once he had flown the nest, Karl had little more to do with his mother – except when he was trying, seldom with much success, to wheedle money out of the old girl. Many years later, after the death of Engels’s lover Mary Burns, Marx sent his friend a brutal letter of condolence: ‘I am being dunned for the school fees, the rent … Instead of Mary, ought it not to have been my mother, who is in any case a prey to physical ailments and has had her fair share of life?’

      Karl Marx