Karl Marx. Francis Wheen

study of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s History of Art? He translated Tacitus’s Germania and Ovid’s Tristia, and ‘began to learn English and Italian by myself, i.e. out of grammars’. In the next semester, while devouring dozens of textbooks on civil procedure and canon law, he translated Aristotle’s Rhetoric, read Francis Bacon and ‘spent a good deal of time on Reimarus, to whose book on the artistic instincts of animals I applied my mind with delight’.

      All good exercise for the brain, no doubt; but even the artistic animals couldn’t rescue his magnum opus. Abandoning the 300-page manuscript in despair, young Karl turned again to ‘the dances of the Muses and the music of the Satyrs’. He dashed off a short ‘humoristic novel’, Scorpion and Felix, a nonsensical torrent of whimsy and persiflage that was all too obviously written under the spell of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. It does, however, have one passage that deserves quotation:

      Every giant … presupposes a dwarf, every genius a hidebound philistine, and every storm at sea – mud, and as soon as the first disappear, the latter begin, sit down at the table, sprawling out their long legs arrogantly.

      The first are too great for this world, and so they are thrown out. But the latter strike root in it and remain, as one may see from the facts, for champagne leaves a lingering repulsive aftertaste, Caesar the hero leaves behind him the play-acting Octavianus, Emperor Napoleon the bourgeois king Louis Philippe …

      No previous writer on Marx appears to have noticed the resemblance between this jokey conceit and the famous opening paragraph of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written fifteen years later:

      Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as a great tragedy, the second as a miserable farce. Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848–1851 for the Montagne of 1793–1795, and the London constable [Louis Bonaparte] with the first dozen indebted lieutenants that came along for the little corporal [Napoleon] with his band of marshals! The eighteenth Brumaire of the idiot for the eighteenth Brumaire of the genius!

      Apart from that suggestive echo, there is little in Scorpion and Felix that need detain us; and even less in Oulanem, an overwrought verse drama that groans under the weight of Goethe’s influence. After these experiments, Marx finally accepted the death of his literary ambitions. ‘Suddenly, as if by a magic touch – oh, the touch was at first a shattering blow – I caught sight of the distant realm of true poetry like a distant fairy palace, and all my creations crumbled into nothing.’ The discovery had cost him many a sleepless night and much anguish. ‘A curtain had fallen, my holy of holies was rent asunder, and new gods had to be installed.’ Suffering some kind of physical breakdown, he was ordered by his doctor to retreat to the countryside for a long rest. He took a house in the tiny village of Stralau, on the banks of the River Spree just outside Berlin.

      At this point, he seems to have become slightly unhinged. Still striving to ignore the siren voice of Hegel (‘the grotesque craggy melody of which did not appeal to me’), he wrote a twenty-four-page dialogue on religion, nature and history – only to find that ‘my last proposition was the beginning of the Hegelian system’. He had been delivered into the hands of his enemy. ‘For some days my vexation made me quite incapable of thinking; I ran about madly in the garden by the dirty water of the Spree, which “washes souls and dilutes the tea”. [A quotation from Heinrich Heine.] I even joined my landlord in a hunting excursion, rushed off to Berlin and wanted to embrace every street-corner loafer.’ Interestingly, Hegel himself had undergone a similar crack-up at the time when he was jettisoning his ideals and embracing ‘maturity’. It is no coincidence that both Hegel and Marx wrote at length about the problem of alienation – the estrangement of humans from themselves and their society. For in the nineteenth century ‘alienation’ had a secondary meaning as a synonym for derangement or insanity: hence, mental pathologists (or ‘mad-doctors’) were known as alienists.

      While he was convalescing – restoring his strength with long walks, regular meals and early nights – Marx read Hegel from beginning to end. Through a friend at the university he was introduced to the Doctors’ Club, a group of Young Hegelians who met regularly at the Hippel café in Berlin for evenings of noisy, boozy controversy. Members included the theology lecturer Bruno Bauer and the radical philosopher Arnold Ruge, both of whom were to become intellectual collaborators with Marx – and, a few years later, his sworn enemies.

      On the night of 10 November 1837, Marx wrote a very long letter to his father describing his conversion, and the intellectual peregrinations that had led him to it. ‘There are moments in one’s life,’ he began, ‘which are like frontier posts marking the completion of a period but at the same time clearly indicating a new direction. At such a moment of transition we feel compelled to view the past and the present with the eagle eye of thought in order to become conscious of our real position. Indeed, world history itself likes to look back in this way and take stock …’

      No false modesty there: at the age of nineteen he was already trying on the clothes of a Man of Destiny and finding that they fitted him handsomely. Now that he had begun the next stage of life, he wanted to erect a memorial to what he had lived through – ‘and where could a more sacred dwelling place be found for it than in the heart of a parent, the most merciful judge, the most intimate sympathiser, the sun of love whose warming fire is felt at the innermost centre of our endeavours!’

      Ornate flattery got him nowhere. Heinrich was neither sympathetic nor merciful as he read, with rising horror, the full story of his son’s intellectual adventures. To have a Hegelian in the family was shaming enough; worse still was the realisation that the boy had been squandering his time and talents on philosophy when he should have been concentrating solely on obtaining a good law degree and a lucrative job. Had he no consideration for his long-suffering parents? No duty to God, who had blessed him with such magnificent natural gifts? And what of his responsibility for his wife-to-be – ‘a girl who has made a great sacrifice in view of her oustanding merits and her social position in abandoning her brilliant situation and prospects for an uncertain and duller future and chaining herself to the fate of a younger man’? Even if Karl cared nothing for his fretful mother and ailing father, he must surely feel obliged to secure a happy and prosperous future for the gorgeous Jenny; and this could hardly be achieved by sitting in a smoke-filled room poring over books about arty animals:

      God’s grief!!! Disorderliness, musty excursions into all departments of knowledge, musty brooding under a gloomy oil-lamp, running wild in a scholar’s dressing-gown and with unkempt hair instead of running wild over a glass of beer; unsociable withdrawal with neglect of all decorum … And is it here, in this workshop of senseless and inexpedient erudition, that the fruits are to ripen which will refresh you and your beloved, and the harvest to be garnered which will serve to fulfil your sacred obligations!?

      This stinging reprimand – which is also a brilliant description of Marx’s lifelong working methods – was delivered in December 1837, when Heinrich was already dangerously ill with tuberculosis. It sounds like the last desperate howl of a dying man who has placed all his hopes in the next generation – only to see those hopes crumpled like so much waste paper. Fortifying himself with a fistful of pills prescribed by his doctor, he hurled grievances galore at the wastrel son. Karl scarcely ever replied to his parents’ letters; he never enquired after their health; he had spent almost 700 thalers of their money in one year, ‘whereas the richest spend less than 500’; he had weakened his mind and body chasing abstractions and ‘giving birth to monsters’; he never returned home during university holidays, and ignored the existence of his brothers and sisters. Even Jenny von Westphalen, who had previously been praised to the skies, was now revealed as yet another irritant: ‘Hardly were your wild goings-on in Bonn over, hardly were your old sins wiped out – and they were truly manifold – when, to our dismay, the pangs of love set in … While still so young, you became estranged from your family …’ True enough; but this litany of complaint was scarcely calculated to reunite them. Karl’s parents begged him to visit Trier for a few days during the Easter vacation of 1838;