Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 in Trier, the oldest city in Germany. Founded in 16 BC as the Roman colony of Augusta Treverorum, it was an important army bastion and a residence of many emperors, with a population of 80,000 by the year AD 300, and went on to become the seat of the Gallic prefecture and one of the main administrative centres of the Western Empire. In the Middle Ages, it was for a long time an archbishopric capital and subsequently preserved the splendour of its intense religious past. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749–1832], who visited it in 1792, described it as a ‘characteristic and striking city’: ‘inside the walls it is burdened, nay overwhelmed, with churches, chapels, monasteries, convents, colleges, and other chivalric and monastic buildings; outside it is beset by abbeys, foundations, and Carthusian monasteries’.1 Yet Trier’s decline from the late-seventeenth century on meant that by the time of Marx’s birth its population was as low as 11,400.2
Trier’s position on the border between Germany and France – belonging to France from 1795 to 1814 – enabled the population to benefit from the economic and political reforms of the Napoleonic Civil Code and a post-Enlightenment cultural climate. The peasantry was liberated from feudal servitude and intellectuals from ecclesiastical constraints, while the bourgeoisie managed to gain approval for the liberal laws necessary for its development. After 1815, being situated in the southern part of the Prussian Rhineland – a region quite different from the more developed north with its metallurgical and cotton industries – Trier remained an essentially agricultural centre; peasant smallholdings were the norm, and it had almost no proletariat at all.3 Nevertheless, the widespread poverty made it one of the first German cities where French utopian socialist theories made an appearance, introduced by Ludwig Gall [1791–1863].
Marx came from an old Jewish family, and to examine its genealogical tree is to lose oneself in a centuries-long list of successive rabbis.4 His paternal uncle, Samuel, was rabbi in Trier until 1827, and Samuel’s father, Levi Mordechai [1743–1804] (a name later modified to Marx), had occupied the same position until his death, numbering several more rabbis in his lineage. Levi’s wife, Eva Lwow [1754–1823], was the daughter of Moses Lwow [1764–1788], himself a rabbi in Trier, like his father Joshue Heschel Lwow [1692–1771] before him – a leading figure in the Jewish community of his time – and like his grandfather Aron Lwow [1660–1712], originally from the Polish city of Lwów. Before emigrating to Poland, the family ancestors had lived in Hesse, and before that, around the mid-fifteenth century, in Italy. In fact, five generations before, anti-Jewish persecution had forced Abraham Ha-Levi Minz [1440–1525] to emigrate from Germany to Padua, where he was rabbi and his son-in-law, Mayer Katzenellenbogen [1482–1565], became rector of the Talmudic university.5
There was also a rabbinical ancestry on the maternal side of Marx’s family. Although information is scarcer, we know that Karl’s mother, Henriette [1788–1863], was the daughter of Isaac Pressburg [1747–1832], rabbi in Nijmegen, and that her line of descent consisted of Hungarian Jews forced by persecution to migrate to the Netherlands, where it took the name of its city of origin: Pressburg (today’s Bratislava).6 In the course of moving around, the Pressburgs also spent some time in Italy, the home of Jehuda ben Eliezer ha Levy Minz [?–1508], professor at Pavia University. In this family too, as Marx’s youngest daughter Eleanor [1855–1898] wrote, ‘the male offspring had been rabbis for hundreds of years’.7
With this background, and being the only surviving son, Marx might very well have followed the same path. We may say, then, that he was a rabbi manqué, whom circumstances pointed toward a different destiny. His father Hirschel [1777–1838] was part of a generation of young Jews – Heinrich Heine8 [1797–1856] and Eduard Gans [1797–1839] made the same choice in this period – who shook off the constraints of a community living apart amid the hostility of Christians, closed to the outside world and the changes taking place within it.9 At that time, moreover, relinquishment of the Jewish faith was not only a price to be paid for keeping one’s job but also, as Heine pointed out, the intellectual entry ticket to European civilization.10
After a complicated youth and difficulties with his family, Hirschel Marx managed to secure a good position as legal adviser at the Court of Appeal in Trier. The Prussian annexation of the Rhineland in 1815, however, led to the exclusion of Jews from all public office. Forced to choose between quitting his profession and abandoning the faith of his ancestors, he then had himself baptised and changed his name to Heinrich. Although Trier had a Catholic majority, he decided to join the small, 300-strong Protestant community, which distinguished itself by its greater liberalism. The conversion of his children (including Karl) followed in August 1824, and that of his wife the following year.11 Despite the change of religion and the Enlightenment atmosphere that the household always exuded, the Marx family retained many Jewish habits and types of behaviour, the influence of which should not be minimized in a discussion of Karl’s childhood and adolescence.
Few particulars are known about the first years of Marx’s life. It is likely that he spent them happily in the calm and cultivated ambience of a bourgeois family and was seen by it as a particularly gifted child holding out bright hopes for the future. Educated at home until he was twelve, he got his early bearings from a paternal rationalism that would exert a profound influence on his development. Heinrich Marx, a highly cultured man, subscribed to Enlightenment theories and had a good knowledge of Voltaire [1694–1778], Jean-Jacques Rousseau [1712–1778] and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing [1729–1781].12 Free of religious prejudices and supportive of liberal tendencies in politics, he brought up his son according to modern pedagogical principles. Marx always preserved a deep affection for his father: he ‘never tired of speaking of him and always carried around a photo of him taken from an old daguerreotype’.13
Marx’s mother Henriette, on the other hand, who had moved from Nijmegen after her marriage, was so lacking in education that she was unable even to master the German language. Devoted to the home, Henriette Pressburg was anxious and apprehensive by nature, played no role in her son’s intellectual development and never understood his aspirations. Relations between them remained infrequent for the rest of her life, often involving conflict and, from a certain point on, centring entirely on financial disputes over the family inheritance. Marx’s relations with his three sisters were also sporadic and had no importance in his life. As the third of nine children – five younger brothers succumbed to tuberculosis – he was left alone with them from an early age. The few recollections that have come down to us speak of him as a ‘terrible tyrant’, who would force his sisters ‘to gallop like horses up the Marcusberg in Trier’ and to eat ‘the cakes he had prepared with dirty hands from even dirtier dough’. Yet they allowed him to do this, because he rewarded them with ‘wonderful stories’.14
From 1830 to 1835, Marx attended the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium in Trier. Founded by Jesuits in the sixteenth century and didactically restructured after Prussia’s annexation of the Rhineland, the high school could boast of excellent teachers and offered a rationalist liberal education which, together with the one received from his father, stamped Marx’s early cast of mind.
The climate then reigning in Prussia, however, was marked by censorship and the suppression of civil liberties; a decree stifling all expressions of dissent was the response to a demonstration for free speech in Hambach in 1832. A special commission for the elimination of politically dangerous groups turned its attentions to Trier, and after an inspection at Marx’s school several teachers were accused of having a bad influence on their pupils. Charges were laid against the headmaster Hugo Wyttenbach [1767–1848], a fervent Enlightenment spirit, and he was assigned a deputy by the name of Vitus Loers [1792–1862], a reactionary for whom Marx displayed his aversion by refusing to take personal leave of him, as was customary, at the end of his studies.
The government commission also targeted the casino literary society, a meeting place for progressive citizens in Trier and the heart of its liberal opposition. In 1834, the building was placed under police surveillance following a banquet in honour of local liberal deputies to the Rhineland Diet – Heinrich Marx gave a speech there supporting a moderate constitutional system – and a meeting at which the Marseillaise was sung and the French tricolour unfurled.15
Such events formed the backdrop to this period of Marx’s life. He was among the youngest pupils in his class and the few non-Catholics in the whole school; these two factors together probably did not help him to make close friends, but we are told that his schoolmates respected ‘the ease with which he composed satirical verses against his enemies’.16
Marx’s results were good but not particularly brilliant. Throughout his time at the school, his name appears only twice in the end-of-year praise bestowed on deserving pupils: once for knowledge of ancient languages, and once for German composition. He did satisfactorily in his final exams, but again did not really stand out. The diploma certificate tells us that his German composition and grammatical knowledge were considered ‘very good’; in Latin and Greek he could translate and explain easier passages with facility and precision, write thoughtfully and with deep insight into the subject matter, and speak with a degree of fluency. He was ‘in general fairly proficient’ in history and geography and able to read even difficult French with some assistance, and he had a ‘good’ grasp of mathematics and a ‘moderate’ grasp of physics. Also ‘fairly clear and well grounded’ was his knowledge of Christian doctrine and morals and ‘to some extent the history of the Christian Church’. The exam board therefore passed him, ‘cherishing the hope that he will fulfil the favourable expectations which his aptitudes justify’.17
Marx took his school-leaving exam in 1835, and his results in religion, Latin and German are the first direct clues to his early intellectual formation.18 His German composition piece, ‘Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession’, is particularly interesting. Although typical of the Enlightenment humanist conceptions prevalent in Germany at the time,19 the text has caught the attention of various researchers because it sums up what Marx thought about each individual’s responsibility in making the difficult choice of a career. In his view, the main guide in this decision should be the good of humanity, and the people whom history considered really great were those who had worked for the universal. And he concludes:
If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.20
The essay contains another sentence that has aroused debate among interpreters of Marx: ‘But 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.’21 Some Marxists who regard his thought as having been formed before his long and profound studies in political economy even see this statement as the first exposition of the materialist conception of history. But the reality is simpler. Just seventeen years old at the time, Marx was arguing that for any human being a choice of career is bound up with the objective circumstances of his or her life.22
With the Gymnasium behind him, the young man indulged his father’s wish that he should follow him into the legal profession, and although he had no special leaning in that direction he enrolled in October 1835 in the faculty of law in Bonn, the closest university city to Trier and the main intellectual centre of the Rhineland.
Bonn, with a population of 40,000, was a little larger than Trier but much more animated, and it held an undoubted attraction for Marx. Many activities were concentrated around the university, which had a staff of sixty for approximately 700 students. The teaching corps, including the prestigious philosopher August W. Schlegel [1767–1845], set its stamp on the whole cultural atmosphere in the city, dominated at the time by a Romanticism associated with the theories of Friedrich W. J. Schelling [1775–1854]. Its students, who enjoyed considerable freedom, were the most energetic section of society and had promoted various political initiatives.
In April 1833, however, there was a profound change in the situation. A group of students attempted to disperse the Federal Diet and to install an independent Rhineland government, and the swift crushing of this revolt was followed by a crackdown on the student organizations. One in particular, the Student Liberal Association, was formally dissolved and its members expelled or arrested. When Marx arrived in Bonn, the repression was still in full swing, as the police, with the help of a network of informers, was attempting to weed out all the suspects. Fear of sanctions impelled large numbers of students to refrain from further political activity and to throw themselves instead into a round of drinking and duelling. The only permitted associations were the student corporations, made up of sons of the nobility, and circles organized by city of origin. Marx joined the one with some thirty students from Trier, becoming a keen member and, before long, one of its five presidents.23
Since Marx’s letter to his parents from Bonn have been lost, those from his father are invaluable for a reconstruction of his life in this period – indeed, the only direct source we have. Heinrich sent thoughtful advice to his ‘studiosus juris’24 and expressed high hopes for his future: ‘I have no doubt as to your good will and diligence, or about your firm intention to do something great.’
Marx threw himself into his studies with great enthusiasm; his will to learn was so great that he registered for a good nine courses during the first winter semester. But after an admonishment from his father – ‘Nine lecture courses seem to me rather a lot and I would not like you to do more than your body and mind can bear’25 – he convinced himself to cut these to six, giving up the realm of physics and chemistry. He assiduously followed every lecture not only in jurisprudence, legal institutions and the history of Roman law, but also in Greek and Roman mythology, modern art history and aspects of Homer (the latter given by Schlegel himself). This selection demonstrates the young man’s wide range of interests, as well as the great passion he felt for poetry. Around the same time, he began to write some verse compositions26 and became a member of the Poets Club.
We know from his father’s letters and money transfers that Marx bought many books, especially large historical works.27 He studied with great intensity and, despite his father’s urging – ‘in providing really vigorous and healthy nourishment for your mind, do not forget that in this miserable world it is always accompanied by the body, which determines the well-being of the whole machine. […] Therefore, do not study more than your health can bear’28 – Marx’s health suffered from the excessive workload after just a few months in Bonn.
His father’s letters repeated the warnings: ‘I hope at least that the sad experience will bring home to you the need to pay rather more attention to your health. […] Even excessive study is madness in such a case. […] There is no more lamentable being than a sickly scholar.’29 So, during the summer semester, force of circumstance dictated that he took no more than four courses: history of German law, European international law, natural law, and the Elegies of Propertius [50/45 bc – 15/? bc], as well as the one given by Schlegel. Apart from accumulated fatigue, another reason for this reduction was the exuberance of student life to which he had indulged in the meantime. He spent a lot of money and ran up debts, so that his father was often compelled to send him additional funds. He also bought a pistol and, when this was discovered by the police, he had to undergo an investigation for possession of a concealed firearm; he was arrested and given one day’s detention for ‘rowdiness and drunkenness at night’;30 and he took part in a duel with another student and received a slight wound above his left eye.
On balance, the year in Bonn did not live up to expectations, and Marx’s father decided to transfer him to Berlin University. Before setting off for the Prussian capital, though, he spent the summer holidays in Trier and became engaged to his future lifelong companion: Jenny von Westphalen [1814–1881], much sought after for her beauty and her position in society. Fearing that the von Westphalens would refuse to accept the match – Karl was an ordinary bourgeois, Jewish in origin and, having just turned eighteen, was four years younger than Jenny (something almost unheard of in those days) – they initially kept their intentions secret from the family.
Jenny did indeed belong to a completely different world. She was the daughter of Baron Ludwig von Westphalen [1770–1842], an eminent government official and a typical representative of the cultured, liberal-inclined German upper classes. He was a fascinating, open-minded man, who spoke perfect English, read ancient Latin and Greek, Italian, French and Spanish; he was therefore on excellent terms with the young Marx and appreciated his great intellectual vivacity. His preferred reading, though, were the works of the Romantic school, rather than the French rationalists and classics. So, ‘whereas [Karl’s] father read Voltaire and Racine to him, the baron would recite Homer [?] and Shakespeare [1564–1616], who always remained his favourite authors’.31 Von Westphalen also paid close attention to the social question and helped to arouse Marx’s early interest in Henri de Saint-Simon [1760–1825].32 All in all, he provided him with stimulating influences that neither family nor school had been able to offer, and Marx always remained tied to him by feelings of gratitude and admiration. Not for nothing did he dedicate his doctoral thesis to the baron a few years later.
With 320,000 inhabitants, Berlin was the second most populous German-speaking city after Vienna. The heart of the Prussian bureaucracy, it was also a lively intellectual centre and the first great metropolis with which Marx became familiar.
Friedrich Wilhelm University, founded in 1810,33 had 2,100 students at the time. It housed many of the most celebrated academics of the age – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel [1770–1831] himself had taught there from 1818 until his death in 1831 – and constituted the most serious and fitting place for Marx to continue his studies. Ludwig Feuerbach [1804–1872], who also studied there, had said of it in the 1820s: ‘other universities seem real dumps in comparison with this temple of work’.34
In this new context, and with the responsibilities deriving from his betrothal, Marx gave up the high spirits of his second Bonn semester and got down to work with renewed passion and diligence. His attitude to university had changed, however: he concerned himself much less with academic lectures and, during the nine semesters he spent in Berlin, registered for only thirteen courses and spent two semesters without attending any. In winter 1836–37 he took courses on the Justinian compilations of Roman law, on criminal law, and anthropology. The first two courses, which he followed with great zeal, were shared between the greatest jurists of the day: Friedrich von Savigny [1779–1861], founder and chief theorist of the Historical School, proposed a Romantic exaltation of the past and was a supporter of political conservatism; Eduard Gans, a disciple of Hegel and Henri de Saint-Simon, idol of the whole of progressive Berlin, and highly liberal in his politics, contributed to the development of similar tendencies in Marx and to his interest in Hegelianism.
In any event, an account of Marx’s academic involvement gives a very one-sided picture of his intellectual endeavours. Apart from courses obligatory for his exams in ecclesiastical law, civil procedure, Prussian civil procedure, penal procedure, and inheritance law,35 he limited himself to four others: logic, geography, the Book of Isaiah, and Euripides. But, locking himself away in his room, he embarked on prodigious independent study that allowed him very quickly to master fields of knowledge well beyond his chosen discipline.
Marx’s learning programme can be reconstructed from the letter he wrote to his father in November 1837; the only one surviving from his time at Berlin University and a priceless document for his first year there. Burning with love for his fiancée and still anxious about the fate of their still unofficial union, he devoted himself to poetry in particular. From October to December 1836, he composed three books of verses and sent them to ‘my dear, eternally beloved Jenny v. Westphalen’:36 the Book of Love in two parts and the Book of Songs. Their conventional themes of tragic love and their heavy, awkward lyrical form did not suggest a particular gift for poetry.37
For Marx, however, ‘poetry could be and had to be only an accompaniment’. He always felt more strongly ‘the urge to wrestle with philosophy’ and had a duty to study jurisprudence. He did in fact begin reading the German jurists Johann G. Heineccius [1681–1741] and Anton F. J. Thibaut [1772–1840], translated the first two books of the Justinian Pandect, and ‘tried to elaborate a philosophy of law covering the whole field of law’.38 Guided by a wish to relate the two to each other, he passed from a study of the empirical side of law to jurisprudence and from there to philosophy in general.39 In this way, he composed ‘a work of almost 300 pages’, which remained incomplete and later went missing; it had two parts – a ‘metaphysics of law’ and a ‘philosophy of law’. Although Marx never finished it, the act of writing enabled him ‘to gain a general view of the material and a liking for it’. He could see ‘the falsity of the whole thing, the basic plan of which borders on that of Kant’, and became convinced that ‘there could be no headway without philosophy’. He therefore ‘drafted a new system of metaphysical principles’ but at the end of this he was ‘once more compelled to recognize that it was wrong, like all my previous efforts’.
Little by little, philosophy took over from the study of law, and the legal career envisaged by his father gave way to the prospect of a life of academic study. At the same time, Marx developed his interests in many other directions. He acquired ‘the habit of making extracts from all the books [he] read […] and incidentally scribbled down [his] reflections’40 – a habit he kept up for the rest of his life, in his tiny, almost illegible handwriting. Marx began his notebooks of excerpts with Laocoon (1767) by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Erwin (1815) by Karl W. F. Solger [1780–1819], the History of Ancient Art (1764) by Johann J. Winckelmann [1717–1768] and the History of the German People (1825–35) by Heinrich Luden [1778–1847].41 During the same period, he translated two Latin classics – Tacitus’s [56–120] Germania (AD 98) and Ovid’s [43 bc–ad 17/18]Tristia (AD 12–17); he began to study English and Italian grammar; read Ernst F. Klein’s [1744–1810] work on Prussian criminal law and annals and, at least cursorily, all the most recent literature.
Despite his father’s repeated entreaties ‘not to overdo [his] studying’ and ‘not to exhaust’ himself,42 Marx kept working at a furious pace. He wrote another notebook of poetry, and dedicated it to his father on his sixtieth birthday, adding the first act of Oulanem, a fantastic drama in verse, and some chapters of a humoristic romance Scorpion and Felix, a poorly executed attempt to heap scorn on Berlin philistines. More interesting are some brief ‘Epigrams’ in the same notebook, which record his critical attitude to Hegel at the time. Finally, Marx had a major interest in theatre and literary issues, and from 1837 on, though still barely nineteen, he had plans to found a journal of literary criticism.43
In the end, after all this intensive and emotionally exhausting work in the fields of law, philosophy, art, literature, languages, and poetry,44 Marx fell ill and took his doctor’s advice to seek rest in the country,45 at a fishing village called Stralow46 an hour’s journey from the university.
As well as providing him with a break, this stay also marked an important stage in Marx’s intellectual evolution: ‘A curtain had fallen, my holy of holies was rent asunder, and new gods had to be installed.’ After a deep inner conflict, he bid farewell to Romanticism, distanced himself from Kantian and Fichtean idealism, and ‘arrived at the point of seeking the idea in reality itself’. Until then he had read only ‘fragments of Hegel’s philosophy, the grotesque craggy melody of which did not appeal’ to him. In Stralow he ‘got to know Hegel from beginning to end, together with most of his disciples’. Nevertheless, his conversion to Hegelianism was by no means immediate. In order to clarify the ideas he was making his own, he drafted a dialogue of ‘24 sheets’47 called Cleanthes, or The Starting Point and Necessary Continuation of Philosophy, also now lost, which attempted to unify ‘art and science’. The fruit of studies of history, the sciences and Schelling’s works, it had caused Marx ‘to rack his brains endlessly’. And the outcome disheartened him in the end; ‘this work, my dearest child, reared by moonlight, like a false siren delivers me into the arms of the enemy’ – that is, into the embrace of Hegel’s philosophy.
Upset by the outcome of his reflections, Marx was ‘for some days quite incapable of thinking’.48 Subsequently, he laid philosophy aside for a while to immerse himself again in his legal studies: Savigny’s Property Law (1805), Anselm R. Feuerbach’s [1829–1880] Manual of Criminal Law (1801), Karl von Groham’s [?] Fundamental Principles of the Science of Criminal Law (1812), Johann Andreas Cramer’s [1723–1788] Significance of the Words in the Title of the Pandect (?), Johann N. von Wenning-Ingenheim’s [1790–1831] Manual of General Civil Law (1822), Christian F. Mühlenbruch’s [1785–1843] Science of the Pandect (1838), Gratian’s [1075/80–1145/47] Concordia discordantium canonum (1140) and Giovan Paolo Lancellotti’s [1522–1590] Institutes of Canon Law (1563). He also read Francis Bacon’s [1561–1626] De augmentis scientiarum (1623) and Hermann S. Reimarus’s [1694–1768] book On the Artistic Instincts of Animals (1760), and translated part of Aristotle’s [384 BC–322 BC] Rhetoric (367 BC–322 BC).49
Finally, because of ‘the vain, fruitless intellectual labours’, and ‘nagging annoyance at having had to make an idol of a view that I hated’ (that is, Hegel’s philosophy), Marx suffered a breakdown. When he had recovered, he ‘burned all the poems and outlines of stories, etc’. that he had written up to then.50 His research still had such a long road to travel.
In 1837, having been introduced by Adolf Rutenberg [1808–1869] – his closest friend at the time – to the Doctors’ Club, Marx began to frequent this circle of Left Hegelian writers, lecturers and students in Berlin. It had been launched that same year, with members including Bruno Bauer [1809–1882], Karl Friedrich Köppen [1808–1863], Heinrich Bernhard Oppenheim [1819–1880] and Ludwig Buhl [1816–1880].51 It was thanks to them that Marx became ‘ever more firmly bound to the modern world philosophy from which [he] had thought to escape’. Now, too, he continued to study and write intensively, and in November he wrote to his father: ‘I could not rest until I had acquired modernity and the outlook of contemporary science through a few bad productions such as The Visit.’52 But his father’s reply was severe, expressing great worries about Karl’s working methods and disapproving of what were now his main spheres of interest:
God’s grief!!! Disorderliness, musty excursions into all departments of knowledge, musty brooding under a gloomy oil-lamp; […] 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] merely testifies how you squander your talents and spend your nights giving birth to monsters; that you follow in the footsteps of the new immoralists who twist their words until they themselves do not hear them.53
Shortly afterwards, Heinrich Marx’s own already bad health deteriorated further, and he died of tuberculosis in May 1838. The chains tying Karl to the family then loosened considerably, and without his father’s critical gaze – which over time would probably have sharpened into a conflict between them54 – he could go his own way at an even brisker pace.55
The Doctors’ Club thus became the centre of Marx’s formation and the stimulus for all his activity. After the split between Left and Right Hegelians, which occurred precisely during these years, some of the most progressive minds in Prussia gathered at this circle in Berlin – the men who took part in the struggle against conservatism and liberalism on the side of the latter. Although Marx was only twenty when he first visited the club, his dazzling personality meant not only that all its members – on average ten years older – treated him as an equal, but that he exercised great intellectual influence over them and often shaped the agenda for discussion.56
From the beginning of 1839, Marx became more and more attached to Bauer, who had repeatedly urged him to finish university more quickly. Marx therefore undertook a deep study of Epicurus and by early 1840 had filled seven notebooks with notes for a dissertation on Greek philosophy that would be entitled Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature.57 This was the only strictly philosophical work that he wrote in his lifetime.58 Probably intended to be part of a larger work on ancient philosophy, it was written between the second half of 1840 and March 1841: it consisted of a preface, two sections of five chapters each – the fourth and fifth chapters of the first section have been lost – and an appendix on Plutarch’s critique of Epicurus, which has also been lost apart from a few notes.59
The large amount of time that Marx spent on the work was due to his extreme meticulousness and the rigorous self-criticism to which he subjected all his thinking.60 The wish to participate in the political struggle of the Hegelian Left was also very strong in him, but he realized he would be of more use continuing his research, deepening his knowledge and clarifying his conception of the world. Epicurus was only one of the many authors he studied. In the first half of 1840, he began to read extracts from Aristotle’s De anima (350 BC) and planned to write a critique of Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg’s [1802–1872] Logical Investigations (1840). It was also his intention to publish a book against the theological Georg Hermes [1775–1831] and a polemical pamphlet on The Idea of Divinity (1839) by Karl Philipp Fischer [1807–1885].61 But none of these projects came to fruition.
Evidence of Marx’s resolve to spend his energy in rigorous study and discrete articles62 is the fact that between January and April 1841 – that is, during and after his writing of the final part of his doctoral thesis – he worked with a hand copier on compiling seven notebooks of extracts from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s [1646–1716] correspondence and works, David Hume’s [1711–1776] Treatise on Human Nature, Baruch Spinoza’s [1632–1677] Theologico-Political Treatise (1670) and Karl Rosenkranz’s [1805–1879] History of Kantian Philosophy (1840).63 This material concerned modern philosophers and was thus independent of his work on the dissertation; its purpose was to broaden his knowledge, in the hope that he might obtain a position as a university professor. But in April 1841, having presented his thesis to the University of Jena64 (more liberal than Berlin) and been awarded a doctorate in philosophy, Marx found that the new political context had shut the door to him. Following the enthronement of Friedrich Wilhelm IV [1795–1861], a strongly Romantic-Christian wave of reaction had spread throughout Prussia, and Hegelian philosophy – which until then had enjoyed support from the state – was banished from academia.
Meanwhile Marx had curtailed his literary ambitions, although early in 1841 he succeeded in having two poems published in the journal Athenäum [Atheneum].65 So he decided to leave for Bonn and join his friend Bauer, with whom he had been planning to found a journal Archiv des Atheismus [Archive of Atheism] that would offer a critical viewpoint, especially in religious matters. During this period, Marx compiled a new group of extracts, above all from On the Worship of Fetish Gods (1760) by Charles de Brosse [1709–1777], the General Critical History of Religion (1806–1807) by Christoph Meiners [1747–1810] and On Religion (1824–1830) by Benjamin Constant [1767–1830].66 But the journal project eventually fell through, and, having grown distant from Bauer over political questions,67 he gave up further studies in this sphere.
At the end of years of intensive academic studies in law, history, literature and philosophy, having abandoned his father’s recommendation of the legal profession but found it impossible to secure a university post, Marx decided to devote himself to journalism. In May 1842, he wrote his first article for the daily Rheinische Zeitung [Rhenish Newspaper] in Cologne, and from October of that year until March 1843 he became its extremely youthful chief editor.
Soon, however, he felt the need to get to grips with political economy – a discipline just beginning to take wing in Prussia – and to become more directly involved in politics. A meeting with Friedrich Engels [1820–1895], who had already completed his studies in political economy in England, was crucial in encouraging his decision in this direction, as was the influence of Moses Hess’s [1812–1872] writings68 and the year-and-a-bit that he spent in Paris: the site of ceaseless social agitation. In little more than five years, then, the student from a Jewish family in provincial Germany had become a young revolutionary in touch with the most radical groups in the French capital. His trajectory had been rapid and wide-ranging, but it paled beside what lay ahead in the immediate future.
1Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Campaign in France in the Year 1792. London: Chapman and Hall, 1849, pp. 178–9.
2s.n., Trierische Kronik, n.p., 1818, p. 85.
3Detailed information about the city in this period is given in Emil Zenz, Geschichte der Stadt Trier im 19 Jahrhundert. Trier: Spee, 1979. For an assessment of its influence on Marx, see Heinz Monz, Karl Marx. Grundlagen der Entwicklung zu Leben und Werk. Trier: NCO, 1973.
4See David McLellan, Marx before Marxism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, p. 42f.
5H. Horowitz, ‘Die Familie Lwów’, Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, vol. 5 (1928), pp. 487–99. For further details on the Marx family, see Mannfred Schöncke (ed.), Karl und Heinrich Marx und ihre Geschwister. Bonn: Pahl-Rugenstean Nachfolger, 1993.
6See the letter from Eleanor Marx to Henri Polak, 31 October 1893, in Werner Blumenberg, ‘Ein unbekanntes Kapitel aus Marx’ Leben: Briefe an die holländischen Verwandten’, International Review of Social History, vol. I (1956), n. 1, p. 56.
7Wilhelm Liebknecht, Karl Marx zum Gedächtnis. Nuremberg: Wörlein & Co., 1896, p. 92.
8During his lifetime, Marx got to know Heine well and became close friends with him. See Walter Victor, Marx und Heine. Berlin: Bruno Henschel und Sohn, 1951.
9Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx. London: Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 26.
10Auguste Cornu, Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels, vol. I. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, p. 57.
11See David McLellan, Karl Marx: A Biography. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 4. Cf. Cornu, pp. 49–67.
12See Boris Nikolaevsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, p. 52. Cf. Cornu, Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels, p. 69.
13Eleanor Marx, in Hans Magnus Enzensberger (ed.), Gespräche mit Marx und Engels, vol. 1. Frankfurt: insel taschenbuch, 1973, p. 268.
14Ibid., p. 1.
15Cornu, Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels, pp. 72–3.
16Eleanor Marx, in David Rjazanov (ed.), Karl Marx als Denker. Frankfurt: Makol, 1971, p. 27.
17Karl Marx, ‘Certificate of Maturity for Pupil of the Gymnasium in Trier’, in MECW, vol. 1, p. 643.
18On Marx’s school performance, see Carl Grünberg, ‘Marx als Abiturient’, Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, vol. XI (1925), pp. 424–33; Monz Heinz, Manfred Henke, Rüdiger Thomas and Hans Pelger, Der unbekannte junge Marx: neue Studien zur Entwicklung des Marxschen Denkens, 1835–1847. Mainz: Hase und Koehler, 1973, pp. 9–146; and Marco Duichin, Il primo Marx. Rome: Cadmo, 1982, pp. 45–67.
19See McLellan, Marx before Marxism, p. 54.
20Karl Marx, ‘Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession’, in MECW, vol. 1, p. 9.
21Ibid., p. 6.
22Two authorities who have made this mistake are Franz Mehring – for whom we see here the ‘first flash of an idea […] whose development and completion were to be the immortal service of the man’: Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, p. 5 – and Auguste Cornu – who, having warned the reader ‘not to exaggerate the importance of this sentence’, goes on to write that ‘in it Marx underlines for the first time the function of social relations in shaping human lives’, Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels, p. 79.
23On Marx’s period in Bonn see Cornu, Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels, pp. 82–7.
24Heinrich Marx to Karl Marx, 19 March 1836, in MECW, vol. 1, pp. 652–3.
25Heinrich Marx to Karl Marx, 18–29 November 1835, in MECW, vol. 1, p. 645.
26Marx had already composed some short poems in his schooldays. They were transcribed in a fair copy and preserved by his younger sister Sophie. One of these ‘To Charlemagne’, dated 1833, shows the influence of his headmaster Wyttenbach and is among the oldest to have survived. See Karl Marx, ‘Gedichte. Aus einem Notizbuch von Sophie Marx’, in MEGA2, vol. I/1, pp. 760–3.
27Heinrich Marx to Karl Marx, beginning of 1836 [February or early March], in MECW, vol. 1, p. 649.
28Heinrich Marx to Karl Marx, 18–29 November 1835, in MECW, vol. 1, p. 647.
29Heinrich Marx to Karl Marx, beginning of 1836 [February or early March], in MECW, vol. 1, pp. 649, 651.
30‘Certificate of Release from Bonn University’, in MECW, vol. 1, p. 658.
31Eleanor Marx, ‘Karl Marx’, Die Neue Zeit, vol. I (1883), n. 10, p. 441.
32See Maxim Kovalevsky, in Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus (ed.), Mohr und General. Erinnerungen an Marx und Engels. Berlin: Dietz, 1964, p. 394. Cf. Cornu, Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels, p. 82.
33In 1948, it changed its name to the Humboldt University.
34Ludwig Feuerbach to his father, 6 July 1824, in Karl Grün (ed.), Ludwig Feuerbach, Sein Briefwechsel und Nachlass. Leipzig and Heidelberg: C. F. Winter’sche Verlagshandlung, 1874, p. 183.
35See Sepp Miller and Bruno Sawadzki, Karl Marx in Berlin. Berlin: Das Neue Berlin, 1956, p. 113, and Nicolaevsky and Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, p. 35f.
36Karl Marx, Buch der Liebe, in MEGA2, vol. I/1, p. 479.
37See Cornu, Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels, pp. 89–90. See also Franz Mehring, ‘Einleitung’, in Franz Mehring (ed.), Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle, vol. 1. Stuttgart: Dietz 1902, pp. 25–6, which reports the opinion of Marx’s second daughter, Laura: ‘I must tell you that my father treated these verses with great irreverence; whenever my parents spoke of them, they laughed heartily at such youthful follies.’ In short, as Mehring observed elsewhere, ‘the gift of verse was not amongst the talents placed in his cradle by the Muses’, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, p. 11. In the letter of November 1837 to his father, just a year after he had composed them, Marx himself judged the verses very harshly: ‘All the poems of the first three volumes I sent to Jenny are marked by attacks on our times, diffuse and inchoate expressions of feeling, nothing natural, everything built out of moonshine, complete opposition between what is and what ought to be, rhetorical reflections instead of poetic thoughts, but perhaps also a certain warmth of feeling and striving for poetic fire. The whole extent of a longing that has no bounds finds expression there in many different forms and makes the poetic “composition” into “diffusion”’, Karl Marx, ‘Letter from Marx to His Father in Trier’, in MECW, vol. 1, p. 11; hereafter ‘Letter to His Father’. Marx also sent his verses to the Deutscher Musenalmanach [Almanach of German Muses], but the journal did not think them worthy of publication.
38Marx, ‘Letter to His Father’, pp. 11–12.
39István Mészáros, ‘Marx filosofo’, in Eric Hobsbawm (ed.), Storia del marxismo, vol. 1. Turin: Einaudi, 1978, pp. 122–3.
40Marx, ‘Letter to His Father’, pp. 12, 15.
41These excerpts have since been lost.
42Heinrich Marx to Karl Marx, 9 November 1836, in MECW, vol. 1, p. 662. The letter continues: ‘You have still a long time to live, God willing, to the benefit of yourself and your family and, if my surmise is not mistaken, for the good of mankind’, ibid.
43The traces of this project are contained in a letter from his father: see Heinrich Marx to Karl Marx, 16 September 1837, in MECW, vol. 1, pp. 679–83.’
44Cf. Marx, ‘Letter to His Father’, p. 11: ‘I regard life in general as the expression of an intellectual activity which develops in all directions, in science, art and private matters.’
45See ibid., p. 15: ‘Busy with these various occupations, during my first term I spent many a sleepless night, fought many a battle, and endured much internal and external excitement. Yet at the end I emerged not much enriched, and moreover I had neglected nature, art and the world, and shut the door on my friends. The above observations seem to have been made by my body. I was advised by a doctor to go to the country.’
46Today’s Stralau, a suburb of Berlin.
47By a ‘sheet’ (Druckbogen) Marx meant 16 pages, so that it would have been a dense text of more than 300 manuscript pages.
48Marx, ‘Letter to His Father’, pp. 16–17.
49Ibid., p. 17.
50Ibid.
51See Miller and Sawadzki, Karl Marx in Berlin, pp. 68–75.
52Marx, ‘Letter to His Father’, p. 17.
53Heinrich Marx to Karl Marx, 9 December 1837, in MECW, vol. 1, pp. 685–91. Cf. Ernst Bloch, On Karl Marx. New York: Herder & Herder, 1971.
54See Cornu, Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels, p. 126.
55The death of Heinrich Marx also ended the priceless correspondence that has told us something about Karl’s life in his university years. According to Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor, these letters ‘show the young Marx maturing, the future adult in the adolescent. One can already see the exceptional capacity and passion for work that characterized Marx throughout his life; no task was too onerous for him, and his writings never bore any trade of relaxation or negligence. […] His aim was to see clearly inside himself, and here too we observe him criticizing himself and his work. […] And already here, as later, we see a reader who does not shut himself up in one discipline but reads, takes in and devours everything: jurisprudence, history, poetry, art. There is nothing that did not bring grist to his mill; and he dedicated himself completely to everything he did’. Eleanor Marx, ‘Marx’ Briefe an seinen Vater’, Die Neue Zeit, vol. 16 (1898), n. 1, pp. 4–12.
56See Cornu, Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels, p. 151.
57It is very likely that these seven notebooks contain only a small part of the preparatory work for the thesis. See Maximilien Rubel, ‘Philosophie Épicurienne. Notice’, in Maximilien Rubel (ed.), Karl Marx, Oeuvres III. Philosophie. Paris: Gallimard, 1982, p. 786. The so called ‘Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy’ have been published in English in MECW, vol. 1, pp. 403–516.
58See Maximilien Rubel, ‘Différence de la philosophie naturelle chez Démocrite et chez Épicure, avec un appendice. Notice’, in Karl Marx, Oeuvres III. Philosophie, p. 6.
59See Mario Cingoli, Il primo Marx (1835–1841). Milan: Unicopli, 2001; and Roberto Finelli, Un parricidio mancato. Hegel e il giovane Marx. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2004, pp. 40–74.
60Cornu, Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels, p. 225.
61Ibid., pp. 194–7.
62See Mario Rossi, Da Hegel a Marx. III La scuola hegeliana. Il giovane Marx. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977, p. 164.
63These extracts, together with those from Aristotle’s De anima, may be found in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Exzerpte und Notizen bis 1842, in MEGA2, vol. IV/1, pp. 153–288.
64See Karl Marx to Carl Friedrich Bachmann, 6 April 1841, in MECW, vol. 1, p. 379; and Karl Marx to Oskar Ludwig Bernhard Wolff, 7 April 1841, in MECW, vol. 1, pp. 380–1.
65The poems appeared in the fourth issue of this German periodical. For an English translation, see Karl Marx, ‘The Fiddler’ and ‘Nocturnal Love’, in MECW, vol. 1, pp. 22–4.
66The extracts from the Bonn period may be found in MEGA2, vol. IV/1, pp. 289–381.
67On the relations between Marx and Bauer, see Zvi Rosen, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977, esp. 223–40 on their dispute; and David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge Universisty Press, 2007.
68See Zvi Rosen, Moses Hess und Karl Marx. Hamburg: Christians, 1983.