Francis Wheen - Karl Marx

One evening the censor had been invited, with his wife and nubile daughter, to a grand ball given by the President of the Province. Before leaving he had to finish work on the censorship. But precisely on this evening the proofs did not arrive at the accustomed time. The censor waited and waited, because he could not neglect his official duties, and yet he had to put in an appearance at the President’s ball – quite apart from the openings this would give to his nubile daughter. It was near ten o’clock, the censor was extremely agitated and sent his wife and daughter on in front to the President’s house and dispatched his servant to the press to get the proofs. The servant returned with the information that the press was closed. The bewildered censor went in his carriage to Marx’s lodgings, which was quite a distance. It was almost eleven o’clock.

After much bell-ringing, Marx stuck his head out of a third-storey window.

‘The proofs!’ bellowed up the censor.

‘Aren’t any!’ Marx yelled down.

‘But—’

‘We’re not publishing tomorrow!’

Thereupon Marx slammed the window shut. The anger of the censor, thus fooled, made his words stick in his throat. He was more courteous from then on.

His employers, however, were not. The provincial governor who hosted the ball, Oberpräsident von Schaper, complained in November that the tone of the paper was ‘becoming more and more impudent’ and demanded the dismissal of Rutenberg (whom he wrongly assumed to be the culprit) from the editorial board. Since Rutenberg was a pie-eyed liability anyway, this was no great sacrifice. Marx composed a grovelling letter assuring His Excellency that the Rheinische Zeitung wished only to echo ‘the benedictions which at the present time the whole of Germany conveys to His Majesty the King in his ascendant career’. As Franz Mehring commented many years later, the letter displayed ‘a diplomatic caution of which the life of its author offers no other example’.

It failed to mollify Herr Oberpräsident. In mid-December he recommended to the censorship ministers in Berlin that they should prosecute the newspaper – and the anonymous author of the article on wood-gathering – for ‘impudent and disrespectful criticism of the existing government institutions’. On 21 January 1843 a mounted messenger arrived from Berlin bearing a ministerial edict revoking the Rheinische Zeitung’s licence to publish, with effect from the end of March. Loyal readers throughout the Rhineland – from Cologne, Düsseldorf, Aachen and Marx’s home town of Trier – sent petitions to the king begging for a reprieve, but to no effect. A second censor was installed to prevent any monkey business in the final weeks. ‘ Our newspaper has to be presented to the police to be sniffed at,’ Marx grumbled to a friend, ‘and if the police nose smells anything unChristian or unPrussian, the newspaper is not allowed to appear.’

Since no explanation was given for the ban, 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 politicstoo,’ 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: