Francis Wheen - Karl Marx

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 myselfwith 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 a jobless, penniless Jew who had already achieved national notoriety was quite intolerable. Her reactionary half-brother Ferdinand, the head of the family since their father’s death, did his utmost to prevent the union, warning that Marx was a ne’er-do-well who would bring disgrace on the entire tribe of von Westphalens. To escape the incessant gossip and browbeating, Jenny and her mother – who supported her loyally if anxiously throughout – fled from Trier to the fashionable spa resort of Kreuznach, fifty miles away. It was there, at 10 a.m. on 19 June 1843, that the twenty-five-year-old Herr Marx, Doctor of Philosophy, married Fräulein Johanna Bertha Julia Jenny von Westphalen, aged twenty-nine, ‘of no particular occupation’. The only guests were Jenny’s goofy brother Edgar, her mother and a few local friends. None of Karl’s relations attended. The bride wore a green silk dress and a garland of pink roses. The wedding present from Jenny’s mother was a collection of jewellery and silver plate embellished with the Argyll family crest, a legacy from the von Westphalens’ Scottish ancestors. The Baroness also gave them a large box of cash to help them through the first few months of married life but unfortunately the newlyweds took this treasure chest with them on a honeymoon trip up the Rhine, encouraging any indigent friends they happened to meet on the way to help themselves. The money was all gone within a week.

A few days before the wedding ceremony, at Jenny’s insistence, Karl had signed an unusual contract promising that the couple would have ‘legal common ownership of property’ – save that ‘each spouse shall for his or her own part pay the debts he or she has made or contracted, inherited or otherwise incurred before marriage’. One must assume that this was an attempt to placate Jenny’s mother, who was well aware of Marx’s hopelessness with money. But the contract was never enforced, even though he was seldom out of debt thereafter. During the next few years, the Argyll family silver spent more time in the hands of pawnbrokers than in the kitchen cupboard.

In that post-nuptial summer of 1843, the new Mr and Mrs Karl Marx were able to live on next to nothing as guests at the Baroness’s house in Kreuznach while waiting to learn from Ruge when – and where – his new journal would be born. It was an idyllic little interlude. In the evenings, Karl and Jenny would stroll down to the river, listening to the nightingales singing from the woods on the far bank. By day, the editor-elect of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher retreated to a workroom, reading and writing with furious intensity.

Marx always liked to work out his ideas on paper, scribbling down thoughts as they occurred to him, and a surviving page from his Kreuznach notebooks shows the process in action:

Note . Under Louis XVIII, the constitution by grace of the king (Charter imposed by the king); under Louis Philippe, the king by grace of the constitution (imposed kingship). In general we can note that the conversion of the subject into the predicate, and of the predicate into the subject, the exchange of that which determines for that which is determined, is always the most immediate revolution. Not only on the revolutionary side. The king makes the law (old monarchy), the law makes the king (new monarchy).

Once Marx had started on one of these riffs, playing with his beloved contradictions, there was no stopping him. Mightn’t the simple grammatical inversion that turned old monarchs into new also explain where German philosophy had gone wrong? Hegel, for instance, had assumed that ‘the Idea of the State’ was the subject, with society as its predicate, whereas history showed the reverse to be the case. There was nothing wrong with Hegel that couldn’t be cured by standing him on his head: religion does not make man, man makes religion; the constitution does not create the people, but the people create the constitution. Top down and bottom up, it all made perfect sense.

The credit for this discovery belongs to the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, whose Introductory Theses to the Reform of Philosophy had been published in March 1843. ‘Being is subject, thought predicate,’ he argued. ‘Thought arises from being, not being from thought.’ Marx stretched the logic much further by extending it from abstract philosophy to the real world – above all, the world of politics, the state and society. Feuerbach, a former pupil of Hegel, had already travelled quite a distance from his mentor’s idealism towards materialism (his most memorable aphorism, still to be found in dictionaries of quotations, was ‘Man is what he eats’); but it was a studiously cerebral materialism, unrelated to the social and economic conditions of his time or place. Marx’s foray into journalism had convinced him that radical philosophers shouldn’t spend their lives atop a lofty pillar like some ancient Greek anchorite; they must come down and engage with the here and now.