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ing poverty, was calculated to increase their collective self-awareness. Although civil equality had been achieved under the Napoleonic laws, the inauguration of the Holy Alliance and its policy of the 'Christian state' inevitably involved an anti-semitism on the double count that the religious Jews professed an alien faith and many claimed to be a separate people. In much of the bitterest polemic - which Marx engaged in with, for example, Ruge, Proudhon, Bakunin and Diihring - his Jewishness was dragged into the debate. Whether Marx himself possessed anti-semitic tendencies is a matter of much controversy: certainly a superficial reading of his pamphlet On the Jewish Question would indicate as much;11 and his letters contain innumerable derogatory epithets concerning Jews;12 but this does not justify a charge of sustained anti-semitism. Some students of Marx believe they have found the key to Marx's whole system of ideas in his rabbinic ancestry; but although some of his ideas - and even lifestyle - have echoes of the prophetic tradition, this tradition itself is more or less part of the Western intellectual heritage; and it would be too simplistic to reduce Marx's ideas to a secularised Judaism.13
Typically Jewish attitudes were certainly not in keeping with the general views of Marx's father. According to Eleanor, he was 'steeped in the free French ideas of the eighteenth century on politics, religion, life and art'.14 He subscribed entirely to the views of the eighteenth-century French rationalists, sharing their limitless faith in the power of reason to explain and improve the world. In this belief these French intellectuals tempered the dogmatic rationalism of the classical metaphysicians like Leibnitz with the British empiricism of Locke and Hume. They believed that they were capable of showing that men were by nature good and all equally rational; the cause of human misery was simply ignorance, which resulted partly from unfortunate material circumstances and partly from a deliberate suppression or distortion of the truth by those in authority, whether civil or religious, in whose obvious interest it was to perpetuate the deceptions under which mankind laboured. One of the chief means of destroying this state of affairs was education; another was change in material conditions.
His surviving letters show that Heinrich Marx was indeed, in the words of his grand-daughter Eleanor, 'a real Frenchman of the eighteenth century who knew his Voltaire and Rousseau by heart'.15 His religion was a shallow and moralising deism: Edgar von Westphalen, Karl Marx's future brother-in-law, described Heinrich Marx as a 'Protestant a la Lessing'.16 His outlook on life is well summed up in the advice he gave to Karl: 'A good support for morality is a simple faith in God. You know that I am the last person to be a fanatic. But sooner or later a man has a real need of this faith, and there are moments in life when even the man
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who denies God is compelled against his will to pray to the Almighty...
everyone should submit to what was the faith of Newton, Locke and Leibnitz.'17
Heinrich Marx was also closely connected with the Rhineland liberal movement. He was a member of a literary society, the Trier Casino Club, founded during the French occupation and so called from its meeting place. The liberal movement gained force after the 1830 Revolution in France, and the Club held a dinner in 1834 (when Karl was sixteen) in honour of the liberal deputies from Trier who sat in the Rhineland Parliament. This dinner - part of a campaign for more representative constitutions - was the only one held in Prussia, though many such were held in non-Prussian areas of Germany. Although Heinrich Marx was extremely active as one of the five organisers of this political dinner, the toast he eventually proposed was characteristically moderate and deferential. The nearest he got to the demands of the liberals was effusively to thank Frederick William III, to whose 'magnanimity we owe the first institutions of popular representation'. He ended: 'Let us confidently envisage a happy future, for it rests in the hands of a benevolent father, an equitable king. His noble heart will always give a favourable reception to the justifiable and reasonable wishes of his people.'18 Several revolutionary songs were then sung and a police report informed the Government that Heinrich had joined in the singing. The dinner caused anger in government circles, and this anger was increased by a more radical demonstration two weeks later, on the anniversary of the founding of the Casino Club, when the 'Marseillaise' was sung and the Tricolor brandished. The Prussian Government severely reprimanded the provincial governor and put the Casino Club under increased police surveillance. Heinrich Marx was present at this second demonstration but this time refrained from joining in the singing: he was no francophile and hated what he termed Napoleon's 'mad ideology'.19 Although his liberal ideas were always tempered by a certain Prussian patriotism, Heinrich Marx possessed a sympathy for the rights of the oppressed that cannot have been without influence on his son.20
The Marx family had enough money to live fairly comfortably. Heinrich's parents had been poor and, although his wife brought a fair dowry, he was a self-made man. The building in which Marx was born was a finely constructed three-storey house with a galleried courtyard.21 However, Heinrich rented only two rooms on the ground floor and three on the first floor, in which he housed seven people as well as exercised his legal practice. Eighteen months after Karl's birth, the family bought and moved into another house in Trier, considerably smaller than the previous one, but comprising ten rooms - and with a cottage in the grounds.22
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The family had two maids and also owned a vineyard near the city. Nevertheless the low income tax paid by Heinrich Marx and some of his remarks in letters to his son (he urged Karl to send several of his letters together by parcel post as it was cheaper) suggest that there was not much money to spare.23
There were nine children in the Marx family of whom Karl was the third; but the eldest, Moritz David, died aged four the year after Karl's birth so that Karl occupied the position of elder son. He had an elder sister, Sophie, to whom he seems to have been particularly attached during his childhood; she later married a lawyer and lived in Maastricht in Holland. Marx's two younger brothers both died early from tuberculosis, as did two of his sisters. Of the two remaining sisters, Louise married a Dutchman, Juta, and emigrated with him to Cape Town, and Emilie married an engineer and lived in Trier. Most of the little information about Marx's childhood comes from these sisters, who told their niece, Eleanor, that as a child Marx was 'a terrible tyrant of his sisters, whom he would "drive" as his horses down the Markusberg in Trier at full speed - and worse, would insist 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 compliance.'24
Up to the age of twelve Marx was probably educated at home. For the subsequent five years 1830-5 he attended the High School in Trier which had formerly been a Jesuit school and then bore the name Frederick William High School. Here he received a typically solid humanist education. The liberal spirit of the Enlightenment had been introduced into the school by the late Prince-Elector of Trier, Clement Wenceslas, who had adopted the principles of his famous predecessor Febronius and tried to reconcile faith and reason from a Kantian standpoint. In order to combat the ignorance of the clergy he turned the school into a sort of minor seminary. It sank to a very low level under the French occupation, but was reorganised after the annexation of the Rhineland and recruited several very gifted teachers.25 The chief influence in the school was its headmaster, Hugo Wyttenbach, Karl's history teacher and a friend of the Marx family. He had made a favourable impression on Goethe as 'an adept of Kantian philosophy',26 and took part in the founding of the Casino Club. After a big demonstration at Hambach in favour of freedom of the Press in 1832, Wyttenbach was put under police observation and the school was searched: copies of the Hambach speeches and antigovernment satire were found in the possession of pupils. As a result of the Casino affair of 1834, Karl Marx's fourth year at the school, the mathematics teacher was accused of materialism and atheism, and the
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improve mankind and himself, but left it to him to seek the means by which he must attain this goal, left it to him to choose the position in society which is most appropriate and from which he can best elevate both himself and society. This choice offers a great advantage over other creatures but at the same time is an act which can destroy man's entire life, defeat all his plans, and make him unhappy.38
To every person there had been allotted his own purpose in life, a purpose indicated by the 'soft but true' interior voice of the heart. It was easy to be deluded by ambition and a desire for glory, so close attention was necessary to see what one was really fitted for. Once all factors had been coolly considered, then the chosen career should be eagerly pursued. 'But we cannot always choose the career for which we believe we have a vocation. Our social relations have already begun to form, to some extent, before we are in a position to determine them.'" This sentence has been hailed as the first germ of Marx's later theory of historical materialism.40 However, the fact that human activity is continuously limited by the prestructured environment is an idea at least as old as the Enlightenment and the Encyclopedists. It would indeed be surprising if even the germ of historical materialism had already been present in the mind of a seventeen-year-old school-boy. It would be a mistake to think that, in his early writings, Marx was raising questions to which he would later produce answers: his later work, coming as it did after the tremendous impact on him of Hegel and the Hegelian School, contained quite different questions - and therefore quite different answers. In any case, the subsequent passages of the essay, with their mention of physical or mental deficiencies, show that Marx here merely means that when choosing a career one should consider one's circumstances.
Marx then went on to recommend that a career be chosen that conferred on a man as much worth as possible by permitting him to attain a position that was 'based on ideas of whose truth we are completely convinced, which offers the largest field to work for mankind and approach the universal goal for which every position is only a means: perfection'.41 This idea of perfectibility was what should above all govern the choice of a career, always bearing in mind that
The vocations which do not take hold of life but deal, rather, with abstract truths are the most dangerous for the youth whose principles are not yet crystallised, whose conviction is not yet firm and unshakeable, though at the same time they seem to be the most lofty ones when they have taken root deep in the breast and when we can sacrifice life and all striving for the ideas which hold sway in them.42
11 ere, too, commentators have tried to discover an embryo of Marx's later
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idea of the 'unity of theory and practice'.43 Once again, this is to read into Marx's essay much more than is there. All that Marx meant is that the sort of profession that deals with abstract ideas should be approached with special circumspection, for 'they can make happy him who is called to them; but they destroy him who takes them overhurriedly, without reflection, obeying the moment'.44 The problem was above all a practical one and not at all posed in terms of theories.
The essay ended with a purple passage revealing a pure, youthful idealism:
History calls those the greatest men who ennoble themselves by working for the universal. Experience praises as the most happy the one who made the most people happy. Religion itself teaches that the ideal for which we are all striving sacrificed itself for humanity, and who would dare to gainsay such a statement?
When we have chosen the vocation in which we can contribute most to humanity, burdens cannot bend us because they are only sacrifices for all. Then we experience no meagre, limited, egotistic joy, but our happiness belongs to millions, our deeds live on quietly but eternally effective, and glowing tears of noble men will fall on our ashes.45
The essay was marked by Wyttenbach, who qualified it as 'fairly good' and praised Marx for being rich in ideas and well organised, though he rightly criticised Marx's 'exaggerated desire for rare and imaginative expressions'.46
The enthusiasm for excessive imagery and the love of poetry that Marx was to display in his first years at the university were heightened by his friendship with Baron von Westphalen who was a third important influence on the young Marx in addition to his home and school. Ludwig von Westphalen was twelve years older than Heinrich Marx, being born in 1770 into a recently ennobled family. His father, Philip von Westphalen, an upright, straightforward and extremely capable member of the rising German middle class, had been private secretary to the Duke of Brunswick during the Seven Years War, had given essential help to his master in several military campaigns culminating in the battle of Minden, and was consequently ennobled by George III of England. During the war he had married a Scottish noblewoman, Jeanie Wishart, who had come to Germany to visit her sister, whose husband, General Beckwith, commanded the English troops. Jeanie Wishart was descended from the Earls of Argyll and brought with her, among other things, the crested silver that Marx and Jenny later had so many occasions to pawn.47 The youngest of their sons, Ludwig von Westphalen, inherited the liberal and progressive views of his father: after the defeat of Prussia he entered the civil service of the