Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

Napoleonic kingdom of Westphalia and then became Vice-Prefect of the town of Salzwedel in North Saxony. His first wife, who had given him four children, having died, he married Caroline Heubel, the daughter of a horse trainer.

Ludwig and Caroline had three children, the eldest being Jenny, born in 1814 - two years before they were to move to Trier where he was transferred (and slightly downgraded) as city counsellor: he was not fully in agreement with the policies of the new Prussian Government and it was thought that his liberal views would be more at home in the exFrench Rhineland. The Westphalens moved into a fine house quite near to that of the Marxes,48 though they were by no means a rich family.49 As Heinrich Marx and Ludwig von Westphalen were both in the city's legal service and members of the small Protestant community, it was natural that they should become friends. Jenny became very intimate with Sophie Marx and the families were in constant contact. The Baron, now over sixty, developed a particular affection for Karl. He was an extremely cultured man, spoke English as well as he spoke German, read Latin and Greek without difficulty and particularly liked romantic poetry. Eleanor Marx wrote that Baron von Westphalen 'filled Karl Marx with enthusiasm for the romantic school and, whereas his father read Voltaire and Racine with him, the Baron read him Homer and Shakespeare - who remained his favourite authors all his life'.50 The Baron devoted much of his time to the young Marx, and the two went for intellectual walks through the 'wonderfully picturesque hills and woods' of the neighbourhood. As well as being a man of culture, the Baron was keen on progressive political ideas and interested Marx in the personality and work of the French Utopian socialist Saint-Simon.

Heinrich Marx approved of his son's attachment to the Baron and admonished him: 'You have good fortune such as is given to few young people of your age. On the first important stretch of life you have found a friend, and a very worthy one, older and more experienced than yourself. It will be the best test of your character, spirit and heart, indeed of your morality, if you can keep your friend and be worthy of him.'51 Marx's gratitude for the Baron's friendship was such that in 1841 he dedicated his doctoral thesis to him in a most effusive manner:

Forgive me, my dear fatherly friend, for prefacing an unimportant work with a name so beloved as yours: but I am too impatient to await another opportunity of giving you a small proof of my love. May all who have doubts of the power of the spirit have, like myself, the good fortune to admire an old man who has kept his youthful impulses and who, with wise enthusiasm for the truth, welcomes all progress. Far from retreating before the reactionary ghosts and the often dark sky of

our time, you have always been able, inspired by a profound and burning idealism, to perceive, behind the veils that hide it, the shrine that burns at the heart of this world. You, my fatherly friend, have always been for me the living proof that idealism is no illusion, but the true reality.52

II. S T U D E N T DAYS

In October 1835, at the early age of seventeen, Marx left home for the university. His whole family turned out at four o'clock in the morning to see him off on the steamer that took sixteen hours to travel down the Mosel to Coblenz, where the following day he took a further steamer down the Rhine to Bonn; on the third day he registered himself as a student in the Law Faculty at the University of Bonn. The enthusiasm for romanticism that Baron von Westphalen had aroused in Marx - thus supplanting to some extent the Enlightenment rationalism of home and school - was increased by the year spent at Bonn. The city itself was scarcely larger than Trier. But the university - with 700 students - served as the intellectual centre of the Rhineland; the dominant outlook there was thoroughly romantic and the most popular lectures (which Marx attended) were those given by the old A. W. Schlegel on philosophy and literature. In general, politics was little discussed: the university, like most in Germany, had experienced a wave of free speech and anti-government activity in the early 1830s, but this had been thoroughly suppressed. Marx began the year with great enthusiasm for his work, putting himself down for nine courses, which he subsequently reduced to six on his father's advice, three of which were on literary subjects. His first end-of-term report said that he followed all six courses with zeal and attention. The second term, however, following an illness from overwork at the beginning of 1836, he reduced the number of courses to four and gave much less time to formal studies.

His father continually complained of his son's inability to keep his family informed of his activities: on his arrival in Bonn he left them three weeks without news and then produced only two short letters in three months. He was also spending much more money than his family could afford - a lifelong characteristic. During the first semester, Marx shared a room with a highly respected philosophy student from Trier (who had entered the university a year earlier), became one of the thirty members of the Trier Tavern Club and was soon one of its five presidents. The activities of the club were largely confined to drinking and Marx entered so fully into the spirit that he found himself imprisoned by the university

for 'disturbing the peace of the night with drunken noise'53 - though only for twenty-four hours; and the university 'prison' was far from uncomfortable as the friends of the condemned man had the right to come and help him pass the time with beer and cards. During 1836 rivalry broke out in the university between the students from Trier and the young Prussian aristocrats in the Borussia-Korps. Sometimes it degenerated into open fighting and in August 1836 Marx was wounded above the left eye in a duel. He was also denounced to the university authorities for having 'been in the possession of forbidden weapons in Cologne',54 but the investigation petered out.

When not drinking and duelling, Marx spent most of his time writing poetry and joined a club of like-minded students. The club probably had political overtones: one of its members was Karl Grtin, one of the future founders of 'true' socialism; it was under police surveillance, and had contacts with other university poetry clubs that were similarly suspect. In his rare letters home Marx was in the habit of enclosing specimens of his compositions which his father found quite incomprehensible. On being asked to bear the cost of their publication, he warned his son that 'although I am very pleased with your poetical gifts and have great hopes of them, I would be very sorry to see you cut in public the figure of a minor poet'.55 Well before the end of the academic year Heinrich Marx decided that one year at Bonn was quite enough and that his son should transfer to the University of Berlin.

Before Marx set out for Berlin, however, another problem arose: 'Scarcely was the wild rampaging in Bonn finished,' Heinrich Marx wrote to him during the summer vacation of 1836, 'scarcely were your debts paid - and they were really of the most varied nature - when to our dismay the sorrows of love appeared.'56 Jenny and Karl had been friends from earliest childhood. Jenny, with her dark auburn hair and green eyes, was widely noticed in Trier and had even been chosen as Queen of the Ball. The young Marx, who later described himself as 'a really furious Roland',57 was an insistent suitor: there had been an understanding between them before Marx left for Bonn and in the summer of 1836 this was turned into a formal engagement. By the standards of the time, the engagement was an extremely unusual one: Marx was only eighteen, Jenny was four years older, and there was also a certain difference in social status. At first only Marx's parents, and his sister Sophie - who had acted as go-between for the lovers - were let into the secret. Jenny's father gave his consent in March 1837. Marx's parents were not (initially at least) very keen on the match; and the pair had also to sustain 'years of unnecessary and exhausting conflicts'58 with Jenny's family. Marx later denied vehemently his son-in-law's statement in a newspaper that the

opposition from the Westphalens was based on anti-semitism,59 and it is more likely that the conflicts arose from the generally reactionary attitudes of some members of that family.

His taste for romanticism and poetry increased by his successful if still semi-secret wooing, Marx left Trier in October 1836 for Berlin. The capital city was in almost total contrast to Bonn. Engels later graphically recalled the Berlin of the time 'with its scarcely formed bourgeoisie, its loud-mouthed petty bourgeoisie, so unenterprising and fawning, its still completely unorganised workers, its masses of bureaucrats and hangerson of nobility and court, its whole character as mere "residence" \60 Berlin was, indeed, a very roodess city with no long-established aristocracy, no solid bourgeoisie, no nascent working class. With over 300,000 inhabitants it was nevertheless the largest German city after Vienna, and possessed a university three times the size of that in Bonn and totally different in atmosphere. Ten years earlier the student Feuerbach had written to his father: 'There is no question here of drinking, duelling and pleasant communal outings; in no other university can you find such a passion for work, such an interest for things that are not petty student intrigues, such an inclination for the sciences, such calm and such silence. Compared to this temple of work, the other universities appear like public houses.'61

We are exceptionally well informed about Marx's first year in Berlin (where he was to remain four and a half years) thanks to his one surviving letter to his father written (by candlelight, during the early hours of the morning) in November 1837. It is an extraordinarily intimate letter in which he retails at great length the spiritual itinerary of his last year.

When I left you [he began] a new world had just begun to exist for me, the world of love that was at first drunk with its own desire and hopeless. Even the journey to Berlin which would otherwise have charmed me completely, exciting in me an admiration for nature and inflaming me with a zest for life, left me cold and, surprisingly, even depressed me; for the rocks that I saw were not rougher, not harsher than the emotions of my soul, the broad cities not more full of life than my blood, the tables of the inns not more overladen and their fare not more indigestible than the stocks of fantasies that I carried with me, nor, finally, was any work of art as beautiful as Jenny.62

As soon as he reached Berlin he reluctantly made a few necessary visits and then completely isolated himself in order to immerse himself in science and art. The writing of lyric poetry was his first concern; at least, as he himself put it, it was 'the pleasantest and readiest to hand'.63 His poems written while he was in Bonn and those written during the autumn of 1836 in Berlin have not survived. The latter were written in three books en tided 'Book of Love, Part 1 and 2' and 'Book of Songs' - all