Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

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S E L E C T C R I T I C A L B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Isle of Wight, whose inhabitants amazed him by their religiosity. He had to leave the Isle of Wight to look after Eleanor, whose nerves had once again brought her to a state of collapse, and to attend the funeral of his grandson Charles who had lived a little less than a year. Thus Marx was temporarily left without grandchildren - the four born so far all having died in infancy.

At the end of June 1874 Marx finally decided to take Gumpert's advice and go to Carlsbad, the fashionable spa built on the steeply sloping banks of the river Egen in Bohemia (now in the west of the Czech Republic). As early as 1869 Kugelmann had tried to persuade Marx to go there with bis daughter Jenny, and Marx had flatly rejected the place as 'boring and expensive'.52 Now, with more money and less health, he decided to go

gentleman, with his daughter Eleanor, from London.' As a private person, Marx had to pay double bath tax, but hoped that the self-description would 'avoid the suspicion that I am the notorious Karl Marx'.55 In anticipation of difficulties with the police Marx had applied for naturalisation as a British subject before his departure. At the beginning of August, his solicitor had forwarded the application to the Home Office together with the necessary references from four respectable householders. T h e I lome Office, however, rejected his request and refused to give a reason when pressed. In fact, the information passed from Scotland Yard to the I lome Office was that the applicant was 'the notorious German agitator' and 'had not been loyal to his own King and Country'.54 N o r did Marx escape constant police surveillance in Carlsbad, though it was merely reported that his conduct 'did not give rise to any suspicion'.55

Marx took his cure very seriously and let himself be turned, as he put it, into a sort of machine. He would be up at 5.30 at the latest and travel round six different springs drinking a glass of water at each at fifteenminute intervals. After a breakfast of special medicinal bread, there would be an hour's walk and mid-morning coffee in one of the cafes outside the town. Then a further walking tour among the surrounding hills, then

back to the hotel to change and have a nap before lunch, which was preceded every other day by a bath. After lunch there was further walking or longer organised tours followed by a light meal and early bed, all entertainments ending at 9.00 p.m. Marx enjoyed the life very much, particularly the long walks among the pine-clad granite foothills of the Erzgebirge. He also liked to pursue his habit of conferring witty nicknames on the more conspicuous passers-by. Franziska Kugelmann recalled a visit to a porcelain works at which they observed a man supervising an intricate turning machine.

'Is this always your job?' Marx asked him, 'or have you some other?' 'No,' the man answered, 'I have not done anything else for years. It is only by practice that one learns to work the machine so as to get the difficult shape smooth and fauldess.' 'Thus division of labour makes man an appendage of the machine,' Marx said to my father as we went on. 'His power of thinking is changed into muscular memory.'56

In the afternoon and evening, in general company, Marx preferred light conversation with such men as Otto Knille (a well-known painter) and Simon Deutsch (an Austrian journalist whom Marx remembered from his Paris days). Father and daughter were inseparable whether on walks or writing letters on the terrace behind their hotel. According to Eleanor, still embarrassingly forthright in her reactions to people and smoking almost continuously, she and her father got on very well in Carlsbad and 'his immense knowledge of history made every place we went to more alive and present in the past than in the present itself.5 7

For Marx, the only drawback to Carlsbad was Kugelmann. From the start of his stay he annoyed Marx by his 'carping criticisms with which he quite needlessly embitters his own life and that of his family'.58 Unfortunately, Kugelmann had chosen for Marx a room between his own and Eleanor's. T h e upshot was that

I had the pleasure of his company not only when I was with him, but also when I was alone. I put up patiently with the continual flow of his solemn chatter uttered in a deep voice .. . but my patience at last broke down when he began to bore me too utterly with domestic scenes. This arch-pedant, this bourgeois hair-splitting philistine, imagines that his wife does not understand or comprehend his Faust-like nature, which is struggling to some higher conception of the world; and he torments the poor woman, who is in all respects his superior, in the most revolting manner. It came to an open quarrel between us. I moved to a higher floor and so was completely quit of him (he had seriously spoiled the cure for me). We were only reconciled just before his departure, which took place last Sunday. But I said positively that I would not visit his house in Hanover.59

According to Eleanor, Mrs Kugelmann (for whom she had a great affection) was always being told by her husband that she was not sufficiently grateful for the benefits he conferred on her and 'the grand scene began because Mrs K. didn't lift up her dress on a dusty day'.60 Franziska wrote later that there was another point at issue: Marx and Kugelmann quarrelled violently during a long walk in which Kugelmann 'tried to persuade Marx to refrain from all political propaganda and complete the

studiously avoided Hanover. T h e y went first to Leipzig to see Liebknecht, who took them to welcome Wilhelm Bios on his release from prison. Bios, then a social-democratic journalist and later Prime Minister of Wurttemberg, wrote later:

Fxcited and happy I walked through the prison doors. Outside stood Liebknecht with one of his small sons.62 And near him there stood, with a beautiful young lady on his arm, a tall, thin man in his fifties with a long white beard, the moustache alone being really black. His complexion was fresh and he could have been taken for a jovial old Englishman. But I recognised him immediately from his photo... .65

They then went on to Berlin to see Marx's brother-in-law Edgar, who earned his living as a minor functionary while still preserving his sympathy lor communism. After a trip to Hamburg to see Meissner they returned to London at the beginning of October.

The following year Marx went alone to Carlsbad. His journey out was enlivened by a discussion with a Catholic priest whose reserve Marx managed to break down by the production of a bottle of Cognac. On arrival he announced in letters home that the absence of Kugelmann was a great help to his health, and set about enjoying the long walks and the I'ilsener beer. He spent much time in the company of Maxim Kovalevsky,

.1 liberal Russian aristocrat who shared his interest in the history of land ownership in Russia, and was later a frequent visitor in London. Kovalevsky was no socialist but admired Marx profoundly and came to occupy the position in Marx's life so recently vacated by Kugelmann.

The police continued to watch Marx closely but could only report back to Prague that 'he lives quietly, has very little intercourse with the other guests and frequently goes on long walks alone'. T h e cure was very beneficial: Engels reported in October 1875 that 'Marx has come back

little more in society - mosdy among German university professors - where the question everyone wished to discuss was: what do you think of Wagner? Marx's thoughts were extremely sarcastic ones. Eleanor's health gave Marx much cause for anxiety and she narrowly avoided serious pneumonia at the end of their stay. On their return they spent some time in Prague with Kugelmann's brother-in-law, the businessman Max Oppenheim, and then made a detour via Bingen and Kreuznach as Marx wanted to show his daughter the places where he had married and spent his honeymoon.

In 1877 Marx did not go to Carlsbad; he went instead to the minor spa of Neuenahr in the Rhineland. In a lengthy justification to Engels, he explained that Carlsbad would be extremely expensive, as Jenny would not agree to be left behind this year; and also that a change of regime might be beneficial. Engels responded by presenting Marx with the

do with the English equivalent at Malvern. He went with his wife, his daughter Jenny and his grandson, all of whom were seriously ill. While they were there Lizzie Burns (with whom Engels had been living since the death of Mary) died of a tumour of the bladder after long suffering. Engels married her on her deathbed according to the rites of the Church of England. T h e following year Marx went to Jersey, but had to return to Ramsgate to be with his daughter Jenny after the birth of Edgar, his third grandchild. During this time the family was preoccupied with Jenny

in Ramsgate. Confined to her bed for long periods and mistrustful of doctors, she needed constant family attention. By the turn of the decade the topics of sickness and climate pervaded Marx's letters to the virtual exclusion of all else - understandably enough, in view of his own illnesses and the tragedies that had occurred within his family - he was now mentally and physically exhausted: in a word, his public career was over.

omous national parties. As often, Marx looked to war as the catalyst of revolution. 'The general situation of Europe', he wrote to Sorge in 1874,

'is such that it moves to a general European war. We must go through this war before we can think of any decisive external effectiveness of the Kuropean working class.'65 T h e only country in which there existed a proletarian party was Germany, to which, as Marx had foreseen, the centre of gravity of the workers' movement shifted after the FrancoPrussian War. It was Germany that occupied most of Marx's attention during the 1870s. More accurately, there were two proletarian parties in Germany, the Eisenach party and the followers of Lassalle, and the early 1870s saw attempts to bring about a union between them. This was aided by the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership, the resignation of Schweitzer from the presidency of the Lassallean party, and the increasing pressure which Bismarck applied to both parties in the aftermath of the Paris Commune. When their first big electoral success showed that the two parties polled an almost identical number of votes, negotiations were opened and agreement reached in principle at the end of 1874. A united programme was to be adopted at Gotha, a small town in central Germany, in May 1875.

Marx and Engels were somewhat out of touch with the situation inside Germany,66 and were enraged both with the content of the programme and with the fact that they had not been consulted. Engels composed a long letter to Bebel in March 1875 in which he recapitulated the unacceptable Lassallean propositions incorporated in the programme: the rejection of all non-proletarian parties as a 'reactionary mass', the lack of international spirit, the talk of the 'iron laws' of wages and the lack of consideration given to trade unions. And he predicted that they would have to break with Liebknecht if the programme were adopted.67 Marx himself wrote to Bracke in M ay that 'every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes'.68 In Marx's view the Eisenach party should have confined itself to concluding some sort of practical agreement for combined action. As it was, he and Engels would dissociate themselves from the programme immediately after the Congress. T h e letter accompanied a manuscript entitled 'Marginal Notes on the Programme of the German Workers' Party' which he asked Bracke to circulate among the Eisenach leaders. Liebknecht, who considered that the negotiations were too far advanced to be suspended, only allowed a few Eisenach leaders to see the document - and not, for example, Bebel. It was published only in 1891 and became known as the Critique of the Gotha Programme, one of the most important of Marx's theoretical writings.

The Critique of the Gotha Programme took the form of marginal notes ind contained two main points: one being a criticism of the programme's proposals for distributing the national product, the other being a criticism ol its views on the state. On the first point, Marx objected to the attempt