The German Genius

ascetic quality but in fact Marx defies easy generalizations. At times he saw himself as a scientist, invoking the name of Darwin as an analogy to his own role in discovering laws, not of “natural technology” but “of human technology.” In the late 1830s, at the very end of the Romantic period, Marx himself wrote poetry and forged a friendship with Heinrich Heine, Ferdinand Freiligrath, and Georg Herwegh, poets who will be discussed in Chapter 14. But as Mazlish also points out, the spread of Marxism is analogous to the expansion of Christianity and Islam. 25 “Some argue that Marx is heir of the tradition of the great Jewish prophets, thundering forth at mankind…But Marx received that tradition in its Lutheran form, as a result of being raised a believing Christian. Marx, needless to say, did not remain a believing Christian, any more than Luther was a forerunner of communism…What they do share…is a rhetorical structure, namely the characteristic articulation of the apocalyptic tradition that moves step by step…from the original condition of domination and oppression to the culmination of perfect community.” 26 Although he became a militant atheist, “a scoffer at the ‘union with Christ,’” the function of religion, its place in our psychology, remained of central importance to Marx, and this is why he found Hegel and Feuerbach so attractive. Hegel didn’t say as much explicitly, but Marx felt that he—and all of mankind—had been taken in by religion. And he thought he had advanced on Hegel when he said, in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852), that “Men make their own history; but…not…under conditions of their own choosing.”
    Influenced by his father, a successful lawyer, Marx originally studied jurisprudence. 27 When he graduated from the Gymnasium in Trier, his school reports show him to have been “well grounded” in knowledge of the Christian faith, to have an aptitude for ancient languages, less for French and physics. (In fact, Marx was eventually able to write fluently in French and English as well as German.)
    Inside a year or so at Bonn University he had changed course, to philosophy and, at his father's insistence, moved to Berlin. His letters to his father show that he was much influenced by Hegel and that he saw his own life in dialectical terms. He had his inner struggles but thought of them as “logical” for a man in his historical and social position. Immersed in these struggles, he came to know some of Hegel’s other disciples and joined the Doktor Club composed of Young Hegelians. 28 It was there that he met Bruno Bauer and his brand of radicalism.
    This radicalism was worn uneasily at times. The woman Marx married, Jenny von Westphalen, represented his first success in life. By any standards, she was a catch. In one of his letters, Marx wrote: “I am asked daily [this was 1862] on all sides about the former ‘most beautiful girl in Trier’ and ‘Queen of the ball.’ It is damned pleasant for a man when his wife lives on in the imagination of a whole city as a delightful princess.” 29 Marx insisted that on her calling card Jenny use the words “ née von Westphalen.”
    The marriage endured—and she was a great practical help to him—but it went through a bad patch around 1850, about the time their first child died and when, to escape, he decamped to the British Museum, in the evenings seeking consolation with another woman, Helene Demuth, the Marxes’ servant. The following year, she gave birth to an illegitimate son, Marx’s role being kept secret at the time and only made public by chance much later. Engels accepted paternity of the boy and Marx never acknowledged him. (Engels told all this to Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, on his deathbed.) 30
    Marx’s affiliation with Bruno Bauer and other leftist Hegelians ended his chances of becoming a university teacher. However, he proved himself an able journalist with the Rheinische Zeitung which, under his direction, doubled its circulation. In the 1840s, industrialization was beginning to appear in Germany, and social and economic issues loomed larger and larger and were growing more complex, as they had done in England during the previous century and as Engels and Marx both realized. Socialist and communist solutions (much the same at the time) were on everyone’s lips in advanced circles. But Marx had not yet embraced these theories. In 1842, in a famous article he wrote on the