The German Genius

Engels himself was more impressed by the incipient industrialization of the area, struck by the fact that, along the Wupper, a “vigorous, hearty life of the people,” with traditional folk songs, had been lost, unlike many other places in Germany. He left the Gymnasium before graduating, to work in his father’s office. He was sent to other company offices, all the while enjoying himself—riding, skating, and fencing; he joined a choral group and even tried composing. 53 In his reading he was influenced by Schleiermacher, Fichte, and David Strauss’s Life of Jesus , which provoked his loss of faith. Then he encountered Hegel, which struck him like a religious conversion. He formed ties with the Young Hegelian circle of which Marx formed a part and in 1842 released “Schelling und die Offenbarung” (Schelling and Revelation), a pamphlet that attracted attention as far afield as Russia. Following that, he began writing more regularly for the newspapers, though his father suggested he spend some time in the company’s Manchester office to flesh out his commercial acumen. 54
    In England, where, says Tristram Hunt, he found the “zest” for life much less than on the Continent, Engels nevertheless met his future common-law wife, Mary Burns, apparently a domestic servant, who introduced him to proletarian circles in Manchester, contacts that formed the background to his book Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England ( The Condition of the Working Class in England ). 55 Returning to Barmen in 1844, Engels traveled via Paris, where he met Marx. Reaching home, he wrote The Condition of the Working Class , which David McLellan has called “a pioneering work in the relatively modern fields of urban geography and sociology.” We now know it to be a one-sided picture of the English working classes, exaggerating their prosperity before industrialization and propagandizing the impact of the machine. Nonetheless, the text was vivid. “Perhaps no other book but Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton provides so graphic a description of the real evils the English working class suffered in this period.” 56
    By the time of the revolutions of 1848, Engels and Marx had collaborated on Die heilige Familie ( The Holy Family ), Die deutsche Ideologie ( The German Ideology ) and the Communist Manifesto . In the revolution, while Marx went to Paris, Engels fought as a “line” soldier in “the last stand” of the democratic revolutionaries in Baden against Prussian soldiers, who had an easy victory. Engels actually took part in four battles, “discovering that he was more courageous than he had dared hope.” But then both Engels and the Marx family went into exile in England, the former taking up employment again for Ermen and Engels in Manchester, enabling him not only to support himself but to supplement Marx’s meager income. Later, as he earned more, Engels’s support of Marx “became quite substantial.” Apart from his collaboration with Marx, Engels—the former soldier—wrote on military affairs.
    At this point, and despite his experiences on the barricades, Engels was by no means a revolutionary. He rode to hounds, joined the Albert Club, named for Queen Victoria’s German consort, the membership of which was half English and half German, and, from 1860, was awarded a share of the profits of Erman and Engels, “adding to the irony that Marx’s principal source of income, at least at this time, was capitalistic.” 57
    In 1870 Engels moved back to London and rented a house within walking distance of Karl and Jenny. He now found time to write his own books, based on his wide reading. These included Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats ( The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State ; using Lewis Morgan’s well-known Ancient Society , which argued that production was the key to progress from savagery to civilization). 58 The last of his own important works, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie ( Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy ), was published in 1886. This clarified his own and Marx’s relationship to Hegel and Feuerbach; he reiterated Hegel’s argument that truth develops over time “without ever arriving at an absolute conclusion” and Feuerbach’s idea that outside nature (which includes human beings), there is nothing, that philosophy and religion are “simply the reflections of humans’ own