Kitabı oxu: «Karl Marx»
KARL MARX
Francis Wheen
Dedication
For Julia
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
1 The Outsider
2 The Little Wild Boar
3 The Grass-eating King
4 The Mouse in the Attic
5 The Frightful Hobgoblin
6 The Megalosaurus
7 The Hungry Wolves
8 The Hero on Horseback
9 The Bulldogs and the Hyena
10 The Shaggy Dog
11 The Rogue Elephant
12 The Shaven Porcupine
POSTSCRIPT 1: Consequences
POSTSCRIPT 2: Confessions
POSTSCRIPT 3: Regicide
Endnotes
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise for Karl Marx:
Other Works
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
There were only eleven mourners at Karl Marx’s funeral on 17 March 1883. ‘His name and work will endure through the ages,’ Friedrich Engels predicted in a graveside oration at Highgate cemetery. It seemed an unlikely boast, but he was right.
The history of the twentieth century is Marx’s legacy. Stalin, Mao, Che, Castro – the icons and monsters of the modern age have all presented themselves as his heirs. Whether he would recognise them as such is quite another matter. Even in his lifetime, the antics of self-styled disciples often drove him to despair. On hearing that a new French party claimed to be Marxist, he replied that in that case ‘I, at least, am not a Marxist’. Nevertheless, within one hundred years of his death half the world’s population was ruled by governments that professed Marxism to be their guiding faith. His ideas have transformed the study of economics, history, geography, sociology and literature. Not since Jesus Christ has an obscure pauper inspired such global devotion – or been so calamitously misinterpreted.
It is time to strip away the mythology and try to rediscover Karl Marx the man. There have been thousands of books about Marxism, but almost all have been written by academics and zealots for whom it is a near-blasphemy to treat him as a figure of flesh and blood – a Prussian émigré who became a middle-class English gentleman; an angry agitator who spent much of his adult life in the scholarly silence of the British Museum Reading Room; a gregarious and convivial host who fell out with almost all his friends; a devoted family man who impregnated his housemaid; and a deeply earnest philosopher who loved drink, cigars and jokes.
For the West, during the Cold War, he was the demonic begetter of all evil, the founder of an awesomely sinister cult, the man whose baleful influence must be suppressed. In the Soviet Union of the 1950s he assumed the status of a secular God, with Lenin as John the Baptist and, of course, Comrade Stalin himself as the redeeming Messiah. This alone has been quite enough to convict Marx as an accomplice in the massacres and purges: had he lived a few years longer, by now some enterprising journalist would probably have fingered him as a prime suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders too. But why? Marx himself certainly never asked to be included in the Holy Trinity, and would have been appalled by the crimes committed in his name. The bastard creeds espoused by Stalin, Mao or Kim Il Sung treated his work rather as modern Christians use the Old Testament: much of it simply ignored or discarded, while a few resonant slogans (‘opium of the people’, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’) are wrenched out of context, turned upside down and then cited as apparently divine justification for the most brutal inhumanities. Kipling, as so often, had the right phrase:
He that has a Gospel
To loose upon Mankind,
Though he serve it utterly –
Body, soul and mind –
Though he go to Calvary
Daily for its gain –
It is his Disciple
Shall make his labour vain.
Only a fool could hold Marx responsible for the Gulag; but there is, alas, a ready supply of fools. ‘In one way or another, the most important facts of our time lead back to one man – Karl Marx,’ Leopold Schwarzschild wrote in 1947, in the preface to his splenetic biography The Red Prussian. ‘It will hardly be disputed that it is he who is manifested in the very existence of Soviet Russia, and particularly in the Soviet methods.’ The resemblance between Marx’s methods and those of Uncle Joe Stalin was apparently so indisputable that Schwarzschild did not bother to adduce any evidence for his preposterous assertion, contenting himself with the observation that ‘the tree is known by its fruit’ – which, like so many proverbs, is rather less axiomatic than it sounds. Should philosophers be blamed for any and every subsequent mutilation of their ideas? If Herr Schwarzschild found wasp-eaten windfalls in his orchard – or, perhaps, was served an overcooked apple pie for lunch – did he reach for an axe and administer summary justice to the guilty tree?
Just as halfwitted or power-hungry followers deified Marx, so his critics have often succumbed to the equal and opposite error of imagining him as an agent of Satan. ‘There were times when Marx seemed to be possessed by demons,’ writes a modern biographer, Robert Payne. ‘He had the devil’s view of the world, and the devil’s malignity. Sometimes he seemed to know that he was accomplishing works of evil.’ This school of thought – more of a borstal, really – reaches its absurd conclusion in Was Karl Marx a Satanist?, a bizarre book published in 1976 by a famous American hot-gospeller, the Reverend Richard Wurmbrand, author of such imperishable masterpieces as Tortured for Christ (‘over two million copies sold’) and The Answer to Moscow’s Bible.
According to Wurmbrand, the young Karl Marx was initiated into a ‘highly secret Satanist church’ which he then served faithfully and wickedly for the rest of his life. No proof can be found, of course, but this merely strengthens the dog-collared detective’s hunch: ‘Since the Satanist sect is highly secret, we have only leads about the possibilities of his connections with it.’ What are these ‘leads’? Well, when he was a student Marx wrote a verse-play whose title, Oulanem, is more or less an anagram of Emanuel, the biblical name for Jesus – and thus ‘reminds us of the inversions of the Satanist black mass’. Most incriminating; but there’s more to come. ‘Have you ever wondered,’ Wurmbrand asks, ‘about Marx’s hairstyle? Men usually wore beards in his time, but not beards like this … Marx’s manner of bearing himself was characteristic of the disciples of Joanna Southcott, a Satanic priestess who considered herself in contact with the demon Shiloh.’ In fact, the England inhabited by Marx had plenty of bushy-bearded gents, from the cricketer W. G. Grace to the politician Lord Salisbury. Were they, too, on speaking terms with the demon Shiloh?
After the end of the Cold War and the apparent triumph of God over Satan, countless wiseacres declared that we had reached what Francis Fukuyama smugly called the End of History. Communism was as dead as Marx himself, and the blood-curdling threat with which he concluded the Communist Manifesto, the most influential political pamphlet of all time, now seemed no more than a quaint historical relic: ‘Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!’ The only fetters binding the working class today are mock-Rolex watches, but these latter-day proletarians have much else which they’d hate to lose – microwave ovens, holiday timeshares and satellite dishes. They have bought their council houses and their shares in privatised utilities; they made a nice little windfall when their building society turned into a bank. In short, we are all bourgeois now. Even the British Labour Party has gone Thatcherite.
When I started researching this biography, many friends looked at me with pity and incredulity. Why, they wondered, would anyone wish to write about – still less read about – such a discredited, outmoded, irrelevant figure? I carried on regardless; and the more I studied Marx, the more astoundingly topical he seemed to be. Today’s pundits and politicians who fancy themselves as modern thinkers like to mention the buzz-word ‘globalisation’ at every opportunity – without realising that Marx was already on the case in 1848. The globe-straddling dominance of McDonald’s and MTV would not have surprised him in the least. The shift in financial power from the Atlantic to the Pacific – thanks to the Asian Tiger economies and the silicon boom towns of west-coast America – was predicted by Marx more than a century before Bill Gates was born.
There is, however, one development which neither Marx nor I had foreseen: that in the late 1990s, long after he had been written off even by fashionable liberals and post-modernist lefties, he would suddenly be hailed as a genius by the wicked old bourgeois capitalists themselves. The first sign of this bizarre reassessment appeared in October 1997, when a special issue of the New Yorker billed Karl Marx as ‘the next big thinker’, a man with much to teach us about political corruption, monopolisation, alienation, inequality and global markets. ‘The longer I spend on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was right,’ a wealthy investment banker told the magazine. ‘I am absolutely convinced that Marx’s approach is the best way to look at capitalism.’ Since then, right-wing economists and journalists have been queuing up to pay similar homage. Ignore all that communist nonsense, they say: Marx was really ‘a student of capitalism’.
Even this intended compliment serves only to diminish him. Karl Marx was a philosopher, a historian, an economist, a linguist, a literary critic and a revolutionist. Although he may not have had a ‘job’ as such, he was a prodigious worker: his collected writings, few of which were published in his lifetime, fill fifty volumes. What neither his enemies nor his disciples are willing to acknowledge is the most obvious yet startling of all his qualities: that this mythical ogre and saint was a human being. The McCarthyite witch-hunt of the 1950s, the wars in Vietnam and Korea, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the massacre of students in Tiananmen Square – all these bloody blemishes on the history of the twentieth century were justified in the name of Marxism or anti-Marxism. No mean feat for a man who spent much of his adult life in poverty, plagued by carbuncles and liver pains, and was once pursued through the streets of London by the Metropolitan Police after a rather over-exuberant pub crawl.
1 The Outsider
A train grinds slowly through the Moselle valley – tall pines, terraced vineyards, prim villages, calm smoke in the winter sky. Gasping for breath in an overcrowded cattle truck, a young Spaniard captured while fighting with the French Resistance counts off the days and nights as he and his fellow prisoners are borne inexorably from Compiègne to the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald. When the train pulls up at a station he glances at the sign: TRIER. Suddenly a German boy on the platform hurls a rock at the grille behind which the doomed passengers cower.
Thus begins Jorge Semprun’s great Holocaust novel, The Long Voyage, and nothing on that journey to extinction – not even the anticipation of horrors to come at Buchenwald – pierces the narrator’s heart more agonisingly than the stone-throwing child. ‘It’s a goddamn dirty trick that this had to happen at Trier, of all places,’ he laments.
‘Why?’ a puzzled Frenchman asks. ‘You used to know it?’
‘No, I mean I’ve never been here.’
‘Then you know someone from here?’
‘That’s it, yes, that’s it.’ A childhood friend, he explains. But in fact he’s thinking of an earlier son of Trier, a Jewish boy, born in the early hours of 5 May 1818.
‘Blessed is he that hath no family,’ Karl Marx sighed wearily in a letter to Friedrich Engels in June 1854. He was aged thirty-six at the time and had long since severed his own umbilical ties. His father was dead, as were three brothers and one of his five sisters; another sister died two years later, and even the survivors had little to do with him. Relations with his mother were icy and distant, not least because she had been inconsiderate enough to stay alive and thus keep the rebellious heir from his inheritance.
Marx was a bourgeois Jew from a predominantly Catholic city within a country whose official religion was evangelical Protestantism. He died an atheist and a stateless person, having devoted his adult life to predicting the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the withering away of the nation-state. In his estrangement from religion, class and citizenship, he personified the alienation which he identified as the curse inflicted by capitalism upon humanity.
He may seem an odd representative of the oppressed masses, this respectable middle-class German, but his emblematic status would not have surprised Marx himself, who believed that individuals reflect the world they inhabit. His upbringing taught him all he needed to know about religion’s seductive tyranny, arming him with the didactic eloquence and self-confidence to exhort humanity to throw off its shackles.
‘He was a unique, an unrivalled storyteller,’ his daughter Eleanor recorded, in one of the few surviving anecdotes from her father’s childhood. ‘I have heard my aunts say that as a little boy he was a terrible tyrant to his sisters, whom he would “drive” down the Markusberg at Trier full speed, as his horses, 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 virtue.’ In later years – when the playful girls had become respectable married women – they were rather less indulgent towards their wayward sibling. Luise Marx, who emigrated to South Africa, once dined at his house while visiting London. ‘She could not countenance her brother being the leader of the socialists,’ a fellow guest reported, ‘and insisted in my presence that they both belonged to the respected family of a lawyer who had the sympathy of everybody in Trier.’
Marx’s determined efforts to cut loose from the influence of his family, religion, class and nationality were never wholly successful. As a venerable greybeard he remained forever the prodigal son, firing off begging letters to rich uncles or ingratiating himself with distant cousins who might soon be drawing up their wills. When he died, a daguerreotype photograph of his father was found in his breast pocket. It was placed in his coffin and interred in Highgate cemetery.
He was tethered – however unwillingly – by the force of his own logic. In a precocious schoolboy essay, ‘Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of Profession’, the seventeen-year-old Karl Marx observed that ‘we cannot always attain the position to which we believe we are called; our relations in society have to some extent already begun to be established before we are in a position to determine them’. His first biographer, Franz Mehring, may have exaggerated when he detected the germ of Marxism in this one sentence, but he had a point. Even in ripe maturity Marx insisted that human beings cannot be isolated or abstracted from their social and economic circumstances – or from the chilly shades of their forebears. ‘The tradition of all the dead generations’, he wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, ‘weighs like a mountain on the mind of the living.’
One of Marx’s paternal ancestors, Joshue Heschel Lwow, had become the rabbi of Trier as long ago as 1723, and the post had been something of a family sinecure ever since. His grandfather, Meier Halevi Marx, was succeeded as the town rabbi by Karl’s uncle Samuel. Yet more dead generations were added to the load by Karl’s mother, Henriette, a Dutch Jew in whose family ‘the sons had been rabbis for centuries’ – including her own father. As the oldest son of such a family, Karl might not have escaped his own rabbinical destiny but for those ‘social and economic circumstances’.
Added to the weight of dead generations was the smothering spiritual tradition of Trier, oldest city in the Rhineland. As Goethe noted gloomily after a visit in 1793, ‘Within its walls it is burdened, nay oppressed, with churches and chapels and cloisters and colleges and buildings dedicated to chivalrous and religious orders, to say nothing of the abbacies, Carthusian convents and institutions which invest, nay, blockade it.’ During its annexation by France in the Napoleonic Wars, however, the inhabitants had been exposed to such unGermanic notions as freedom of the press, constitutional liberty and – more significantly for the Marx family – religious toleration. Though the Rhineland was reincorporated into imperial Prussia by the Congress of Vienna three years before Marx’s birth, the alluring scent of French Enlightenment still lingered.
Karl’s father, Hirschel, owned several Moselle vineyards and was a moderately prosperous member of the educated middle class. But he was also Jewish. Though never fully emancipated under French rule, Rhenish Jews had tasted just enough freedom to hunger for more. When Prussia wrested back the Rhineland from Napoleon, Hirschel petitioned the new government for an end to legal discrimination against himself and his ‘fellow believers’. To no avail: the Jews of Trier were now subject to a Prussian edict of 1812 which effectively banned them from holding public office or practising in the professions. Unwilling to accept the social and financial penalties of second-class citizenship, Hirschel was reborn as Heinrich Marx, patriotic German and Lutheran Christian. His Judaism had long been an accident of ancestry rather than a deep or abiding faith. (‘I received nothing from my family,’ he said, ‘except, I must confess, my mother’s love.’) The date of his baptism is unknown, but he had certainly converted by the time of Karl’s birth: official records show that Hirschel began to work as an attorney in 1815, and in 1819 he celebrated the family’s new respectability by moving from their five-room rented apartment into a ten-roomed property near the old Roman gateway to the city, Porta Nigra.
Catholicism might appear to have been the more obvious choice for what was, essentially, no more than a spiritual marriage of convenience: the Church to which he now belonged had barely 300 members in a city with a population of 11,400. But these adherents happened to include some of the most powerful men in Trier. As one historian has observed, ‘To the Prussian state, the members of its established religion represented the solid, reliable and loyal core in a predominantly Roman Catholic, and somewhat dangerously gallicised, Rhineland.’
Not that Hirschel was immune to Gallic charm: during the years of Napoleonic dominance he had been steeped in free French ideas of politics, religion, life and art, becoming ‘a real eighteenth-century “Frenchman” who knew his Voltaire and Rousseau by heart’. He was also an active member of Trier’s Casino Club, where the more enlightened citizens gathered for political and literary debates. In January 1834, when Karl was fifteen, Heinrich organised a banquet at the club to pay tribute to the newly elected ‘liberal’ deputies to the Rhineland Assembly, winning raucous applause for his toast to the King of Prussia – ‘to whose magnanimity we are indebted for the first institutions of popular representation. In the fullness of his omnipotence he has of his own free will directed that the Diets should assemble so that the truth might reach the steps of the throne.’
This extravagant flattery for a feeble and anti-Semitic king might sound sarcastic, and was probably taken thus by the more boisterous revellers. (‘The fullness of his omnipotence’, forsooth.) But Heinrich was perfectly sincere; no revolutionary he. Nevertheless, the very mention of ‘popular representation’, however carefully muffled in sycophancy and moderation, was enough to alarm the authorities in Berlin: irony is often the dissident’s only weapon in a land of censors and police spies, and the agents of the Prussian state – ever alert for mischief – were adept at detecting satire where none was intended. The local press was forbidden to print the speech. After a Casino Club gathering eight days later, at which members sang the Marseillaise and other revolutionary choruses, the government placed the building under police surveillance, reprimanded the provincial governor for permitting such treasonous assemblies and marked Heinrich Marx down as a dangerous troublemaker.
What did his wife make of all this? It is quite possible that he kept the news from her. Henriette Marx did not share her husband’s intellectual appetites: she was an uneducated – indeed only semi-literate – woman whose interests began and ended with her family, over whom she fussed and fretted ceaselessly. She admitted to suffering from ‘excessive mother love’, and one of her few surviving letters to her son – written while he was at university – amply justifies the diagnosis: ‘Allow me to note, dear Carl, that you must never regard cleanliness and order as something secondary, for health and cheerfulness depend on them. Insist strictly that your rooms are scrubbed frequently and fix a definite time for it – and you, my dear Carl, have a weekly scrub with sponge and soap. How do you get on about coffee, do you make it, or how is it? Please let me know everything about your household.’ The picture of Mrs Marx as a congenital worrier was confirmed by Heinrich: ‘You know your mother and how anxious she is …’
Once he had flown the nest, Karl had little more to do with his mother – except when he was trying, seldom with much success, to wheedle money out of the old girl. Many years later, after the death of Engels’s lover Mary Burns, Marx sent his friend a brutal letter of condolence: ‘I am being dunned for the school fees, the rent … Instead of Mary, ought it not to have been my mother, who is in any case a prey to physical ailments and has had her fair share of life?’
Karl Marx was born in the upstairs room of a house at 664 Brückergasse, a busy thoroughfare that winds down to the bridge over the Moselle river. His father had taken a lease on the building only one month earlier and moved out when Karl was fifteen months old. Yet this birthplace, of which he had no memories, was bought by the German Social Democratic Party in April 1928 and has ever since been a museum devoted to his life and times – apart from a ghastly interlude between 1933 and 1945, when it was occupied by the Nazis and used as the HQ for one of their party newspapers. After the War, letters were sent out appealing for money to repair the damage done by Hitler’s loutish squatters. One of the replies, dated 19 March 1947, came from the international secretary of the British Labour Party: ‘Dear Comrade, I regret that the British Labour Party is not prepared as an organisation to support your international committee for the reconstruction of the Karl Marx house at Treves [the English name for Trier], since its resources are devoted to the upkeep of similar monuments of Karl Marx in England. Yours fraternally, Denis Healey.’ A likely story: Londoners will search in vain for these monuments to which Healey allegedly ‘devoted’ his party’s resources. Still, at least the house survives. A hundred yards away is the site of the old Trier synagogue at which so many of Marx’s ancestors presided. The only token of its presence today is a sign attached to the lamppost at the street corner, which needs no translation: ‘Hier stand die frühere Trierer Synagoge, die in der Pogromnacht im November 1938 durch die Nationalsozialisten zerstört wurde.’
Little is known about Karl Marx’s early boyhood, apart from his habit of forcing his sisters to eat mud pies. He appears to have been educated privately until 1830, when he entered the Trier High School – whose headmaster, Hugo Wyttenbach, was a friend of Heinrich Marx and a founder of the Casino Club. Although Karl later dismissed his schoolfellows as ‘country bumpkins’, the teachers were mostly liberal humanists who did their best to civilise the yokels. In 1832, after a rally at Hambach in support of free speech, police officers raided the school and found seditious literature – including speeches from the Hambach protest – circulating among the pupils. One boy was arrested, and Wyttenbach was placed under close surveillance. Two years later, the maths and Hebrew teachers were charged with the despicable crimes of ‘atheism’ and ‘materialism’ following the notorious Casino dinner of January 1834. To dilute Wyttenbach’s influence, the authorities appointed a grim-faced reactionary named Loers as co-headmaster.
‘I found the position of good Herr Wyttenbach extremely painful,’ Heinrich told his son after attending Loers’s installation ceremony. ‘I could have wept at the offence to this man, whose only failing is to be much too kind-hearted. I did my best to show the high regard I have for him and, among other things, I told him how devoted you are to him …’ But when Marx proved his devotion by refusing to speak to the conservative interloper, he earned a paternal scolding. ‘Herr Loers has taken it ill that you did not pay him a farewell visit,’ Heinrich wrote after Karl’s matriculation in 1835. ‘You and Clemens [another boy] were the only ones … I had to have recourse to a white lie and tell him we were there while he was away.’ Here is the authentic voice of Heinrich Marx, angry but timid, unhappy but obedient, forever letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’, like the cat in the adage.
His son, by contrast, always preferred to imitate the action of a tiger. ‘Social reforms,’ Karl Marx wrote, when warning the working class not to expect any philanthropy from capitalism, ‘are never carried out by the weakness of the strong; but always by the strength of the weak.’ One could argue that he embodied this principle. Though his intellectual power seldom faltered, the body which sustained this tremendous creative fecundity was a very feeble vessel indeed. It was almost as if he decided to test on himself what he advocated for the proletariat, by defying his physical limitations and seeking out the strength of his own weakness.
Even in the full vigour of youth – before poverty, sleeplessness, bad diet, heavy drinking and constant smoking had taken their inevitable toll – he was a fragile specimen. ‘Nine lecture courses seem to me rather a lot and I would not like you to do more than your body and mind can bear,’ Heinrich Marx advised, soon after his seventeen-year-old son started at Bonn University in 1835. ‘In providing really vigorous and healthy nourishment for your mind, do not forget that in this miserable world it is always accompanied by the body, which determines the well-being of the whole machine. A sickly scholar is the most unfortunate being on earth. Therefore, do not study more than your health can bear.’ Karl took no notice, then or ever: in later years he often toiled through the night, fuelled by cheap ale and foul cigars.
With his usual rash candour, the lad replied that he was indeed in poor health – thus provoking another earnest sermon from his Polonius of a father. ‘Youthful sins in any enjoyment that is immoderate or even harmful in itself meet with frightful punishment. We have a sad example here in Herr Günster. True, in his case there is no question of vice, but smoking and drinking have worked havoc with his already weak chest and he will hardly live until the summer.’ His mother, fretful as ever, added her own list of commandments: ‘You must avoid everything that could make things worse, you must not get over-heated, not drink a lot of wine or coffee, and not eat anything pungent, a lot of pepper or other spices. You must not smoke any tobacco, not stay up too long in the evening, and rise early. Be careful also not to catch cold and, dear Carl, do not dance until you are quite well again.’ Frau Marx, one can safely say, was no skylark.
Shortly after his eighteenth birthday Marx was excused military service because of his weak chest, though he may well have exaggerated his condition. (The suspicion of lead-swinging is strengthened by a letter from his father advising him on how to dodge the draft: ‘Dear Karl, If you can, arrange to be given good certificates by competent and well-known physicians there, you can do it with a good conscience … But to be consistent with your conscience, do not smoke too much.’) The supposed disability certainly didn’t harm his enjoyment of student high jinks. An official ‘Certificate of Release’ issued after Marx’s year at Bonn University, while praising his academic achievements (‘excellent diligence and attention’), noted that ‘he has incurred a punishment of one day’s detention for disturbing the peace by rowdiness and drunkenness at night … Subsequently, he was accused of having carried prohibited weapons in Cologne. The investigation is still pending. He has not been suspected of participation in any forbidden association among the students.’
The university authorities didn’t know the half of it. True, the Poets’ Club – which he joined in his first term – was not a ‘forbidden association’, but neither was it quite so innocent as the name suggested: the discussion of poetry and rhetoric was a cover for more seditious talk. ‘Your little circle appeals to me, as you may well believe, much more than alehouse gatherings,’ Heinrich Marx wrote, happily imagining his boy improving the shining hour with earnest literary debate.
2 The Little Wild Boar
During his three years at Berlin University, Marx was seldom in the lecture hall and often in debt. The death of his father meant an end to the regular stipends but also relieved the paternal pressure to apply himself to legal studies. ‘It would be stupid,’ Bruno Bauer advised, ‘if you were to devote yourself to a practical career. Theory is now the strongest practice, and we are absolutely incapable of predicting to how large an extent it will become practical.’ The task of the Young Hegelians was to infiltrate the academy and establish their theories as the new received wisdom. Marx began work on a doctoral thesis which would qualify him for a lectureship, taking as his subject ‘The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy’.
He could not have chosen a less propitious moment, since it coincided with a new and thoroughgoing purge of Hegel’s left-wing disciples. Eduard Gans, the last Hegelian in the faculty of law, died unexpectedly in 1839 and was replaced by the severely reactionary Julius Stahl. Bauer himself was evicted from the theology department soon afterwards and forced to seek refuge at the University of Bonn. As recently as 1836 Bauer had argued, with some vehemence, that religion should remain above and beyond philosophical criticism; now he was proclaiming his atheism from the rooftops. He urged Marx to get on with the dissertation and join him in Bonn as soon as possible. Another young radical predicted that ‘if Marx, Bruno Bauer and Feuerbach come together to found a theological – philosophical review, God would do well to surround Himself with all His angels and indulge in self-pity, for these three will certainly drive Him out of His heaven’. Luckily for God, He had Prussian friends in high places. After the accession of Friedrich Wilhelm IV to the throne in 1840 the persecution of dissidents was redoubled, strict censorship imposed on all publications and academic freedom extinguished.
Stranded in inhospitable Berlin, Marx no longer bothered to attend the university. By day he sat in his lodgings, reading and writing and smoking; in the evenings he colloquised and caroused with the kindred souls at the Doctors’ Club, who were keeping their spirits up by meeting almost daily. Though his explorations of Epicurus and Democritus might seem harmless enough, he knew that there was no question of submitting his thesis to the Berlin professors – especially since it would be scrutinised by F. W. von Schelling, a veteran anti-Hegelian philosopher who was brought into the university in 1841 at the personal command of the new king to root out unhealthy influences. Despite its apparently dry subject, Marx’s comparative study of Democritus and Epicurus was actually a daring and original piece of work in which he set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy, and that scepticism will triumph over dogma. His argument was laid down like a gauntlet on the first page:
As long as a single drop of blood pulses in her world-conquering and totally free heart, philosophy will continually shout at her opponents the cry of Epicurus: ‘Impiety does not consist in destroying the gods of the crowd but rather in ascribing to the gods the ideas of the crowd.’ Philosophy makes no secret of it. The proclamation of Prometheus – ‘In one word, I hate all gods’ – is her own profession, her own slogan against all gods in heaven and earth who do not recognise man’s self-consciousness as the highest divinity. There shall be none other beside it.
In the spirit of belligerent mischief that was to be such a feature of his later polemics, Marx added a brief appendix mocking his own tutor’s loss of liberal faith. Quoting from an essay Schelling had written more than forty years earlier – ‘The time has come to proclaim to the better part of humanity the freedom of minds, and not to tolerate any longer that they deplore the loss of their fetters’ – he asked, ‘When the time had already come in 1795, how about the year 1841?’
Schelling did not have a chance to reply. Marx submitted his thesis instead to the University of Jena, which had a reputation for awarding degrees without delay or debate. He was obliged to attach his leaving certificate from Bonn (which mentioned the escapades with drink and firearms) and a reference from the Deputy Royal Government Plenipotentiaries at Berlin University, who found ‘nothing specially disadvantageous to note from the point of view of discipline’ except that ‘on several occasions he has been the object of proceedings for debt’. The Dean of Philosophy at Jena, Dr Carl Friedrich Bachmann, decided that these trifling misdemeanours could be disregarded, since the essay on Democritus and Epicurus ‘testifies to intelligence and perspicacity as much as to erudition, for which reason I regard the candidate as pre-eminently worthy’. On 15 April 1841, just nine days after sending his dissertation to Jena, Karl Marx collected a Ph.D.
Herr Doktor Marx was now ready to launch himself in the world. But for the next year he shuttled aimlessly between Bonn, Trier and Cologne, apparently uncertain of what to do next. His thesis had been dedicated ‘to his dear fatherly friend, Ludwig von Westphalen … as a token of filial love’, and during several visits to Trier he pointedly ignored his own surviving parent, devoting himself to the ailing Baron (who was to die in March 1842) and the patient Jenny, whose adoration of her ‘little wild boar’ was as intense as ever in spite of his lengthy absences. ‘My little heart is so full, so overflowing with love and yearning and ardent longing for you, my infinitely loved one,’ she wrote. ‘It is certain, isn’t it, that I can marry you?’ Of course, of course, he agreed, but not just yet. The marriage would have to be postponed until he had found gainful employment, since his wretched mother had stopped his allowance and withheld his share of Heinrich Marx’s estate.
In July 1841 Marx went to stay with Bruno Bauer in Bonn, where the two reprobates spent an uproarious summer shocking the local bourgeoisie – getting drunk, laughing in church, galloping through the city streets on donkeys and (rather more subversively) penning an anonymous spoof, The Last Trump of Judgement Against Hegel the Atheist and the Anti-Christ. At first glance this was a pious broadside, supposedly written by a devout and conservative Christian who wished to prove that Hegel was a revolutionary atheist; but its true intent soon became apparent, as did the identity of the authors. One Hegelian newspaper commented knowingly that every ‘bauer’ (the German word for ‘peasant’) would understand the real meaning. Bruno Bauer was expelled from the university, and with him went Marx’s last chance of academic preferment.
‘In a few days I have to go to Cologne,’ Marx told the radical Hegelian philosopher Arnold Ruge in March 1842, ‘for I find the proximity of the Bonn professors intolerable. Who would want to have to talk always with intellectual skunks, with people who study only for the purpose of finding new dead ends in every corner of the world!’ A month later, he was having second thoughts: ‘I have abandoned my plan to settle in Cologne, since life there is too noisy for me, and an abundance of good friends does not lead to better philosophy … Thus Bonn remains my residence for the time being; after all, it would be a pity if no one remained here for the holy men to get angry with.’
But the lure of Cologne was hard to resist, since the ‘noise’ of which he complained sounded remarkably like an echo of the Doctors’ Club meetings in the Hippel café – the main difference being the quality of the alcohol. ‘How glad I am that you are happy,’ Jenny wrote to Karl in August 1841, ‘and that you drank champagne in Cologne, and that there are Hegel clubs there, and that you have been dreaming …’ Champagne seemed a more appropriate lubricant than the ale favoured in Berlin: Cologne was the wealthiest and largest city in the Rhineland, which was itself the most politically and industrially advanced province in the whole of Prussia, and the local bankers and businessmen had lately begun to agitate for a form of government more suited to a modern economy than the wheezing, ancient apparatus of absolute monarchy and bureaucratic oppression under which they laboured. As Marx himself pointed out often enough in later years, the nature of society is dictated by its forms of production; now that industrial capitalism had established itself, the talk in the bars of Cologne was that democracy, a free press and a unified Germany would have to follow. It was no surprise, then, that the city acted as a magnet for heretical thinkers and Bohemian malcontents who offered their wealth of knowledge in exchange for the tycoons’ knowledge of wealth. The child of this union was the Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper founded in the autumn of 1841 by a group of wealthy manufacturers and financiers (including the President of the Cologne Chamber of Commerce) to challenge the dreary, conservative Kölnische Zeitung.
With hindsight, it was sublimely inevitable that Marx would write for the paper and quickly install himself as its presiding genius. But although Marxism has often been caricatured as a doctrine of ‘historical inevitability’, he knew very well that individual destinies are not preordained – though he did tend to underestimate the importance of accident and coincidence in shaping a life. What if Bruno Bauer had not been driven out of academe? What if Dr Marx had found a university sinecure instead of being forced – faute de mieux – to express his restless intelligence through journalism?
Chance may have helped to decide his fate; but it was a chance he had himself been seeking. This was another of those frontier posts marking the unexplored territory beyond. Hegel had served his purpose, and since leaving Berlin Marx’s thoughts had been moving from idealism to materialism, from the abstract to the actual. ‘Since every true philosophy is the intellectual quintessence of its time,’ he wrote in 1842, ‘the time must come when philosophy not only internally by its content, but also externally through its form, comes into contact and interaction with the real world of its day.’ He had come to despise the nebulous and blurry arguments of those German liberals ‘who think freedom is honoured by being placed in the starry firmament of the imagination instead of on the solid ground of reality’. It was thanks to these ethereal dreamers that freedom in Germany had remained no more than a sentimental fantasy. His new direction would, of course, require another exhaustive and exhausting course of self-education, but that was no discouragement to such an insatiable auto-didact.
He composed his first journalistic essay in February 1842, while visiting the dying Baron von Westphalen in Trier, and sent it to Arnold Ruge in Dresden for inclusion in his new Young Hegelian journal, the Deutsche Jahrbücher. The article was a brilliant polemic against the latest censorship instructions issued by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV – and, with glorious if unintended irony, the censor promptly banned it. The Deutsche Jahrbücher itself was closed down a few months later, by order of the federal parliament.
Grumbling about the ‘sudden revival of Saxon censorship’, Marx hoped for better luck in Cologne, where several of his friends were already installed at the Rheinische Zeitung. The editor, Adolf Rutenberg, was a bibulous comrade from the Doctors’ Club (and brother-in-law to Bruno Bauer), but since he was usually sozzled the burden of producing the paper fell mostly on Moses Hess, a rich young socialist. Moses Hess later became a fierce enemy, as did almost all of Marx’s friends, but at this time his attitude to the combative youngster was reverential. He wrote to his friend Berthold Auerbach:
He is a phenomenon who made a tremendous impression on me in spite of the strong similarity of our fields. In short you can prepare yourself to meet the greatest – perhaps the only genuine – philosopher of the current generation. When he makes a public appearance, whether in writing or in the lecture hall, he will attract the attention of all Germany … Dr Marx (that is my idol’s name) is still a very young man – about twenty-four at the most. He will give medieval religion and philosophy their coup de grâce; he combines the deepest philosophical seriousness with the most biting wit. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel fused into one person – I say fused not juxtaposed – and you have Dr Marx.
Marx had the same effect on almost everyone he encountered at this time. Though the men in the Berlin Doctors’ Club and the Cologne Circle were eight or ten years older than him, most treated him as their senior. When Friedrich Engels arrived in Berlin to do his military service, a few months after Marx’s departure, he found that the young Rhinelander was already a legend. A poem written by Engels in 1842 includes a vivid description of his future collaborator – whom he hadn’t yet met – based entirely on the breathless reminiscences of fellow intellectuals:
Who runs up next with wild impetuosity?
A swarthy chap of Trier, a marked monstrosity.
He neither hops nor skips, but moves in leaps and bounds,
Raving aloud. As if to seize and then pull down
To Earth the spacious tent of Heaven up on high,
He opens wide his arms and reaches for the sky.
He shakes his wicked fist, raves with a frantic air,
As if ten thousand devils had him by the hair.
He was indeed swarthy (hence his lifelong nickname, ‘Moor’) and the effect was accentuated by thick black hair which seemed to sprout from almost every pore on his cheeks, arms, ears and nose.
It is easy to overlook the obvious, which may be why so few writers on Marx have noticed what is staring them in the face: that he was, like Esau, an hairy man. In the recollections of those who knew him, however, the awe-inspiring effect of that magnificent mane is mentioned again and again. Here is Gustav Mevissen, a Cologne businessman who invested in the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842: ‘Karl Marx from Trier was a powerful man of twenty-four whose thick black hair sprang from his cheeks, arms, nose and ears. He was domineering, impetuous, passionate, full of boundless self-confidence …’ And the poet George Herwegh, who came to know Marx in Paris: ‘Luxuriant black hair overshadowed his forehead. He was superbly suited to play the role of the last of the scholastics.’ Pavel Annenkov, who encountered Marx in 1846: ‘He was most remarkable in his appearance. He had a shock of deep black hair and hairy hands … he looked like a man with the right and power to command respect.’ Friedrich Lessner: ‘His brow was high and finely shaped, his hair thick and pitch-black … Marx was a born leader of the people.’ Carl Schurz: ‘The somewhat thick-set man, with broad forehead, very black hair and beard and dark sparkling eyes, at once attracted general attention. He enjoyed the reputation of having acquired great learning …’ Wilhelm Liebknecht, writing in 1896, still trembled to recall the moment half a century earlier when he had first ‘endured the gaze of that lion-like head with the jet-black mane’.
This apparently careless luxuriance was contrived quite deliberately. Both Marx and Engels understood the power of the hirsute, as they proved in a sneering aside half-way through their pamphlet on the poet and critic Gottfried Kinkel, written in 1852:
London provided the much venerated man with a new, complex arena in which to receive even greater acclaim. He did not hesitate: he would have to be the new lion of the season. With this in mind he refrained for the time being from all political activity and withdrew into the seclusion of his home in order to grow a beard, without which no prophet can succeed.
Perhaps for the same reason, Marx grew a set of whiskers at university and cultivated them with pride throughout his adulthood until he was as woolly as a flock of sheep. (A Prussian spy in London, reporting to his Berlin masters in 1852, thought it significant that ‘he does not shave at all’.)
Friedrich Engels, too, seems to have formulated a political theory of facial hair at an early age. ‘Last Sunday we had a moustache evening,’ the nineteen-year-old Engels wrote to his sister in October 1840. ‘I had sent out a circular to all moustache-capable young men that it was finally time to horrify all philistines, and that that could not be done better than by wearing moustaches. Everyone with the courage to defy philistinism and wear a moustache should therefore sign. I had soon collected a dozen moustaches, and then the 25th of October, when our moustaches would be a month old, was fixed as the day for a common moustache jubilee.’ This pogonophiles’ party, held in the cellar of Bremen town hall, concluded with a defiant toast:
Philistines shirk the burden of bristle
By shaving their faces as clean as a whistle.
We are not philistines, so we
Can let our mustachios flourish free.
Though the growth later spread over his cheeks and chin, Engels’s wispy beard was no match for the magnificent Marxist plumage. The image of Karl Marx familiar from countless posters, revolutionary banners and heroic busts – and the famous headstone in Highgate cemetery – would lose much of its iconic resonance without that frizzy aureole.
Marx was no great orator – he had a slight lisp, and the gruff Rhenish accent often led to misunderstandings – but the mere presence of this bristling boar was enough to inspire and intimidate. The historian Karl Friedrich Köppen, a habitué of the Doctors’ Club, found himself paralysed whenever he was in Marx’s company. ‘Once again I now have thoughts of my own,’ he wrote soon after his fearsome friend had left Berlin in 1841, ‘ideas that I have (so to speak) produced myself, whereas all my earlier ones came from some distance away, namely from the Schützenstrasse [where Marx lived]. Now I can really work once more, and I am pleased to be walking around amongst complete idiots without feeling that I am one myself …’ After reading an article by Bruno Bauer on the politics of Christianity, Köppen told Marx that ‘I subjected this idea to police-examination and asked to see its passport, whereupon I observed that it too emanates from the Schützenstrasse. So you see, you are an absolute storehouse of ideas, a complete factory or (to use the Berlin slang) you have the brain of a swot.’
When Marx started working for the Rheinische Zeitung, colleagues noticed that his restless intellectual impetuosity also manifested itself in an endearing absent-mindedness. The journalist Karl Heinzen loved to watch Marx sitting in a tavern, gazing myopically at a newspaper over his morning coffee, ‘and then suddenly going to another table and reaching for papers that were just not available; or when he ran to the censor to protest about the cutting out of an article and then, instead of the article in question, stuffed into his pocket some other newspaper or even a handkerchief and hared off’.
Equally attractive, to those with strong stomachs, was Marx’s taste for revelry and rough-housing. Heinzen describes one evening when he had to lead Marx home after several bottles of wine:
As soon as I was in the house, he shut the doors, hid the key and jeered comically at me that I was his prisoner. He asked me to follow him up into his study. On arrival I sat myself down on the sofa to see what on earth this marvellous crank would get up to. He immediately forgot that I was there, sat down astride a chair with his head leaning forward against the back, and began to declaim in a strong singing tone which was half mournful and half mocking, ‘Poor lieutenant, poor lieutenant! Poor lieutenant, poor lieutenant!’ This lament concerned a Prussian lieutenant whom he ‘corrupted’ by teaching him the Hegelian philosophy …
After he had lamented the lieutenant for a while, he started up and suddenly discovered that I was in the room. He came over to me, gave me to understand that he had me in his power, and, with a malice that recalled an imp rather than the intended devil, he began to attack me with threats and cuffs. I begged him to spare me that sort of thing, because it went against the grain to pay him back in the same coin. When he did not stop I gave him a serious warning that I would deal with him in a way which he would certainly feel and when that too did no good I saw myself compelled to dispatch him into the corner of the room. When he got up I said that I found his personality boring and asked him to open the front door. Now it was his turn to be triumphant. ‘Go home then, strong man,’ he mocked, and added a most comical smirk. It was as though he was chanting the words from Faust, ‘There is one imprisoned inside …’ At least, the sentiment was similar, although his unsuccessful imitation of Mephistopheles made the situation comic in the extreme. In the end I warned him that if he would not open the door for me, then I would get it open myself and he would have to pay for the damage. Since he only answered with mocking sneers, I went down, tore the front door off its lock and called out to him from the street that he should shut the house up to prevent the entry of thieves. Dumb with amazement that I had escaped from his spell, he leaned out of the window and goggled at me with his small eyes like a wet goblin.
The sequel is all too predictable: a few years later, Marx denounced Heinzen as a loutish philistine (‘flat, bombastic, bragging, thrasonical’) and was in turn condemned by his sometime prisoner as ‘an untrustworthy egoist’. Engels then entered the lists, calling Heinzen ‘the most stupid person of the century’ and threatening to box his ears; Heinzen replied that he could not be intimidated by ‘a frivolous dilettante’. And so, interminably, on. Even as late as 1860, after emigrating to the United States, Heinzen still nursed his grudge – describing Marx in one article as a cross between a cat and an ape, a sophist, a mere dialectician, a liar and an intriguer, noted for his yellow dirty complexion, black dishevelled hair, small eyes possessed by ‘a spirit of wicked fire’, snubby nose, unusually thick lower lip, a head that suggested anything but nobility or idealism and a body always dressed in dirty linen.
Marx was often accused of being an intellectual bully, especially by those who felt the full force of his invective. (One of his tirades against Karl Heinzen, published in 1847, runs to nearly thirty pages.) He undoubtedly delighted in his talent for inflicting verbal violence. His style, as a friend noted admiringly, is what the stylus originally was in the hands of the Romans – a sharp-pointed steel pencil for writing and for stabbing. ‘The style is the dagger used for a well-aimed thrust at the heart.’ Heinzen thought it not so much a dagger as a full battery of artillery – logic, dialectics, learning – used to annihilate anyone who would not see eye to eye with him. Marx, he said, wanted ‘to break windowpanes with cannon’. Nevertheless, the charge of bullying cannot be upheld. Marx was no coward, tormenting only those who wouldn’t retaliate: his choice of victims reveals a courageous recklessness which explains why he spent most of his adult life in exile and political isolation.
For proof, one need look no further than his first article for the Rheinische Zeitung, published in May 1842, in which he delivered a withering exegesis of the Rhine Provincial Assembly’s debates on freedom of the press. Naturally he criticised the oppressive intolerance of Prussian absolutism and its lickspittles; this was brave enough, if unsurprising. But, with an exasperated cry of ‘God save me from my friends!’, he was even more scathing about the feeble-mindedness of the liberal opposition. Whereas the enemies of press freedom were driven by a pathological emotion which lent feeling and conviction to their absurd arguments, ‘the defenders of the press in this Assembly have on the whole no real relation to what they are defending. They have never come to know freedom of the press as a vital need. For them, it is a matter of the head, in which the heart plays no part.’ Quoting Goethe – who had said that a painter can succeed only with a type of feminine beauty which he has loved in at least one living being – Marx suggested that freedom of the press also has its beauty, which one must have loved in order to defend it. But the so-called liberals in the Assembly seemed to lead complete and contented lives even while the press was in fetters.
Having made enemies of both the government and the opposition, he was soon turning against his own confrères as well. Georg Jung, a successful Cologne lawyer involved in the Rheinische Zeitung, thought him ‘a devil of a revolutionary’, and the radical young Turks on the staff had high hopes when Marx was appointed to the editor’s chair in October 1842. They were to be disappointed. He set out his editorial policy in the form of a reply to the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, which had accused its rival of flirting with communism:
The Rheinische Zeitung, which does not even admit that communist ideas in their present form possess even theoretical reality, and therefore can still less desire their practical realisation, or even consider it possible, will subject these ideas to thoroughgoing criticism … Such writings as those of Leroux, Considérant, and above all the sharp-witted work by Proudhon, cannot be criticised on the basis of superficial flashes of thought, but only after long and profound study.
No doubt he had half an eye on the censor – and on the paper’s shareholders, bourgeois capitalists to a man. But he meant it all the same. Marx disliked the posturing of colleagues such as the tipsy Rutenberg (who was still working in the office, though his job consisted mainly of inserting punctuation marks) and Moses Hess. He was even more irritated by the antics of the Young Hegelian pranksters in Berlin, now calling themselves ‘The Free’, who lived up to the name by freely criticising everything – the state, the Church, the family – and advocating ostentatious libertinism as a political duty. He regarded them as tiresome, frivolous self-publicists. ‘Rowdiness and blackguardism must be loudly and resolutely repudiated in a period which demands serious, manly and sober-minded persons for the achievement of its lofty aims,’ he told his readers.
There was, of course, an element of hypocrisy here: as his Cologne drinking companions testify, he was not always either serious or sober, and the solemn disapproval of attention-grabbing stunts came a little oddly from a man who, only a few months earlier, had been clattering through the streets of Bonn astride a donkey. But the assumption of editorial responsibility had concentrated his mind wonderfully: juvenile japes were no longer acceptable. The most persistent nuisance was Eduard Meyen, leader of the licentious Berlin clique, who submitted ‘heaps of scribblings, pregnant with revolutionising the world and empty of ideas’. During the weak, undiscriminating stewardship of Rutenberg, Meyen and his gang had come to regard the Rheinische Zeitung as their private playground. But the new editor made it clear that he would no longer permit them to drench the newspaper in a watery torrent of verbiage. ‘I regard it as inappropriate, indeed even immoral, to smuggle communist and socialist doctrines, hence a new world outlook, into incidental theatrical criticisms etc.,’ he wrote. ‘I demand a quite different and more thorough discussion of communism, if it should be discussed at all.’
Marx’s own ability to discuss communism was hampered by the fact that he knew nothing about it. His years of academic study had taught him all the philosophy, theology and law that he was ever likely to need, but in politics and economics he was still a novice. ‘As editor of the Rheinische Zeitung,’ he admitted many years later, ‘I experienced for the first time the embarrassment of having to take part in discussions on so-called material interests.’
His first venture into this unexplored territory was a long critique of the new law dealing with thefts of wood from private forests. By ancient custom, peasants had been allowed to gather fallen branches for fuel, but now anyone who picked up the merest twig could expect a prison sentence. More outrageously still, the offender would have to pay the forest-owner the value of the wood, such value to be assessed by the forester himself. This legalised larceny forced Marx to think, for the first time, about the questions of class, private property and the state. It also allowed him to exercise his talent for demolishing a thoughtless argument with its own logic. Reporting a comment by one of the knightly halfwits in the provincial assembly – ‘It is precisely because the pilfering of wood is not regarded as theft that it occurs so often – he let rip with a characteristic reductio ad absurdum: ‘By analogy with this, the legislator would have to draw the conclusion: It is because a box on the ear is not regarded as a murder that it has become so frequent. It should be decreed therefore that a box on the ear is murder.’
This may not have been communism but it was quite naughty enough to worry Prussian officialdom – especially since the paper’s circulation and reputation were growing rapidly. ‘Do not imagine that we on the Rhine live in a political Eldorado,’ Marx wrote to Arnold Ruge, whose Deutsche Jahrbücher had taken a fearsome battering from the authorities in Dresden. ‘The most unswerving persistence is required to push through a newspaper like the Rheinische Zeitung.’ For most of 1842, the resident censor at the paper was Laurenz Dolleschall, a doltish police officer who had once banned an advertisement for Dante’s Divine Comedy on the grounds that ‘the divine is not a fit subject for comedy’. After receiving the proofs each evening he blue-pencilled any articles he didn’t understand (most of them), whereupon the editor would spend hours persuading him that it was all quite harmless – while the printers waited, long into the night. Marx liked to quote Dolleschall’s anguished wail whenever his superiors chided him for letting through some piece of devilry: ‘Now my living’s at stake!’ One can almost sympathise with the hapless jobsworth, since any censor unlucky enough to have to haggle with Karl Marx every working day might well conclude that a policeman’s lot is not a happy one. A story told by the left-wing journalist Wilhelm Blos shows what Dolleschall had to endure:
Pulsuz fraqment bitdi.
