In the “German Democratic Republic” they tell the story about a weary old man who tries to gain entrance into the Red Paradise. A Communist Archangel holds him up at the gate and severely cross-questions him:

“Where were you born?”

“In an ancient bishopric.”

“What was your citizenship?”

“Prussian.”

“Who was your father?”

“A wealthy lawyer.”

“What was your faith?”

“I converted to Christianity.”

“Not very good. Married? Who was your wife?”

“The daughter of an aristocratic Prussian officer and the sister of a Royal Prussian Minister of the Interior who persecuted the Socialists.”

“Awful. And where did you live mostly?”

“In London.”

“Hm, the colonialist capital of capitalism. Who was your best friend?”

“A manufacturer from the Ruhr Valley.”

“Did you like workers?”

“Not in the least. Kept them at arm’s length. Despised them.”

“What did you think about Jews?”

“I called them a money-crazy race and hoped that they would vanish from the Earth.”

“And what about the Slavs?”

“I despised the Russians.”

“You must be a fascist! You even dare to ask for admission to the Red Paradise — you must be crazy! By the way, what’s your name?”

“Karl Marx.”

Man, indeed, is a very strange animal. This has been proved in many ways, but especially by the Marx-renaissance of recent decades. And yet the ideas of this odd and by no means constructive thinker are responsible all over the world for rivers of blood and oceans of tears. There can be no doubt that without the Communist challenge National Socialism, its competitor, would never have succeeded. Hitler boasted to Rauschning that he was the real executor of Marxism (though “minus its Jewish-Talmudic spirit”); thus the macabre death dance of our civilization in the past fifty years is due to that scurrilous, evil and unhappy man who spent half his life copying endless passages from books in the British Museum Library’s reading room. Yet, with the exception of numerous pamphlets and the first volume of a book, he left nothing but badly assembled, unpublishable manuscripts and a mountain of notes. It was his friend Friedrich Engels who, with the most laborious efforts, had to bring them into shape.

New Interest from the Left

This Marx-renaissance is due largely, but not solely, to the rise of the New Left which argues that the dear old man had been thoroughly misunderstood by the barbaric Russians. Also a number of men and women would be horrified to be called Socialists or Communists but still have a soft spot in their hearts for a man who “at least was filled with compassion for the poor and was an admirable father and a tender husband.” Surely, Marx was a complex and contradictory person, and the renewed attention paid to him has produced a number of German books analyzing this most fatal figure of our times. Destructive ideas almost unavoidably derive from a destructive and — in this case — rather repulsive person.

Karl Marx was born in Trier, of Jewish parents, in 1818. Only a few years earlier this Catholic bishopric was forcibly incorporated into the Kingdom of Prussia and Karl Marx’s father embraced the Lutheran faith of the Prussian occupants. The children and the rather reluctant mother were baptized by a Prussian army chaplain only at a later date. The deism of Enlightenment was the true faith of Heinrich Marx who, however, was a cultured man and a devoted father. Young Karl finished high school-college with flying colors at the age of seventeen and set out to study law which he shortly abandoned for philosophy, eyeing the possibility of an academic career. He first matriculated in Bonn, then in Berlin where he fell under the spell of the Hegelians. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Jena, but renounced the idea of becoming a professor. He also gave up writing his self-centered poetry and his dream of running a theatrical review. He then married into the Prussian nobility and established himself as a free-lance writer in Paris where he soon clashed with the more humanitarian French socialists. He moved to Cologne, then returned to Paris and, finally —expelled from Belgium as an enemy of the established order — he took a permanent abode in London where, with interruptions, he remained until his death in 1883.

So much for the facts of his life. Within the last decade three books have been published in German analyzing Marx psychologically. These tomes are very different in scope but they hardly vary in their judgments. The authors belong to no “school” in particular, but all are serious students of our “hero’s” works and personal history. These books are Marx, by Werner Blumenberg, a small, but exceedingly readable paperback (1962), Karl Marx, Die Revolutionare Konf ession by Ernst Kux (1967) and Karl Marx, Eine Psychographie by Arnold Künzli (1966). The last two have not been published in the United States and whoever is acquainted with the tremendous difficulties encountered by translations of learned books in the United States will not be surprised. The reasons for this state of affairs are not solely of a financial nature. This article is partly based on the work of these authors.

A Generation Gap

Let us return to the personality of the founder of socialism and communism. Even as a young man Marx does not appear to have been attractive. As a student he is liberally provided with money by his affluent father, and spends his annuity of 700 Thalers — a nice middle class income would then be around 300 Thalers — in a manner still unexplained. In spite of his love for Jenny von Westphalen he is an unhappy, “torn” person and writes in these terms to his father. Heinrich Marx ticks him off: “To be quite frank, I hate this modern expression —’torn — used by weaklings if they are disgusted with life merely because they cannot get without effort beautifully furnished palaces, elegant carriages, and millions in the bank.” And in another letter the old gentleman, knowing his son only too well, tells him that he suspects his heart not to have the same qualities as his mind. “If your heart is not pure and human, if it becomes alienated by an evil genius… my life’s great hope will be dashed.”

Karl Marx was impatient. In this connection it is worthwhile to have a look at his doctoral dissertation on Epicurus, the materialistic Greek philosopher who, as the founder of Epicureanism, made sensual pleasures the main purpose of life. Here Marx quoted several lines from Aeschylus in which Prometheus rants against the gods and ridicules the idea of being an obedient son to Father Zeus. The figure of Prometheus was, indeed, as Kux and Künzli demonstrate one of the guiding stars in Marx’s life. The revolt against God (and the gods), the rebellion against the entire existing order, all quite natural in youth, remained his leitmotiv until his death. Marx, as our authors insist, never really grew up. His entire relationship to other people continued to be juvenile, if not infantile.

Marx’s basic vision was that of a humanity freed from all oppression, repression and controls and thus open to an egotistic “self-realization” — primarily of an artistic order. There was, as he believed, a Raphael, a Michelangelo, a Shakespeare, a Bach in every man. This great liberation, however, could only be achieved by the rule, the dictatorship of the poorest and most tyrannized people, the working class. These were the ones, he thought, who could be indoctrinated to destroy the existing order entirely — and then to build a new one. They were ordained “by history” to carry out his murderous dreams.

The trouble was that he had no knowledge of the mind and mentality of the workers nor any affection for them. He only knew “statistically” about their situation, their living conditions; and these were humble, inevitably so, because at the beginning of any industrialization (be it capitalistic or socialistic) the purchasing power of the masses is still low and the costs of saving and investing (i.e. the buying of expensive machinery) are bound to be very high. In the period of early capitalism the manufacturers, contrary to a widespread legend, lived rather puritanically and were by no means bent on luxury. But none of this endeared the workers to Marx in any way. He had only words of contempt for them, except as they might be mobilized against the “bourgeois” society which Marx so hated.

Glaring Inconsistencies

Despite his entirely “bourgeois” background this is the way his lifelong opposition against his family, above all against his parents, took shape. Interestingly enough, Marx’s anti-middle-class complex was not accompanied by any marked loathing for the aristocracy to which his wife belonged. He probably preferred her father to his own. The young leader of the German Worker’s Movement directed his wife to have her calling cards printed: “Jenny Marx, née baronne de Westphalen.” He also sported a most feudal-looking monocle and was a real snob. His two closest friends belonged to the hated grande bourgeoisie: Friedrich Engels, the Presbyterian textile manufacturer; and August Philips, a Dutch banker, a Calvinist of Jewish origin who was his maternal cousin.

Apart from these two, Marx had no real friends. Budding friendships he destroyed almost automatically through his pettiness, his envy, his rancor and his urge to domineer. He was one of the greatest haters in modern history, and one of the reasons why he never really got ahead in his basic work was his endless hostile pamphleteering. If he felt slighted by anybody, if he saw in some writer a possible competitor, if an innocent author had written about a theme of interest to Marx but with conclusions differing from his, Marx immediately dropped every serious research object, sat down and wrote a vitriolic reply or an entire pamphlet. He had the most poisonous pen under the sun and used the most unfair personal arguments. Even as a scholar he never could refrain from going off on a tangent. He sometimes copied half a book which had nothing to do with his main subject; hence the mountains of undecipherable notes and casual remarks on small slips.