Karl Marx Read Free

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 moreappropriate 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