PRIVATE LIFE OF KARL MARX
The name of this man immediately brings to mind revolutions, the proletariat,
justice and equality. But above all this, Karl Marx was a man of inexorable
fate and a difficult life…
At seventeen, Karl Marx still had no idea what he was going to be but there
was one thing he knew for sure: Jenny von Westphalen was the only woman
in the whole world he was going to marry. Life in Trier was a small
world where  everyone
knew each other and the scion of Jewish Rabbis, Heinrich Marx, a lawyer,
was good friends with the high-born Westphalen family. Privy Councilor
Ludwig von Westphalen took a liking to Heinrich’s smart and lively son
who would often play with his kids, but he hardly ever dreamed of having
a son-in-law with such dim prospects for the future. It was as if
the old man had a premonition that a marriage between Karl and Jenny would
mean poverty and untold suffering for his daughter.
Jenny’s aristocratic relatives would equally be scandalized by the prospect
of such a misalliance. To make things worse, Jenny was five years
Karl’s senior, but no matter how hard her family tried to make her reconsider,
Jenny was adamant: the two were too much in love and there was no stopping
them now…
Karl and Jenny had a secret engagement not knowing that it would take seven
long years before they could officially be pronounced husband and wife.
The letters they wrote each other were overfilled with tenderness, pain
and hope. For seven years Jenny, widely touted as the most beautiful girl
in town, methodically turned down all matrimonial advances that came her
way while Karl, then a university student in Bonn, was dedicating countless
poems and sonnets to his best beloved… When the two finally tied the knot,
Jenny was 29 and Karl – 25 years old…
The marriage did not turn Karl, by then an opposition-minded editor, into
a respectable bourgeois though. Jenny was not a typical wife either, because
she never really aspired for a quiet and affluent life as did so many other
women her age… She was exactly the kind of woman Karl needed. She was more
than a wife, she was an associate endlessly devoted to the cause they both
believed in.
It is safe to assume, therefore, that, in a sense, the Marxist theory contains
many ideas nurtured by Jenny von Westphalen… Soon after the wedding the
newspaper Karl edited was closed down for political considerations. Left
without any means of subsistence, Marx and his pregnant wife were forced
to leave the country. During their first emigration the spouses lived from
hand to mouth, always on the move and never being able to pay back their
snowballing debts. When Karl was put behind bars in Brussels, Jenny came
to see him. Apparently trying to scare the young woman, the wardens enticed
her into one of their cells where Jenny had to spend the night with a bunch
of thieves and harlots…
Karl and Jenny had several daughters and two sons none of whom lived long.
Devastated by the loss of the 9-year-old Edgar, Karl Marx never really
cared for his other son, Freddie Demut. Freddie’s mother, Helena, joined
the family shortly before their first emigration. Managing the affairs
of the family that was always on the move, Helena was like a mother to
their children, a good friend for Jenny and a regular chess partner for
her husband. Never really over-respectful of Dr. Marx, Helena would often
win and their mutual affection for the game probably gave rise to a more
intimate relationship that eventually led to Freddie’s birth… All
we know for sure, however, is that it was Friedrich Engels who paid for
Freddie’s stay in an orphanage, that the boy maintained no personal relationship
with his father and died in 1929 living longer than any offspring Jenny
ever bore. Did Jenny know or at least suspect, who fathered the son of
her best friend? It looks like she did, but this suspicion must have never
really soured her relationship with Karl. Their youngest daughter, Eleanor,
said that her parents were in love with each other all their life. Recalling
a letter her father had written Jenny, Eleanor said it was written with
the loving vigor of an 18-year-old boy… By the time the letter was written,
however, Jenny was already the mother of six…
The year after Freddie’s birth was probably the hardest in the family’s
entire life. Karl, Jenny and Helena were so desperately working to survive
that they hardly had any time left for family squabbles. The family,
which now lived in London, was catastrophically short of money. Karl’s
coat already sold, it was now the turn of von Westphalens’ heirloom silverware.
However just as Karl Marx was about to sell it off, he was arrested. Marx
looked too threadbare for a high-born German aristocrat, and so they took
him for a thief… Forgetting about her daughters, Jenny rushed to her husband’s
rescue…
A life in squalid, ill-furnished rooms, a potato-only diet and constant
searches and arrests were having their toll on Jenny and her children.
In 1881 after long and agonizing months of daily pain and suffering, Jenny
died of liver cancer. Karl Marx died shortly after. The two were buried
in a common grave in Highgate cemetery in London. Helena Demut was buried
nearby…
05/23/2005
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