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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:

One evening the censor had been invited, with his wife and nubile daughter, to a grand ball given by the President of the Province. Before leaving he had to finish work on the censorship. But precisely on this evening the proofs did not arrive at the accustomed time. The censor waited and waited, because he could not neglect his official duties, and yet he had to put in an appearance at the President’s ball – quite apart from the openings this would give to his nubile daughter. It was near ten o’clock, the censor was extremely agitated and sent his wife and daughter on in front to the President’s house and dispatched his servant to the press to get the proofs. The servant returned with the information that the press was closed. The bewildered censor went in his carriage to Marx’s lodgings, which was quite a distance. It was almost eleven o’clock.

After much bell-ringing, Marx stuck his head out of a third-storey window.

‘The proofs!’ bellowed up the censor.

‘Aren’t any!’ Marx yelled down.

‘But—’

‘We’re not publishing tomorrow!’

Thereupon Marx slammed the window shut. The anger of the censor, thus fooled, made his words stick in his throat. He was more courteous from then on.

His employers, however, were not. The provincial governor who hosted the ball, Oberpräsident von Schaper, complained in November that the tone of the paper was ‘becoming more and more impudent’ and demanded the dismissal of Rutenberg (whom he wrongly assumed to be the culprit) from the editorial board. Since Rutenberg was a pie-eyed liability anyway, this was no great sacrifice. Marx composed a grovelling letter assuring His Excellency that the Rheinische Zeitung wished only to echo ‘the benedictions which at the present time the whole of Germany conveys to His Majesty the King in his ascendant career’. As Franz Mehring commented many years later, the letter displayed ‘a diplomatic caution of which the life of its author offers no other example’.

It failed to mollify Herr Oberpräsident. In mid-December he recommended to the censorship ministers in Berlin that they should prosecute the newspaper – and the anonymous author of the article on wood-gathering – for ‘impudent and disrespectful criticism of the existing government institutions’. On 21 January 1843 a mounted messenger arrived from Berlin bearing a ministerial edict revoking the Rheinische Zeitung’s licence to publish, with effect from the end of March. Loyal readers throughout the Rhineland – from Cologne, Düsseldorf, Aachen and Marx’s home town of Trier – sent petitions to the king begging for a reprieve, but to no effect. A second censor was installed to prevent any monkey business in the final weeks. ‘Our newspaper has to be presented to the police to be sniffed at,’ Marx grumbled to a friend, ‘and if the police nose smells anything unChristian or unPrussian, the newspaper is not allowed to appear.’

Since no explanation was given for the ban, Marx could only speculate. Had the authorities panicked when they noticed the paper’s swelling popularity? Had he been too outspoken in his defence of the other victims of censorship, such as Ruge’s Deutsche Jahrbücher? The likeliest reason, he guessed, was a long article published only a week before the edict, in which he had accused the authorities of ignoring the wretched economic plight of Moselle wine-farmers who were unable to compete with the cheap, tariff-free wines being imported into Prussia from other German states.

Little did he realise – though he might have been gratified to hear it – that there were more potent forces working behind the scenes. The Prussian king had been asked to suppress the paper by no less a figure than Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, his closest and most necessary ally, who had taken exception to an anti-Russian diatribe in the 4 January issue of the Rheinische Zeitung. At a ball in the Winter Palace four days later, the Prussian ambassador to the court of St Petersburg was harangued by the Tsar about the ‘infamy’ of the liberal German press. The ambassador sent an urgent dispatch to Berlin reporting that the Russians could not understand ‘how a censor employed by Your Majesty’s government could have passed an article of such a nature’. And that was that.

‘Today the wind has changed,’ one of the Rheinische Zeitung’s censors wrote on the day after Karl Marx had vacated the editor’s chair. ‘I am well content.’ Marx himself was pretty happy too. ‘I had begun to be stifled in that atmosphere,’ he confided to Ruge. ‘It is a bad thing to have to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom.’

He had no future in Germany, but since most of the people and institutions for which he cared were now dead – his father, the Baron von Westphalen, the Deutsche Jahrbücher, the Rheinische Zeitung – there was nothing to keep him anyway. What mattered was that, at the age of twenty-four, he was already wielding a pen that could terrify the crowned heads of Europe. When Arnold Ruge decided to quit the country and set up a journal-in-exile, the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher, Marx gladly accepted an invitation to join him. There was only one caveat: ‘I am engaged to be married and I cannot, must not and will not leave Germany without my fiancée.’

Seven years after pledging himself to Jenny, even the thick-skinned Karl Marx was beginning to feel prods and stabs of guilt. ‘For my sake,’ he admitted in March 1843, ‘my fiancée has fought the most violent battles, which almost undermined her health, partly against her pietistic aristocratic relatives, for whom “the Lord in heaven” and “the lord in Berlin” are equally objects of a religious cult, and partly against my own family, in which some priests and other enemies of mine have ensconced themselves. For years, therefore, my fiancée and I have been engaged in more unnecessary and exhausting conflicts than many who are three times our age.’ But the trials and torments of this long betrothal could not all be blamed on others. While Karl was making whoopee in Berlin or fomenting trouble in Cologne, Jenny stayed at home in Trier wondering if he would still love her tomorrow. Sometimes these anxieties surfaced in her letters – which were then misinterpreted by Marx as evidence of her own inconstancy. ‘I was shattered by your doubt of my love and faithfulness,’ she complained in 1839. ‘Oh, Karl, how little you know me, how little you appreciate my position, and how little you feel where my grief lies … If only you could be a girl for a little while and, moreover, such a peculiar one as I am.’

It was, as she tried to explain, different for girls. Condemned to passivity by Eve’s original sin, they could only wait, hope, suffer and endure. ‘A girl, of course, cannot give a man anything but love and herself and her person, just as she is, quite undivided and for ever. In ordinary circumstances, too, the girl must find her complete satisfaction in the man’s love, she must forget everything in love.’ But how could she forget everything while premonitions of grief buzzed in her head like angry bees? ‘Ah, dear, dear sweetheart, now you get yourself involved in politics too,’ she wrote in August 1841, while Marx was gallivanting in Bonn with Bruno Bauer. ‘That is indeed the most risky thing of all. Dear little Karl, just remember always that here at home you have a sweetheart who is hoping and suffering and is wholly dependent on your fate.’

Actually, his political agitation was the least of her worries: it was dangerous, to be sure, but also thrillingly heroic. She expected nothing less from her ‘wild black boar’, her ‘wicked knave’. What stopped Jenny surrendering to happiness was fear of the agony ‘if your ardent love were to cease’. There were good reasons for these misgivings. While studying in Berlin, he fell under the spell of the famous romantic poet Bettina von Arnim – who was old enough to be his mother – and on one occasion, with clodhopping insensitivity, even took her back to Trier to meet his young bride-to-be. Jenny’s friend Betty Lucas witnessed the miserable encounter:

I entered Jenny’s room one evening, quickly and without knocking, and saw in the semi-darkness a small figure crouching on a sofa, with her feet up and her knees in her hands, resembling more a bundle than a human figure, and even today, ten years later, I understand my disappointment when this creature, gliding from the sofa, was introduced to me as Bettina von Arnim … The only words her celebrated mouth uttered were complaints about the heat. Then Marx entered the room and she asked him in no uncertain tone to accompany her to the Rheingrafenstein, which he did, although it was already nine o’clock and it would take an hour to get to the rock. With a sad glance at his fiancée he followed the famous woman.

How could a half-educated girl compete with such sirens? Marx’s intellectual strength intimidated Jenny. When chatting to aristocratic mediocrities in gilded ballrooms she was witty, lively and supremely self-assured. When she was in the presence of her beloved, one look from those dark and fathomless eyes was enough to strike her dumb: ‘I cannot say a word for nervousness, the blood stops flowing in my veins and my soul trembles.’

One need hardly add that Jenny was a child of the Romantic Age. Like many restless spirits of that generation she read and reread Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, whose hero was shackled to a rock for defying the gods and enlightening mankind. (‘Prometheus,’ Marx declared in his doctoral thesis, ‘is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar.’ An allegorical cartoon published after the suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung showed Marx himself in Promethean guise, chained to a printing press while a Prussian eagle pecked at his liver.) Unable to keep pace with Karl’s striding impetuosity, she began to dream that he too would have to be hobbled:

So, sweetheart, since your last letter I have tortured myself with the fear that for my sake you could become embroiled in a quarrel and then in a duel. Day and night I saw you wounded, bleeding and ill, and, Karl, to tell you the whole truth, I was not altogether unhappy in this thought: for I vividly imagined that you had lost your right hand, and, Karl, I was in a state of rapture, of bliss, because of that. You see, sweetheart, I thought that in that case I could really become quite indispensable to you, you would then always keep me with you and love me. I also thought that then I could write down all your dear, heavenly ideas and be really useful to you.

Though she conceded that this fantasy might sound ‘queer’, in fact it is a common enough romantic motif – the dark, dangerous hero who must be maimed or emasculated before he can win a woman’s heart. Only a few years later Charlotte Brontë used the same idea in the denouement of Jane Eyre.

Jenny’s wish was granted, more or less. During their four decades of marriage Marx was often ‘bleeding and ill’; and, since his handwriting was indecipherable to the untrained eye, he depended on her to transcribe his dear, heavenly ideas. Rapture, however, proved rather more elusive in real life than in her giddy dreams.

Half Prometheus, half Mr Rochester: if this is how his adoring fiancée saw him, the attitude of her more conventional relations can well be imagined. To marry a Jew was shocking enough, but to marry a jobless, penniless Jew who had already achieved national notoriety was quite intolerable. Her reactionary half-brother Ferdinand, the head of the family since their father’s death, did his utmost to prevent the union, warning that Marx was a ne’er-do-well who would bring disgrace on the entire tribe of von Westphalens. To escape the incessant gossip and browbeating, Jenny and her mother – who supported her loyally if anxiously throughout – fled from Trier to the fashionable spa resort of Kreuznach, fifty miles away. It was there, at 10 a.m. on 19 June 1843, that the twenty-five-year-old Herr Marx, Doctor of Philosophy, married Fräulein Johanna Bertha Julia Jenny von Westphalen, aged twenty-nine, ‘of no particular occupation’. The only guests were Jenny’s goofy brother Edgar, her mother and a few local friends. None of Karl’s relations attended. The bride wore a green silk dress and a garland of pink roses. The wedding present from Jenny’s mother was a collection of jewellery and silver plate embellished with the Argyll family crest, a legacy from the von Westphalens’ Scottish ancestors. The Baroness also gave them a large box of cash to help them through the first few months of married life but unfortunately the newlyweds took this treasure chest with them on a honeymoon trip up the Rhine, encouraging any indigent friends they happened to meet on the way to help themselves. The money was all gone within a week.

A few days before the wedding ceremony, at Jenny’s insistence, Karl had signed an unusual contract promising that the couple would have ‘legal common ownership of property’ – save that ‘each spouse shall for his or her own part pay the debts he or she has made or contracted, inherited or otherwise incurred before marriage’. One must assume that this was an attempt to placate Jenny’s mother, who was well aware of Marx’s hopelessness with money. But the contract was never enforced, even though he was seldom out of debt thereafter. During the next few years, the Argyll family silver spent more time in the hands of pawnbrokers than in the kitchen cupboard.

In that post-nuptial summer of 1843, the new Mr and Mrs Karl Marx were able to live on next to nothing as guests at the Baroness’s house in Kreuznach while waiting to learn from Ruge when – and where – his new journal would be born. It was an idyllic little interlude. In the evenings, Karl and Jenny would stroll down to the river, listening to the nightingales singing from the woods on the far bank. By day, the editor-elect of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher retreated to a workroom, reading and writing with furious intensity.

Marx always liked to work out his ideas on paper, scribbling down thoughts as they occurred to him, and a surviving page from his Kreuznach notebooks shows the process in action:

Note. Under Louis XVIII, the constitution by grace of the king (Charter imposed by the king); under Louis Philippe, the king by grace of the constitution (imposed kingship). In general we can note that the conversion of the subject into the predicate, and of the predicate into the subject, the exchange of that which determines for that which is determined, is always the most immediate revolution. Not only on the revolutionary side. The king makes the law (old monarchy), the law makes the king (new monarchy).

Once Marx had started on one of these riffs, playing with his beloved contradictions, there was no stopping him. Mightn’t the simple grammatical inversion that turned old monarchs into new also explain where German philosophy had gone wrong? Hegel, for instance, had assumed that ‘the Idea of the State’ was the subject, with society as its predicate, whereas history showed the reverse to be the case. There was nothing wrong with Hegel that couldn’t be cured by standing him on his head: religion does not make man, man makes religion; the constitution does not create the people, but the people create the constitution. Top down and bottom up, it all made perfect sense.

The credit for this discovery belongs to the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, whose Introductory Theses to the Reform of Philosophy had been published in March 1843. ‘Being is subject, thought predicate,’ he argued. ‘Thought arises from being, not being from thought.’ Marx stretched the logic much further by extending it from abstract philosophy to the real world – above all, the world of politics, the state and society. Feuerbach, a former pupil of Hegel, had already travelled quite a distance from his mentor’s idealism towards materialism (his most memorable aphorism, still to be found in dictionaries of quotations, was ‘Man is what he eats’); but it was a studiously cerebral materialism, unrelated to the social and economic conditions of his time or place. Marx’s foray into journalism had convinced him that radical philosophers shouldn’t spend their lives atop a lofty pillar like some ancient Greek anchorite; they must come down and engage with the here and now.

Feuerbach was one of the first writers from whom Marx solicited a contribution to the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher as soon as he knew that its publication was assured. On 3 October 1843, just before setting off to join Ruge in Paris, he wrote to suggest a demolition job on the Prussian court philosopher F. W. von Schelling, his old antagonist from Berlin University. ‘The entire German police is at his disposal, as I myself experienced when I was editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. That is, a censorship order can prevent anything against the holy Schelling from getting through … But just imagine Schelling exposed in Paris, before the French literary world! … I confidently expect a contribution from you in the form you may find most convenient.’ As further enticement, he added a cheeky postscript: ‘Although she does not know you, my wife sends greetings. You would not believe how many followers you have among the fair sex.’

Feuerbach was not seduced. He replied that, in his opinion, it would be rash to move from theory to practice until the theory itself had been honed to perfection. Marx, by contrast, believed the two were – or ought to be – inseparable. Praxis makes perfect, and the most necessary practice for philosophers at this time was ‘merciless criticism of all that exists’. The critique of Hegel had been inspired by Feuerbach; now Feuerbach himself, having served his purpose, must expect to be criticised in turn – most notably in the Theses on Feuerbach, written in the spring of 1845, which conclude with the most succinct summary of the difference between anchorites and activists: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’

Unlike most of the thinkers whom Marx chewed up and spat out, Feuerbach earned his lasting gratitude. ‘I am glad to have an opportunity of assuring you of the great respect and – if I may use the word – love which I feel for you,’ he wrote to Feuerbach in 1844. ‘You have provided – I don’t know whether intentionally – a philosophical basis for socialism … The unity of man with man, which is based on the real differences between men, the concept of the human species brought down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth, what is this but the concept of society!’

In his last weeks at Kreuznach, Marx wrote two important essays which were to appear in the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher. The first, ‘On the Jewish Question’, is usually mentioned only en passant, if at all, in Marxist hagiographies. But it has provided powerful ammunition for his enemies.

Was Marx a self-hating Jew? Although he never denied his Jewish origins, he never drew attention to them either – unlike his daughter Eleanor, who proudly informed a group of workers from the East End of London that she was ‘a Jewess’. In his later correspondence with Engels, he sprayed anti-Semitic insults at his enemies with savage glee: the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, a frequent victim, was described variously as the Yid, Wily Ephraim, Izzy and the Jewish Nigger. ‘It is now quite plain to me – as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify – that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt, unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger,’ Marx wrote in 1862, discussing the ever-fascinating subject of Lassalle’s ancestry. ‘Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also niggerlike.’

Some passages from ‘On the Jewish Question’ have an equally rancid flavour if taken out of context – which they usually are.

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest.

What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling.

What is his secular God? Money …

We therefore recognise in Judaism the presence of a universal and contemporary anti-social element whose historical evolution – eagerly nurtured by the Jews in its harmful aspects – has arrived at its present peak, a peak at which it will inevitably disintegrate.

The emancipation of the Jews is, in the last analysis, the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.

Those critics who see this as a foretaste of Mein Kampf overlook one essential point: in spite of the clumsy phraseology and crude stereotyping, the essay was actually written as a defence of the Jews. It was a retort to Bruno Bauer, who had argued that Jews should not be granted full civic rights and freedoms unless they were baptised as Christians. Although (or perhaps because) Bauer was an ostentatious atheist, he thought Christianity a more advanced phase of civilisation than Judaism, and therefore one step closer to the joyful deliverance which would follow the inevitable destruction of all religion – just as a gravedigger might regard a doddery dowager as a more promising potential customer than the local Queen of the May.

This perverse justification for official bigotry, which allied Bauer with the most reactionary boobies in Prussia, was demolished with characteristic brutality. True, Marx seemed to accept the caricature of Jews as inveterate moneylenders – but then so did almost everyone else. (The German word ‘Judentum’ was commonly used at the time as a synonym for ‘commerce’.) More significantly, he didn’t blame or accuse them: if they were forbidden to participate in political institutions, was it any wonder that they exercised the one power permitted to them, that of making money? Cash and religion both estranged humanity from itself, and so ‘the emancipation of the Jews is, in the last analysis, the emancipation of mankind from Judaism’.

From Judaism, nota bene, not from the Jews. Ultimately, mankind must be freed from the tyranny of all religions, Christianity included, but in the meantime it was absurd and cruel to deny Jews the same status as any other citizen. Marx’s commitment to equal rights is confirmed by a letter he sent from Cologne in March 1843 to Arnold Ruge: ‘I have just been visited by the chief of the Jewish community here, who has asked me for a petition for the Jews to the Provincial Assembly, and I am willing to do it. However much I dislike the Jewish faith, Bauer’s view seems to me too abstract. The thing is to make as many breaches as possible in the Christian state and to smuggle in as much as we can of what is rational.’ It is also borne out by the other major work on which he started during the post-honeymoon summer of 1843, ‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: An Introduction’, which was completed in Paris a few months later and published in the spring of 1844.

Though its title may be familiar only to the initiated, the essay itself is as famous as the article on Judaism is obscure. Many of those who have never read a word of Marx still quote the epigram about religion being the opium of the people. It is one of his most potent metaphors – inspired, one guesses, by the ‘Opium War’ between the British and Chinese, fought from 1839 to 1842. But do those who parrot the words actually understand them? Thanks to his self-appointed interpreters in the Soviet Union, who hijacked the phrase to justify their persecution of old believers, it is usually taken to mean that religion is a drug dispensed by wicked rulers to keep the masses in a state of dopey, bubble-brained quiescence.

Marx’s point was rather more subtle and sympathetic. Though he insisted that ‘the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism’, he understood the spiritual impulse. The poor and wretched who expect no joy in this world may well choose to console themselves with the promise of a better life in the next; and if the state cannot hear their cries and supplications, why not appeal to an even mightier authority who promised that no prayer would go unanswered? Religion was a justification for oppression – but also a refuge from it. ‘Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’

Most eloquent. Elsewhere in the essay, however, his verbal facility occasionally degenerates into mere word-juggling for its own sake – or, to be blunt, showing off. Here he is on Martin Luther and the German Reformation:

He destroyed faith in authority, but only by restoring the authority of faith. He transformed the priests into laymen, but only by transforming the laymen into priests. He freed mankind from external religiosity, but only by making religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from the chains, but only by putting the heart in chains.

Or on the difference between France and Germany:

In France it is enough to be something for one to want to be everything. In Germany no one may be anything unless he renounces everything. In France partial emancipation is the basis of universal emancipation. In Germany universal emancipation is the conditio sine qua non of any partial emancipation.

After a few paragraphs of this pyrotechnic flamboyance, one suspects that the display itself has become an end rather than a means.

To wish away Marx’s stylistic excess is, however, to miss the point. His vices were also his virtues, manifestations of a mind addicted to paradox and inversion, antithesis and chiasmus. Sometimes this dialectical zeal produced empty rhetoric, but more often it led to startling and original insights. He took nothing for granted, turned everything upside down – including society itself. How could the mighty be put down from their seat, and the humble exalted? In the critique of Hegel he set out his answer for the first time: what was required was ‘a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes … This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat.’ That last word resounds like a clap of thunder over a parched landscape. Never mind that neither Germany nor France yet had a proletariat worth the name: a storm was coming.

Marx’s theory of class struggle was to be refined and embellished over the next few years – most memorably in the Communist Manifesto – but its outline was already clear enough: ‘Every class, as soon as it takes up the struggle against the class above it, is involved in a struggle with the class beneath it. Thus princes struggle against kings, bureaucrats against aristocrats, and the bourgeoisie against all of these, while the proletariat is already beginning to struggle against the bourgeoisie.’ The role of emancipator therefore passes from one class to the next until universal liberation is finally achieved. In France, the bourgeoisie had already toppled the nobility and the clergy, and another upheaval seemed imminent. Even in stolid old Prussia, medieval government could not prolong its reign indefinitely. With a parting jibe at Teutonic efficiency – ‘Germany, which is renowned for its thoroughness, cannot make a revolution unless it is a thorough one’ – he set off for Paris. It was, he sensed, the only place to be at this moment in history. ‘When all the inner conditions are met, the day of the German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing of the Gallic cock.’