KARL MARX

ONE
Trie?] Bonn and Berlin
I feel myself suddenly invaded by doubt and ask myself if your heart
is equal to your intelligence and spiritual qualities, if it is open to
the tender feelings which here on earth are so great a source of
consolation for a sensitive soul; I wonder whether the peculiar demon,
to which your heart is manifestly a prey, is the Spirit of God or that
of Faust. I ask myself - and this is not the least of the doubts
that assail my heart - if you will ever know a simple happiness and
family joys, and render happy those who surround you.
Heinrich Marx to his son, MEGA i i (2) 202.
i. CHILDHOOD
It may seem paradoxical that Karl Marx, whom so many working-class
movements of our time claim as their Master and infallible guide to
revolution, should have come from a comfortable middle-class home. Yet
to a remarkable extent he does himself epitomise his own doctrine that
men are conditioned by their socio-economic circumstances. The German
city in which he grew up gave him a sense of long historical tradition
and at the same time close contact with the grim realities of the underdevelopment
then characteristic of Germany. Thoroughly Jewish in their
origins, Protestant by necessity yet living in a Catholic region, his family
could never regard their social integration as complete. The sense of
alienation was heightened in Marx's personal case by his subsequent
inability to obtain a teaching post in a university system that had no room
for dissident intellectuals.
Marx was born in Trier on 5 May 1818. A community of about 15,000
inhabitants, it was the oldest city in Germany 1 and also one of the loveliest
- situated as it was in the Mosel valley, surrounded by vineyards and
luxuriating in an almost Mediterranean vegetation. Under the name of
Augusta Treverorum the city had been considered the Rome of the North
and served as the headquarters of the most powerful of the Roman armies.
The Porta Nigra, in whose shadow (literally) Marx grew up, and the
enormous fourth-century basilica were enduring monuments of Trier's