KARL MARX

38 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
anonymously in November what purported to be an arch-conservative
pietist attack on Hegel, entitled The Trump of the Last Judgement on Hegel
the Atheist and Anti-Christ. Under the cover of attacking Hegel, this tract
was designed to show that he was really an atheist revolutionary. Marx
may well have collaborated with Bauer in writing The Trump..., and
some indeed thought it was their joint work. At any rate they certainly
intended jointly to produce a sequel, to be called Hegel's Hatred of Religious
and Christian Art and his Destruction of all the Laws of the State. Marx
therefore began to read a series of books on art and religion. Bauer had
finished his part in December 1841, but he had to publish it without his
collaborator's contribution: in December 1841 Marx was obliged to return
to Trier where Baron von Westphalen had fallen seriously ill. Until his
father-in-law's death on 3 March 1842, Marx stayed in the Westphalen
house and helped, as Bauer put it, to 'lighten the days' of the dying man.
March was a bad month for Marx: not only did he lose his closest friend
and supporter in the Westphalen household, but his hopes of a university
career were shattered when Bauer was deprived of his teaching post on
account of his unorthodox doctrines. While in Trier Marx had already
composed an article which he sent to Arnold Ruge who edited the Deutsche
Jabrbucher.
Ruge, who was to be a close colleague of Marx's for the next two
years, was also an exile from university teaching; being refused a chair
owing to his unorthodox views, he resigned from the university and
devoted himself entirely to journalism. For this he was admirably suited:
he was a man of independent means, and although having no very original
mind, he wrote quickly and well and had a very wide range of contacts. 159
In 1838 he started the Hallische Jahrbiicher which soon became the leading
periodical of the Young Hegelians. Although during the early years the
contributions to the Hallische Jahrbiicher had in general addressed themselves
to an enlightened Prussian state, by 1840 overtly political articles
were beginning to follow on religious ones - a logic implicit in the notion
of the 'Christian state'. As a result the Jahrbiicher was banned in Prussia
in June 1841 and moved to Dresden, where it appeared under the title
Deutsche Jahrbiicher.^ During 1840 the Berlin Young Hegelians had begun
to write for it, and by the middle of 1841 Bauer had become a regular
contributor.
Marx had already been introduced to Ruge by his Berlin friend
KOppen, himself a frequent contributor. The article Marx sent to Ruge
111 Kebruary 1842 (together with a covering letter offering to review books
and put all his energies at the service of the Deutsche Jahrbiicher) dealt
with the new censorship instruction issued by Frederick William IV in
December 1841. Frederick William IV had succeeded to the Prussian