Karl Marx Prince of Darkness

By George Fabian

If Marx in his famous quip called religion the opium of the people, opium was the religion of Marx (see page 28 of the book).

Amid some 20,000 titles on Marx, this ranks as one of the most comprehensive and subversive studies of him. The reader learns for the first time here that:

*This father of communism, idolized today as a beacon of light, was in truth a drug addict intent on stripping us all of civic freedoms and, still worse, corralling us into labor camps as superficial bourgeois riff-raff.

*In contrast, his close friend Friedrich Engels imagined communism as a higher stage of civilization, and his views have mistakenly become associated with Marx.

*Behind the faade of unity, Marx and Engels feuded over the goals, strategy, and tactics of communism. This conflict marred The Communist Manifesto and Capital, warranting their fundamental reinterpretation.

*Engels initiated an astonishing image makeover that eventually transformed Marx the self-appointed gravedigger of civil society into its savior.

Apart from challenges to serious students of Marx and Marxism, the book also offers intersecting human-touch stories of his dark self, his family, friends and contemporaries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 24, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462874330

George Fabian

George Fabian is an investigative historian, lecturer, and writer.  A graduate cum laude of Charles University in Prague, he received multidisciplinary instruction that included all facets of Marxism and the art of critical reading and interpretation of documents. Subsequently he pursued advanced education and research in Germany, the United States, and Canada. Coming of age, he has honed his analytical skills as military intelligence specialist, archivist, crusading journalist, businessman, commodity trader, and university professor lecturing in modern European history. Karl Marx Prince of Darkness is his first book in English, the product of nine years of research and writing. His current projects include a study on the life and work of Franz Kafka as well as a sequel to Marx, on Lenin and the infancy of 20th century communism. Amid some 20,000 titles on Marx, this ranks as one of the most comprehensive and subversive studies of him. The reader learns for the first time here that: The book also offers intersecting human-touch stories of Marx’s dark self, his family, friends and contemporaries. After some 20,000 titles and counting on Marx, the reader learns for the first time here that: *The most comprehensive account thus far of Marx and the origins of Marxism, the book also offers intersecting human-touch stories of interest to any history buff of his family, friends and contemporaries The closing sections also trace an unprecedented image makeover, which eventually transformed the self-appointed gravedigger of civilization Marx into its savior. *Among other startling findings, Marx betrayed comrades to German police for political gain and money, wrote Das Kapital  heavily under the influence of drugs, and grossly abused his youngest daughter Eleanor. The book also traces an unprecedented image makeover, which eventually transformed the self-appointed gravedigger of civilization Marx into its savior.

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Copyright © 2011 by George Fabian.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011908124

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Acknowledgments

Driven by primary sources, this study has been produced with due attention to my peers’ literary output. With rare exceptions there has not been a book that failed to enrich my understanding of the subject. In this sense, I humbly acknowledge the debt to my colleagues at large (and make them responsible for the errors committed to paper here).

My thanks for support rendered go to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, the libraries of the University of Toronto, and the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.

Guessing rightly or wrongly the manuscript might be too unconventional for regular publisher, I opted for assisted self-publishing. While the staff at XLibris has proven to be unfailingly accommodative, Amy Ramirez and Ryan Cortes deserve mention for their patience and valuable copyediting suggestions. It must be observed that self– and e–publishing have dramatically expanded the scope of intellectual intercourse.

At the end of a long journey, my gratitude goes to my colleagues, family and friends for their encouragement, as well as to M. Amodeo who enthusiastically proofread the manuscript; and to Frances Bleviss who offered advice and stylistic improvements. The latter also wrote the last sentence of the book.

Contents

Prologue

Part I

Return to the Future

Background

The Anguish of Young Marx

The Black Fellow from Trier

The Legacy of Two Cities, Two Sages

Rousseau and Proto-communism

The Romantic Visionaries

Socialism and Anarchism

Doomsday Now: The Birth of Communism

The German Trailblazers

Engels: Strength in Faith

Engelsism

Marx Turns Red, 1842-43

In the Paris Maelstrom

Communism in One Country

In Praise of Dark Ages

The Yin and Yang of Marxism

The Charm Offensive, 1844-45

The End of Illusions

The German Ideology

In Praise of Slavery

The Harney Factor

1847: Eve of the Storm

The Communist Manifesto

1848: ‘Stuck in the German Muck’

The Last Gasp of Radicalism

Endnotes to Prologue and Part I

Part II

That Damned Book

The ‘English Disease’

Doktor Faustus

The Cologne Trial

Repercussions

Back to Economics: Gloom Amid Boom

In Praise of Despotism

Black Madonna

Farewell to the Past?

Back to Economics: Damn the Reality

When Left Is Right

The Emancipation of Lassalle

The Champagne Time

Return to the Left: The International

Capital, Volumes II and III

‘In the Interest of the Working Class’

Capital, Volume I

Aftermath: Gold is False

Endnotes to Part II

Part III

The Long Sunset

If Marx Ruled Albion

Comrade Bakunin

The Paris Commune

Blowing Up the International

Germany, the Land of Democratic Communism?

The Russian Card

Engelsian Marxism

Bismarck Strikes

The Assassination of Alexander II

I Am Not a Marxist

Eleanor Marx

The Cull of Goddess Demeter

Reinventing Marx

City on the Hill

1890s: The Eclipse of Marxism?

The Tragedy on Jew’s Walk

Epilogue

Endnotes to Part III and Epilogue

Select Bibliography

Prologue

The subject of this book is hardly virgin territory. For generations, Karl Marx has attracted some of the brightest of scholars and authors.1 Though sophisticated studies on various aspects of his intellectual legacy do exist, his personal life remains surprisingly unscrutinized and his political centerfold understated. It would appear that Marx is defined by his totemic photographic images rather than by his ideas. Thus mainstream authors conjure him up nowadays as a visionary in the league of Bill Gates of Microsoft fame,2 a gentle, semi-anarchist guru of anti-capitalism who contemplated a society the aspects of which would be ‘extremely attractive’ to so many.3

Work on this volume began before respect for Marx reached such arcane heights and has trended in the opposite direction. Delving into his private and public life, I found him far more layered and controversial than assumed. Under what surely is a teflon coating there hides a fascinating, astonishingly multifaceted persona. Marx’s daughter Eleanor was understandably overwhelmed by the prospect of writing his biography: I only despair when I think of… gathering together all those loose threads and weaving them into a whole.4 This book, then, attempts to convey Marx’s complexity. In doing so, it expands, substantially revises, and streamlines the general understanding of his personality, politics, ideology and economics, within the context of nineteenth-century society.

As the story line evolves here, young Marx was handicapped by a botched attempt at engineering a new man through drugs. It limited his options and triggered his existential revolt against society. The solace he found was the nascent primitivist communism that defied both free will and materialistic civilization. A parallel scrutiny identifies social trends that gave rise to and nurtured this ideology of misery and repression in the name of the common good (and finds them distressingly banal).

In this formative stage Marx also met Friedrich Engels, whose notion of communism was decidedly sunnier. A major undertaking here has been to identify and separate their personal and political values and record their conflicts and conciliation. Part I should make clear, for example, that their joint studies, such as The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto, do not express a single view, and that the label reactionary found in their early texts may be Engels’ assessment of his co-author.

Part II, in the main reconstructs the factors that motivated Marx’s work on Capital, delayed its completion and shaped his economic arguments. The story of his opus magnum comes out here as ‘a tale of politics, intrigue, money, drugs and sex’ (see page 333 inside). The reader versed in economics may also be surprised to learn that both Marx and Engels regarded the centerpoint of Capital to be as valid as the claim of flat earth.

Interspersed with sections dealing with theory are chapters on Marx’s politics, particularly his interaction with German radicals, royal regimes and Russian revolutionaries. Much of the evidence adduced here of his reprehensible conduct was known of or rumored in his lifetime, only to be ignored or suppressed later.

Interwoven with the reconstruction of Marx as homo politicus are probes into his private life. Venturing beyond customary platitudes, I examine and connect multiple strands of evidence to arrive at conclusions that contrast sharply with his image as a somewhat impractical intellectual. The context should make it obvious that far from demonizing, I strive to reconnect the name with the real person responsive to real-life impulses. Ultimately, there are no genuine heroes or villains here but rather victims of circumstance.

The closing sections of this work trace Engels’ effort to give Marxism his own imprint as well as smudge his differences with Marx. Engels also started an unprecedented image makeover that eventually morphed the owner of arguably the most regressive mind ever into a shiny humanistic visionary and pinnacle of nineteenth century wisdom.

A skeptical reader may ask where the textual support for all this is. The short answer: much of it hides in plain sight, in fifty volumes of the collected works of Marx and Engels and other printed primary sources. Marx and Engels left behind a thick trail of evidence that in itself—paradoxically—seems to intimidate a conscientious reader and obstruct probing scholarship.

Sadly, also, the authors’ myopia and self-censorship mar this field of inquiry—consider the three cases that follow.

In a letter of 1837, Heinrich Marx effectively accused his son Karl of indulgence in opium smoking. The charge has always been overlooked, and still is: a recent chronicler quotes from the epistle, again stopping short of the incriminating sentence.5 The other instance dates to 1846-47, when Marx declared the cotton slavery of the American South an inspiration for communism. A potential bombshell and yet it has never received scholarly attention. In fact, the compiler of Marx’s writings on America has deleted the revealing passage from the reprinted text.6 In the third case in point, a few years after Marx died, his daughter Eleanor sighed that he had not given her a child of her own. Can we plausibly assume, as her biographer suggests, that she merely regretted not getting her sister’s children into her temporary care?7

Seemingly extraneous and disconnected, these fragments are accounted for and assigned a common denominator.

Further, though Marx had ‘the gift of plainspeaking’,8 he rarely used it. Operating in an unfriendly world, he learned to hide his ideas and impulses behind his words. The process of discovery here stumbles over semantic traps he relished laying, over his dialectical ambiguities, metaphoric language and a habit of contradicting himself. If, for example, in volume III of Capital and elsewhere he alternatively propounded and rescinded the labor value theory, the traditional true-or-false grading of evidence is grossly inadequate. Every word is a chamber pot, and not an empty one, Heinrich Heine claims in Romanzero, and his pun seems tailored for Marx. In a departure from the common practice of discarding the ill-fitting specifics, this work strives rigorously to account for them in a hierarchy of values.

The complex and conflicting texts have necessitated adjustments in research and presentation.* The scope of inquiry is widened to include Marx’s precursors and contemporary trends; the analysis employs modern methods of investigation; the narrative incorporates both the accidental and the discursive; the standard of proof is set at ‘on balance of probability’ to reflect the slippery nature of evidence. Accepting that—to paraphrase de Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince—what’s important may not be visible to the eye, I also undertake to interpret the emptied chamber pots, so to speak, the frequent gaps in preserved sources.

* A hybrid style adopted here reflects the diverse nature of evidence. Double quotation marks are used for primary sources—quotes from Marx, his contemporaries or predecessors—while single quotation marks indicate secondary sources or indirect quotations; punctuation marks enclose quotation marks.

In order to keep the storyline reasonably straight, I may introduce major points before they become fully apparent, with the understanding that the subsequent text must confirm their validity. Hypotheses, the fount of learned advance, are not shied from when tethered to facts or historical context.

I hope the shadowy corners in the lives of Marx, Bismarck and others profiled here, or the tragedy of Marx’s youngest daughter Eleanor, will grip the reader just as they motivated my research. The segments dealing with ideology and economics, however, may be taxing to the uninitiated. If the story were simple, it would already have been told.

To make the intricate issues more digestible, I have cleansed the language as much as possible of Marxist jargon, untangled convoluted texts or rephrased the arguments. Minor errors or interpretive inaccuracies will inevitably show here; some mysteries will remain unsolved. Such a devilishly complex assignment as this may on occasion overwhelm my capacity for plain delivery.

It cannot be otherwise. If the story is not told now, it may never be told. Almost certainly, numerous points made here would not register with an author of a different background. In particular, my formative years spent in a rarefied Kafkaesque communism that blended repression with absurdity may have primed me for a project of this nature.

As miffed as some readers may be seeing their core assumptions challenged, I am confident the pages below substantiate the need for a systematic reexamination of Marx, the genesis of Marxism and of communist ideology. I would like to believe the story presented here is the first outline of the truth.

You are hereby invited to revisit the life and times of a man who erected the signposts for the tragic march of folly that by its end in the late twentieth century claimed more lives than had two world wars combined.

Part I

Return to the Future

Background

Karl Marx’s birthplace Trier is Germany’s oldest town boasting a history that stretches back more than two millennia. The town flourished as a Roman outpost against the barbarians, the glorious period still remembered by landmarks like the gate of Porta Nigra. It also played a significant role in the medieval politics of Central Europe. With the advent of modernity, however, Trier lost its shine and lapsed into a provincial center drawing on agriculture and particularly wine-making. Located in the valley of the Mosel River, the town is at the heart of the region that has been producing quality vinous goods since time immemorial.

We can assume that growing up in this historic enclave—and at a stone’s throw from Porta Nigra—imbued in Marx heightened sensitivity to his generation’s Romantic yearning for the past.

Religion was another obvious influence in his early life. Marx’s ancestors belonged to the Jewish Diaspora that—wedge between German and Slavic worlds—produced more than its fair share of luminaries. The family could trace its lineage to the famed Rabbi Judah Löwy of Prague, the embodiment of Jewish wisdom. On his paternal side, Marx’s grandfather emigrated from Bohemia westward eventually to settle as a rabbi in Trier. The inscription on his and his father’s monument at the old Jewish cemetery in Trier described each of them as a priest of higher calling. This sense of family exceptionality and high aspirations would be instilled in Karl Marx by his father Heinrich.

As with other inhabitants of the town near the French border, the Marx family was also impacted by its western neighbor’s culture and politics. That influence increased in 1797 when the Rhineland, including Trier, was attached to Napoleonic France and stamped with the liberalizing measures of the French Revolution. For numerous Jewish communities on the west bank of the Rhine, this meant the repeal of all anti-Jewish legislation and full citizenship, two groundbreaking concessions decreed by the French National Assembly in 1791. In 1808, however, Napoleon reintroduced restrictions, forcing the Jewish middle class to reconsider its status in society.

The same year, as the future clouded over, the family changed its surname from Levi or Halevi to Marx. This gave the rabbi’s younger son Heinrich (Herschel) Marx (1777-1838), a chance to pursue a career in jurisprudence. Qualified as a lawyer and working as a court clerk, in November 1814 Heinrich married Henrietta Pressburg (1788-1864), daughter of the rabbi in the Dutch town of Nymwegen. As the surname indicates, her family hailed from Pressburg, today Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia.

Such cross-border nuptial matching of a bride and groom living 250 km apart suggests an arrangement between the two rabbinical families. The Dutch-speaking Henrietta came into marriage with a sizable dowry of over 11,000 taler. Lacking formal education, she never learned German well, but was intelligent and levelheaded, proving a suitable partner to her gentle yet motivated husband.

Simultaneous with the marriage, Napoleon’s Empire crumbled, and the new Bourbon King Louis XVIII lifted the restrictions on Jews in France. Might the same be expected from Prussia which had seized the Napoleonic Rhineland to become by far the largest German state? Heinrich Marx pleaded for racial and religious tolerance in a memorandum to the new Governor-General,9 but without success. The Prussian government in fact reinforced existing anti-Jewish legislation. In the year of Karl Marx’s birth, the Jews of Prussia found themselves once again barred from such careers as teachers, judges, lawyers, soldiers, doctors or pharmacists.

Intended to force assimilation, this act of intolerance worked. Jewish professionals began converting to Christianity. Heinrich Marx was baptized in 1820, followed four years later by his children and in 1825 by his wife Henrietta. Heinrich’s brother Hirsch delayed conversion until 1831.

The converts received fair treatment in post-Napoleonic Germany. By 1830 Heinrich Marx was an affluent attorney living with family in a spacious house and investing in wine and vineyards. Politically he was a freethinker rather than a democrat. The controversial Rousseau appears to have been the most debated author in Marx’s household next to Voltaire, the supporter of enlightened absolutism. Personally ambitious in his early years, Heinrich Marx matured to accept his limitations as a small-town attorney.

Not unlike most parents, he expected his children to carry the torch much farther. However, they became the most traumatic aspect of his life. Henrietta Marx gave birth to nine children. The oldest, son Moritz, died in 1819 at the age of four, not unusual in an age when child mortality was high. Daughter Sofia (born 1816) and son Karl (born 1818), survived into adulthood. Of six more children that followed, however, only two lived full lives—and they happened to be of the gender not expected to excel, the daughters Louise (1821-93) and Emily (1823-88). Four others died young. The Marx children’s mortality rate at sixty-six percent was excessive even by the contemporary standard. The prosperous family of Friedrich Engels senior at Barmen, for example, consisted of eight children, among them Karl’s best friend, all of whom had normal life spans.

According to the German chronicler, the quartet of Karl Marx’s younger siblings died of (pulmonary) tuberculosis.10 This is a misconception for the official death certificates attributed death by tuberculosis—Lungensucht in German—only to Karl’s younger brother Hermann. Even this may have been a misdiagnosis by Trier officials. The cause of death of the three other siblings, Henrietta (1820-1845), Caroline (1824-47), and Eduard (1826-37) was Schwindsucht, wasting away due to starvation.

When Karl Marx’s son Edgar died in similar circumstances in 1855, the grieving father would call it abdominal consumption—as opposed to a ‘pulmonary’ one or tuberculosis—and declare it hereditary in my family.11

While this type of consumption is virtually unknown in the developed world, until the nineteenth century it was a fact of life. As a medical doctor in 1890 explained in a socialist newspaper, Schwindsucht is brought about by insufficient nourishment or overextension and results in a gradual shutdown of bodily functions. In striking contrast to tuberculosis, this is a disorder that can be easily cured with ample diet. Since this remedy was less easily available to the lower classes, Schwindsucht was the ‘proletarian disease’, observed the doctor. The children of the affluent rarely died of it.12

By 1830 the Marxes lived comfortably in a house with fourteen doors and windows, owned vineyards, and employed two maids. Why did they then allow their children—at least three of them—to succumb to this proletarian curse?

The answer ought to start with an excursus on opium, the gelled juice of the poppy head. Serious students of narcotics would probably concur that the drug’s use and abuse was more widespread in the past and its impact on individuals and society far more pervasive than is generally assumed. Known since time immemorial as the most effective painkiller (until Bayer in 1899 introduced aspirin), opium was nearly as common as pain, and invited experimentation. From time to time, the drug was also used for its narcotic effect and as a performance-enhancing substance.

After the British consolidated their hold on the Bengal poppy fields, in the closing decades of the 18th century opium became more plentiful and its price dropped, making it more affordable to creative segments of society. Under the influence of opium diluted in alcohol, the brew known as laudanum (in Latin ‘worthy of praise’), in 1797 Samuel Coleridge produced the most imaginative work of his life, the poem Kubla Khan, featuring the dreamscape of Xanadu. By the time his opium habit became public in 1816, he was a revered man of letters. Thus it did not take much to connect the drug with creativity. The Byronic generation discovered—as Coleridge put it—the milk of the Paradise.

Before long, the secret was out. Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859), the diminutive Oxford-trained essayist, in 1821 anonymously published Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Presenting himself as scholar and philosopher, he extolled the fascinating powers of opium, far superior to the gross and mortal enjoyment of alcohol. Here he describes his initiation to the drug at the age of 28: What a revulsion! What an upheaval… what an apocalypse of the world within me… the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea… for all human woes; here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages. Even more impressive, he found opium indispensable for sustaining the philosopher’s possession of a superb intellect in its analytical function, nay for greatly increasing the activity of the mind generally.13

Elsewhere in his book, de Quincey mentions the obverse, the sense of incapacity and feebleness… neglect and procrastination… deep-seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy… I seemed every night to descend… into chasms and sunless abysses, depth below depth from which it seemed hopeless that I could ever re-ascend. Alternatively the author’s Oriental dreams placed him in a chamber of horrors, haunted by a hideous crocodile multiplied into a thousand of repetitions. The opium empire founded on the spells of pleasure may in fact offer only tortures and carry the risk of turning the user mad debilitated by opium, he observed.

In spite of all this, de Quincey claimed there was no need to worry. Everything the doctors had written about opium—he meant primarily the risk of addiction—was lies! lies! lies! He was proof that the opium, after seventeen years’ use and eight years’ abuse… may still be renounced. For a discretionary length of time, "happiness might now be bought for penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket: portable ecstasies might be corked up in a pint bottle; and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the mail coach".14

In fact, within a decade, de Quincey’s paradise turned into a torture chamber. Unable to kick his addiction, from the 1830s he lived in poor health, perpetually broke, constantly angling for loans from his friends and publishers, changing addresses to avoid debtor’s prison. His aspiration of becoming a respected philosopher had washed away in laudanum, and when he turned to political economy, he produced nothing of substance. Dispirited and wrecked by chronic pain, he even failed to write the sequel to the Confessions he had promised and would spend his last years in delirium. The erudite Coleridge also slumped intellectually well before his death in 1834.

Biographers tend to amplify the importance of their subjects, but this would hardly apply to de Quincey. Though other than medical uses of opium still carried the stigma of impropriety, his tour of exhibitionism cemented a growing fascination with the drug. A succession of prominent Romantics associated themselves with opium—Byron, Shelley, Keats, Edgar Alan Poe, Goya, Berlioz, Baudelaire, Balzac, Richard Wagner, Victor Hugo—along with countless others. In fact, based on evidence accumulated below, the reader may concur that any prominent personality, intellectual or artist born in the Romantic period might be suspected of non-medicinal use of opiates unless clearly exempted. More than the other narcotics of the day, hashish and cannabis, opium became le drogue romantique, the fetish of the age and the ticket to fame.15

Though de Quincey was so tragically wrong, his widely publicized Confessions remained unchallenged as a bible of the ambitious and sybarites until the early 1880s. For six decades, the author and self-described Church of Opium Pope arguably impacted the lifestyle of nineteenth century society as no other individual did.

Opium was also gaining popularity in Germany, the nation whose educated marched in lockstep with England and France. By the turn of the century the great Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832)—now associating with Friedrich von Schiller—had opium prescriptions discreetly filled in his Weimar pharmacy. For the public—in Maxims and Reflections—he praised opium merely as an intoxicant along with tobacco and wine. Yet as he acquired a taste for the drug, Goethe also shifted from the classicist mode to Romanticism and at last completed his masterpiece, the first part of Faust (1808), a reworking of the old tale about a man who trades his self-worth and dignity for money. Goethe’s version is about selling one’s soul for the greener tree of knowledge, possibly an allusion to an opium-enhanced talent.

In 1824, then, already corroded by his indulgence, Goethe received the upcoming poet Heinrich Heine, another opium user who arrived aware that his host too struggled with weight loss, the typical concern of addicts. Confounding their future biographers, these two masters of metaphor and nuance conversed about the seemingly irrelevant subject, poppy fields along the road from Jena to Weimar. What was his guest’s present interest? Goethe inquired. Faust! was the answer, suggesting Heine too was willing to pay for success with opiatic tribulations. While imitation may be the highest form of flattery, the quip impinged on Goethe’s genuine talent. With Have you any other business at Weimar, Herr Heine? Goethe curtly dismissed his guest never to invite him again.16

We can presume from the tenor of this conversation that by the 1820s Germany’s elite also attributed heightened creativity to opium. In general, however, opium use in Germany was far more secretive than in Britain and almost certainly less common. The drug remained restricted to the more affluent segments of the population.17

The question of why opium users struggle with weight loss must be answered now. One of the side effects of opiates is spasmodic muscles, often described by addicts as ‘muscle rheumatism’. Fibromyalgia produces similar symptoms, but the opiates specifically cramp the passage controlling the feeding tube (esophagus) and its twin, the breathing tube (larynx). This turns the consumption of food and liquids into an excruciating task; in fact, the constriction of the esophagus can push the swallowed food and drinks back through the nose or into the breathing tube. Unlike sufferers from anorexia nervosa, opium addicts in truth have an appetite that cannot be satisfied. Preventing starvation thus becomes the addict’s lifelong challenge. This may explain why opium has often been taken with wine or other alcohol that, acting as a muscle relaxant, unlocks the esophagus.

On a steady diet of laudanum, countless Romantics were nonetheless unable to consume even simple meals or drinks without experiencing intense agony.

Sadly, as opium was gaining popularity amongst the lower classes, in particular in England’s industrial districts, children were also drawn into this craze. Since the 1820s the syrupy opium concoctions designed specifically for children trickled on market to become one of the first discretionary consumables aiming at all classes.

The syrups’ growing popularity reflected more than the need for pacifiers. Once de Quincey’s claim of success and happiness for a cent a day reached the ordinary folks, well-meaning parents embraced opium as a wonder drug. As a student of early industrial society—Friedrich Engels—deduced from the findings of the Royal Commission of 1841, such opiatic syrups were meant to strengthen children.18

Here was the chance for the underprivileged to enhance their offspring’s standing chances in the dog-eat-dog world of industry and commerce. Cranky if denied the opiatic syrup, they were fed more of the same, producing more crankiness and morbidity. Child deaths from emaciation and convulsion rose dramatically in England in the 1830s. Drawing on the Blue Book of 1841, Engels registered the heavy toll opiates took on the young and innocent.19

The devastating impact of addiction was not yet common knowledge by 1828 when the Confessions of an English Opium Eater appeared in French. The translator, the up-and-coming novelist and poet Alfred de Musset and himself an opium user, further embellished the text with his own observations. The book stirred interest in France and was reviewed in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, the favorite reading of educated Germans. By the early 1830s other French artists—Balzac, Eugèn Sue, Daumier—manifested their absorption with opium.20

That takes us back to the French-oriented Heinrich Marx. In spite of the name change and conversion to Christianity, this son of a rabbi still coped with residual intolerance and felt uneasy among fellow-burghers. For example, he and his family were reported only once to have attended Sunday mass, the small town version of social outings. Feeling handicapped by his Jewishness, he was determined to secure a better future for himself and his children. No sacrifice is too great for me if the welfare of my children requires it, he vowed.21 In order to give them an education in the public system, he had them baptized, risking the wrath of his wife and of extended family, and this in the Lutheran Church, the predominant religion in Prussia, even though Trier was mainly Catholic.

For generations, poppy-head tea had commonly been served to children as a pacifier. If this ambitious lawyer learned that in higher doses opium opens the path to happiness and success, would he deny it to himself and his offspring? The answer—until a more plausible one is established—must follow the ‘Occam razor’, the postulate that the simplest explanation is also the likeliest. We can assume that by 1830 Heinrich Marx’s children were introduced to opium, the fad of the generation,22 and gradually wilted from exposure to it—as did their countless cousins at large.23

In 1818 Mary Shelley, herself a laudanum user, published Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the nightmarish story of a medical student who produces a highly intelligent man-like creature which turns against his creator. Along with Faust and de Quincey’s Confessions, it helped generate the belief amongst the Romantics that modern man can reinvent himself in a new, higher form.

On evidence adduced here, opium had become the Marx family Frankenstein. Tragically, the children were not spared. Four of Karl Marx’s younger siblings would die young, and so would four of his own seven children. Of his three daughters who lived to adulthood, one would die in suicidal mood at 39; the other two would use opiates and commit suicide. Of Marx’s nine grandchildren, five also died at an early age, as far as can be ascertained also from starvation or convulsion, major markers of opiates.

The Anguish of Young Marx

Heinrich Marx’s son Karl (May 5, 1818—March 14, 1883) turned twelve in 1830, the age that helped him withstand his father’s experimentation. From the little known about his early years he was an imperious character. A terrible tyrant to his sisters, he reportedly forced them to eat mud. According to one of them, Emily, he also called her unimaginable names. He would have very few contacts with his siblings as an adult. In fact, despite the parents’ dedication, the clan was quite dysfunctional. Eleanor quipped on further unidentified weird conduct and propensity to hallucinations of her close relatives: I think our family is going quite mad.24

Heinrich Marx’s younger son Hermann certainly was slow-witted. It is a pity that this well-meaning youth has not got a better brain, his father regretted in 1836. In poor health, Hermann would die at the age of 24. As the hapless Heinrich and Henrietta watched in pain and horror their children fading, the oldest living son Karl seemed destined to carry the torch. Referring to his splendid natural gifts, the father expected him to rise high one day in the world and entertained the flattering hope to see… [his] name in high repute.25 Yet Karl’s scholastic record was far from conspicuous.

The high school in Trier he attended between 1830 and 1835 was a Jesuit-affiliated gymnasium staffed by competent teachers. Under the progressive headmaster Johann Wyttenbach, it also harbored—like other schools in Rhineland—the spirit of resistance to Prussia. Still, the young Marx turned out to be a rather underachieving student. Upon graduation, he received top marks in German and Latin, but mediocre grades in Greek, French and history. He barely passed math and failed trigonometry. His average (1 being the top, 5 the bottom) was 2.4, much worse than that of his classmate and future brother-in-law Edgar von Westphalen who, one year younger, scored 1.8.

Karl ranked amid the country bumpkins, as he dismissed the pack of underprivileged students on a stipend destined for priesthood.26 He had no friends and no evidence points to his political activism.

Might this indifference reflect a diet of opium? The answer is so elusive. A dark ballad The Mother that Karl penned in adolescence evoked a grim scene of a loving and laughing mother who inadvertently lets a snake suck sweet blood of and kill her baby boy.27 Since, as the page below shows, Marx also used the metaphor of a harmful snake in his high school essay relating to opium, the poem can be interpreted as a reflection on his mother Henrietta’s administering opium-laced syrup.

For the teenager growing up in the climate of Francophilia that gripped Trier after the 1830 revolution, however, opium smoking was the vogue. The habit had been popularized in France by Napoleon’s soldiers returning from the Egyptian campaign of 1797, eventually spreading into the French-administered Rhineland. When Prussia annexed the territory in 1815, the recreational use of opium was proscribed along with liberties, and the drug reverted to prescription-only status. After 1815, then, specifically, opium smoking acquired the taste of a forbidden fruit with political subtext. The elongated waterpipe, perfected for opium in 18th century Turkey, apparently became the Rhenish Romantics’ piece de résistance, the symbol of passive defiance of Prussian overlordship.

In his first published text, a poem, the teenage Marx described his experience as an opium smoker in a metaphor: Stabbed in his soul by a blood-stained sword, he observes the hellish vapors invade his head until he goes mad and his heart is altered. With Satan I have struck the deal.28

When did Marx start tasting the hellish vapors? In August 1836, he and the Trier contingent in Bonn gathered at nearby Bad Godesberg to celebrate the end of the school year. The badly preserved group portrait shows the bibulous students availing themselves of the elongated porcelain pipes with receptacle—the ubiquitous paraphernalia of opium smoking.29

Opium smoke appears already to have influenced the essay he chose to graduate with in 1835, On Choice of Profession. It elicited a mixed review from the principal who faulted it for the lack of clarity. Wyttenbach obviously referred to the parts describing Karl’s existential struggle.

Man is free to choose his position in society, Karl asserts early on, but the choice can destroy his whole life, frustrate all his plans, and make him unhappy. Our own reason cannot be a councilor here… being deceived by emotion and blinded by phantasy. Deity provides a guide… but this voice can easily be drowned in personal turmoil. Karl renders here images befitting de Quincey: Our imagination, perhaps set on fire, our emotions excited, phantoms flit before our eyes, and we plunge headlong into what impetuous instinct suggests, which we imagine the Deity himself has pointed out to us. This excitement, however, proves to be passing: What we ardently embrace soon repels us and we see our whole existence in ruins.

In the follow-up sequence Karl blames Faustian temptation for this trap: Reason can no longer restrain the man who is tempted by the demon of ambition, and he plunges headlong into what impetuous instincts suggest: he no longer chooses his position in life, instead it is determined by chance and illusion. This ambition-related demon ultimately leaves our wishes unfulfilled, our ideas unsatisfied, and turns us against the Deity and mankind. The mature Marx would call it alienation.

He who cannot resist life’s tempestuous stress or lacks a talent, or cannot exercise it worthily, loses faith in God, humanity and himself, Karl proceeds. He is shamed into self-contempt, and what feeling is more painful. It numbs man’s strength and morale—and it resides in one’s chest: Self-contempt is a serpent that ever gnaws at one’s breath, sucking the life-blood from one’s heart.30

This first text by Marx is—like his subsequent accounts —indisputably personal. The trait displayed here strikingly—of self-hate and self-pity—would mark much his adult life, prompting his interpreters to attribute it to his resentment of his Jewish origin.31 The teenage Marx’s imagery, including the reference to the devil, however, points to an alternate explanation. As the expert advises, self-hate is also the effect of addiction. Once the drug user loses his will to resist and becomes dependent, he begins to be afraid of himself and loses self-respect.32 A close reading of evidence indeed points to this source of Karl’s low self-esteem.

For one, his chest metaphor had a realistic foundation. Though the graduate’s physical condition was excellent, his lungs were indeed compromised. Two years later, his military service was deferred because of a bad chest and blood spitting. The military examiner could have been bribed, of course, but Karl’s breathing apparatus and discharge were of genuine concern also to his father. In 1840 he was declared a total invalid because of his irritability of lungs.33 Coping with deficient lungs at such an early age, his organism compensated by growing them larger, giving the adult Marx a barrel chest. This is an occurrence typical of opium smokers.

The teenage Marx’s gamut of emotions certainly ran deeper than self-hate: he was horrified by his growing psycho-physiological liabilities, the prospect of losing health and moral fiber. His allusion to making a wrong choice for the devil of ambition—antedating his ‘deal with Satan’ in the aforementioned poem—also reflected his growing disillusionment with the father-initiated opiatic experiment. This explains why the young Marx was poignantly crying for help, seeking a deity or counselor to deliver him from temptation.

Marx as a drug addict? Most surprising about this issue is that it has been ignored for so long, considering the place of opium in the Romantic age, as well as his sybaritic personality and a host of health and financial troubles he had coped with since adolescence.

These problems, in the conventional rationalization, stemmed from his indulgence in alcohol and tobacco. Yet judged by the recollections of his acquaintances, Marx did not take alcohol well, and his drinking binges stopped in the 1850s. He did continue smoking tobacco or cigars, we learn, but these alone could not account for the growing severity of his woes, nor did they preclude the abuse of intoxicants. Far from it: polydrug use was then as common among addicts as it is now.

There is little doubt that the mature Marx took opiates by prescription, supposedly an exculpatory circumstance. However, the dividing line between the medical use and abuse of opiates was blurred in nineteenth century society. They were prescribed against an assortment of real or imaginary ailments including their side effects. Prescription opiates had become the medium that kept the addict bouncing from relapse to relapse. Evidence shows, however, that Marx also indulged in over-the-counter opiates and on occasion consumed them in the most drastic, nay decadent form. He also experimented with opium substitutes or enhancers, as well as with substances and healing methods that his contemporary and crusader against opium Dr. Calkins identified as anti-opiatic remedies of the day.34

In Marx’s century, a reliable marker of addiction to opiates was a persistent flu-like condition, coughing, running nose and watery eyes.35 Numerous persons introduced in this book lived with this virtual flu or cold, as did Marx who coughed and sneezed summer or winter, sometimes referring to the ‘flu’ in quotation marks in order to convey its quasi-realistic nature. He clearly considered these symptoms self-induced.

Nearly all his adult life Marx also coped with a plethora of symptomatic disorders including insomnia, cramps, hand tremor, partial paralysis, lack of appetite, nausea, vomiting, sweating, and alternating constipation and diarrhea. While individually these are not necessarily indicative of opium addiction, their confluence is.

Judged by the nature and multitude of mature Marx’s troubles, smoking remained his preferred form of opium intake. Smoking takes longer to produce dependence than oral ingestion but inflicts serious collateral damage. The heavily particled smoke is only superficially filtered by passing through the water receptacle and the pipe’s purposely elongated neck. The smoker’s respiratory system is flooded with irritants and toxins. The common effect is laryngitis or a fevered throat and unrelenting nocturnal cough which, unlike its morning, tobacco variety, robs the addict of sleep and energy.

Apart from coughing heavily for much of his life, in a creeping degradation of his breathing system, from his thirties Marx coped with bronchitis, with pulmonary or thoracic inflammation in his later life, and with lung abscesses and pulmonary apoplexy or discharge of blood in his last years. He died from laryngitis and the collapse of his respiratory system.

The influx of toxins and irritants next affects the opium smokers’ gastro-intestinal and excretion systems. Hemorrhoids are frequent among addicts and Marx was not an exception. He had already endured them in his early thirties, and much worse was still to come in the form of carbuncles, another curse that, by his own observation, could be attributed to the use of opium.

Further, as the opiates are metabolized in the liver and excreted mainly by the kidneys, the function of both is gradually impaired. The overworked liver hardens and malfunctions, leading eventually to hepatitis or liver cancer. Marx complained about liver trouble not later than his early thirties, found it troublesome in his forties and fifties, but recovered on curtailing his opium intake in his last years.

Waste from the drug can also be secreted by other organs, in particular the skin, which then takes on unnatural—usually darker—hues among opium users.36 The four-time Prime Minister and laudanum user William Gladstone had an oystery face which, along with his black coat and white tie, added ghostliness to the stolid pallor of his countenance.37 Alas, since his university years, our quintessential urbanite sported a strikingly brownish face that earned him the lifelong nickname Mohr, Moor.38

Thanks to Marx’s own words, a textbook story of the nineteenth-century opium addict is presented below. In closing this preview, the reader is asked to accept in good faith that, if Marx in his famous quip called religion the opium of the people, opium was the religion of Marx.39

The taste for opium helps interpret Marx’s personal trials and setbacks as an adolescent. A porcelain pipe surely among his belongings, in October 1835 the recent graduate sailed from Trier down the Rhine to attend university in Bonn. Following his father’s footsteps, he chose jurisprudence, enrolling in nine courses. The university, however, had a reputation for being a free-spirited institution and the town—at forty thousand inhabitants three times the size of Trier—offered so many enticements.

The Marx family correspondence covering three generations was cleansed on an ongoing basis between the 1850s and 1890s. The letters extant from Karl’s student years are nonetheless revealing. They show parents concerned about his health, unhealthy lifestyle, neglect of the family and inordinate spending. Only three weeks into Karl’s stay in Bonn, Herr Marx sent him the first in the series of sermonizing letters: In spite of your many good qualities… in your heart egoism is predominant. Abstemiousness and daily exercise was recommended. More epistles followed, revealing the parents’ hope, disappointment and anger.

In response to a no longer available missive, in January 1836 Herr Marx wrote that Unless the description of your condition was somewhat poetical, it was upsetting. I hope at least that the sad experience will bring home to you to pay rather more attention to your health… youthful sins… meet with frightful punishment. As a warning, the father mentioned Herr Günster whose smoking and drinking have worked havoc with his already weak chest. A cloud was hanging over the son that could not be dispelled without his involvement. Please, dear Karl, write at once, but write frankly, without reserve and truthfully, intoned the father.40

All this made no impact. His son dropped five of the nine courses in favor of poetry, took part in a duel, went to jail for intoxication and disturbing the peace, constantly overspent, and was several times taken to the court for unpaid debt only to be bailed out by his father. What an adventurous freshman year!

In the fall of 1836, with his father’s wholehearted support, Karl transferred to the University of Berlin, a monastery compared to other places of higher learning in Germany. He matriculated in law but showed little diligence; indeed, the transfer failed to give him a firmer footing.

In their epistles, the parents once again expressed concern about his health, lifestyle, work habits, indifference to the family and huge bills. As the disappointments piled up, the father’s tone had become more critical. Karl stood accused of egoism, moral obtuseness, the absence of good heart, inability to communicate, of staining his otherwise so noble character, tempestuous and ravaging passions, of having a heart animated and governed by a demon not granted to all men that could be heavenly or Faustian. There was a very dark point in Karl’s life that went unexplained.41

In December 1837, at last, Heinrich blamed evil spirits for entangling his son in the association with the world restricted to a dirty work-room, in the classic disorder in which perhaps the love letters of a Jenny [Karl’s fiancée], and the well-meaning exhortations of a father… are used for pipe spills. Herr Marx effectively accused Karl of opium smoking, the habit associated with Chinese-style opium dens.42

As the invocation of God and family proved ineffective, Herr Marx drew into the picture Karl’s fiancée Jenny von Westphalen (1814-1881). She was the daughter of the Trier administrator Ludwig von Westphalen, an aristocrat with renowned German and Scottish ancestors. Introduced to Karl through her brother Edgar, the two became engaged after his return from Bonn in August 1836, but withheld the news from Jenny’s parents. Soon Karl showered her with love poems of dreadful earnestness.

Apart from being four years his senior, Jenny courted in Karl a plebeian convert, a dreamer and a suspected drug user. Never mind that he was studying at Germany’s top university: the facts and rumors could only disturb the Westphalens, and both surely circulated. Trier was a small town after all. For reasons introduced below, both the Marxes and the Westphalens were aware of the impact of opium and justifiably felt apprehensive. We may assume that in late 1836, the Westphalens put restrictions on Jenny’s contacts with Karl and his family.

In December 1836, then, Heinrich Marx urged his son to abandon poetry and in consideration of Jenny seek an academic career. She is making a priceless sacrifice for you. Karl ought to show that you are a man who deserved the respect of the world.43 Perhaps coached by Heinrich, in early 1837 Jenny herself let Karl know that she would not write until he made himself eligible to her parents and their engagement could be made public.

In a response no longer available, Karl must have promised to find his calling in academia and conquer his classic disorder. So much can be inferred from Herr Marx’s exultant reaction: Your last letter… proves that you have got rid of the little weakness which… disquieted me… good health is the greatest boon for everyone, for scholars most of all. Overjoyed, Herr Marx enclosed a letter of credit for a higher amount than you asked for… because I trust you.44 As if to replace another stimulant, he also dispatched to his son a consignment of wine.

The good news must have also reached the Westphalens, who in March gave the couple their blessing.

Sadly, the brain receptors of opium users require a steady supply of the drug, trapping them in a vicious cycle. As the dependence deepens and the euphoric phase shortens, ‘the good spirit of the pipe disappears, giving place to a demon’. The freshly hatched addict tries to escape the trap but encounters excruciating withdrawal symptoms—headache, extreme irritability, inability to focus, tremor in extremities, cramps, convulsions, even delirium and death. Even with the benefit of modern methods, only 5% of opium addicts in the late 20th century stayed free of the drug for five years. Most return to the opiatic prison primarily to avoid the discomfort and pain.45

A narcissist with neurotic dispositions, young Marx was even less likely than others to shed his dependence. His recovery in 1837 indeed proved to be shortlived. In March Herr Marx realized that his son’s little weakness was to stay and felt overcome with sad forebodings and fear. Will you ever be capable of imparting happiness to those immediately around you? he implored Karl.46

Worse yet, loving him dearly and crushed by his relapse, his fiancée Jenny plunged into a lengthy depression. In early May Karl returned to Trier to console her, but confronted with reproaches, he aggravated the situation by calling her a material vulgar girl. If he could do this in a moment of love, what can I expect when it has cooled? she asked, raising suicide as her possible escape.47 She again stopped communicating with him.

Karl felt no better than his fiancée. Struck by another health crisis, after many sleepless nights and much internal and external excitement,48 he sought refuge in Stralau, the village of 90 inhabitants on the northern outskirts of Berlin. He would spend three months there, keeping his family uninformed about his whereabouts. Almost certainly, his soul-searching also involved the role of opium in his life. New gods had to be installed he eventually advised his father. If previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, now they become its centre.

From that point, he reconciled with personal egotism and opium as his permanent deity. High or down but rarely out, until his very last year he would serve in the temple of Goddess Demeter, the patron of the poppy. The 19-year old also burned his stories and poetry, resolved to shift focus from law to philosophy and possibly to seek a university position.49

Increasingly frustrated, Herr Marx no longer cared about his son’s choice of career. It was more important to get rid of this stain on his character, his stormy idiosyncrasies… violent outbreaks of passion. This led him to dispute the roots of Karl’s despair and exultation. Was Karl really a pet child of good fortune or was he victimized by being the son of his father? Do not put forward your character as an excuse. Do not blame nature… It has given you strength enough, the will is left to man, the father effectively exhorted the son to beat the addiction and stop the financial hemorrhaging.50

European opium smokers, to add another explanatory note, used the top quality Turkish brand that commanded a premium price. Considering also the waste in preparation and inhaling, opium smoking was a prohibitively expensive sport indeed. More than anything else, this explains why, after vastly overspending in Bonn, Karl continued his profligate ways in Berlin. Despite having at his disposal a very generous expense account, the feeble attempts by his father to rein him in failed. Living in a single rental room, in the year 1837 alone, Karl spent close to 700 taler, close to the annual salary of a Berlin counselor and 200 taler more than a richest child, his father complained. Karl had also incurred yet another big debt that Herr Marx covered,51 and numerous other debts that went unpaid.

In September 1837, Karl returned from Stralau to Berlin, uncured of his addiction but more focused. In a (unavailable) letter to his father, he confirmed his intention to pursue a worthwhile career and asked for advice. Apparently he also complained about Jenny’s silence, again adding some self-incriminating confession. The father defended Jenny: Her attitude to you is one of the most sacrificing love, and she was not far from proving it by her death—probably an allusion to an attempted suicide. However, he resolved to withhold Karl’s letter from the Westphalens: I do not see why I should give them material for new fantasies.52

The Westphalens’ ambivalence about Karl is generally attributed to his Jewish background, lack of pedigree and poor employment prospect. Yet Marx later angrily denied that his Jewish roots had been a factor in the Westphalens’ considerations. As for the right lineage, von Westphalen was a Romantic whose second wife, the mother of Jenny, was also a commoner. They would hardly have frowned on the bright student of a prestigious university destined for a high-status career, unless he carried heavy baggage. It was above all the rumor of Karl’s addiction and reckless spending that must have raised their concern—as it would any potential in-laws.

While Heinrich Marx tried to hush up his son’s failure to defeat the minor weakness, his wife Henrietta resolved to disclose it. She sounded the alarm with the Westphalens, Karl learned.53

Henrietta’s action almost certainly had a religious undertone. A believer in God, she converted to Christianity under duress. From her non-gentile point of view, it did not matter much that her daughters had married Protestants. As mothers they still imparted Jewishness to their children. For the same reason, she must have felt uneasy about Karl taking on a Protestant wife: according to Jewish tradition his children would not qualify as Jews. Symptomatically, neither she nor anyone else from the family would attend Karl’s wedding to Jenny when it eventually took place in 1843, and for the rest of her life she would practically ignore her daughter-in-law and Karl’s children.

Her intervention in the fall of 1837 undoubtedly left bitter feelings in Karl that would surface in 1844.54 In immediate terms, it prompted the Westphalens to make more inquiries that yielded more disturbing findings about the entire family.

The reader may ask at this point why Heinrich Marx, by 1830, had introduced his children to opium only to scold his son for using it six years later. The partial answer is that his assumptions were turning tragically wrong. Not only because his younger children were wasting away, but he too coped with symptomatic health problems. In his epistolary sermon to Karl, Herr Marx sounded as if he were in the same boat. Regrettably I am in every respect weak… If I were less indulgent, if in general I could harbor resentment for a long time… I would certainly be justified in not answering you at all.55 He was neither quite the proper role model nor the authority to wean his son off the devil.

In August 1837 Heinrich Marx confessed to his indifferent son: For the last 7-8 months, I myself have been afflicted by a painful cough, which has been continually irritated by the external necessity of speaking. Eight days later, he called it a fatal cough that tortured him in every respect. His hands were trembling, his liver rebelled and his overworked kidneys failed to excrete all uric acid, which deposited in his extremities as gout. Combined, these are the markers of heavy addiction. Herr Marx made the connection: With cough… coupled with recent attacks of gout, I… became annoyed at my weakness of character.56

Since he became too frail to function by late 1836, Heinrich Marx must have resorted to opium long before 1830. In the slow opiatic death by wasting, he would spend his ultimate 16 months confined to bed.

His youngest son Eduard, age 9, shared his father’s fate. Unable to eat or drink and quite emaciated, he had been confined to bed since February 1837 and looked to his demise with the deepest melancholy and actually fear. He would die the same autumn.

Tormented day and night caring for two invalids, Henrietta Marx would get little help from her daughters. Sophie was steadily taking medicine without success (possibly opium pills to combat her dependency?), while Louise, Caroline and Henrietta (the last two would also die young) either labored in bed or were steadily unwell. May God rescue us soon from this long struggle! Heinrich despaired in September 1837.57 When in the same month Frau von Westphalen quizzed Marx’s children about family matters, she could not but form the impression of a cursed clan. The Westphalens severed all ties with the Marxes and apparently advised Karl that he was persona non grata.

After considerable soul-searching, the junior Marx now resolved to reconcile with his father. In a long confessional of November 10-11, he boasted of his belonging to the ‘Doctors’ Club’ of neo-Hegelians in Berlin, but also confirmed his intention to seek a career in law or academia. Baring his frailty, in the closing section he pleaded for permission to visit home, to suffer and weep with you and, perhaps, when with you to give proof of my profound, heartfelt sympathy and immeasurable love, which often I can express only badly owing to his militant spirit and much agitated mind. His hope was that you will soon be wholly restored to health so that I can clasp you to my heart and tell you all my thoughts.

This moving expression of filial love was penned in the wee morning hours when a real unrest has taken possession of me, confessed Karl fighting turbulent specters. Obviously he took opium to unwind emotionally.58

Detecting no change in his son’s lifestyle, Herr Marx spurned the outstretched hand. In view of his unfailing support, his son behaved like a negating genius blinded with self-pity: You are the last person from whom I would expect it. In the follow-up letter of December 9 he bitterly accused his son of wasting natural talents so lavishly bestowed upon him. Because of this classic disorder… you… spend your nights giving birth to monsters. Not only had Karl squandered his potential but his lifestyle was so expensive. In one year, the son outspent his bedridden father’s earnings. Was it so much to expect some joy and banish causes of sorrow?

Here was Heinrich’s practical advice on how Karl could cut his expenditure: when my weakness once again begins to come over me, in order to help myself quite literally, I take the real pills prescribed for me and swallow them down. Herr Marx had not given up the drug but satisfied his craving more cheaply with prescription opiates. He also regretted having left you all too loose a rein with money. I have given too little utterance to my grievances, and thus to a certain extent have become your accomplice.

As for Karl’s requested permission to visit the family, Papa was resolutely against it: To come here at the present moment would be nonsense! True I know you care little for lectures, though you probably paid for them, but I will at last observe the decencies. I am certainly no slave to public opinion, but neither do I like gossip at my expense.59 For the moment Karl was too much of a liability for the hapless Marxes to risk his presence.

The bond between the father and son had been broken. The sulky Karl failed to come home during his Easter vacations in 1838, thus forfeiting his last chance to see his father alive. Heinrich Marx died on May 10 of the same year. According to his death certificate, this affluent lawyer also succumbed to starvation, allgemeine Auszehrung.60 He left behind a wife coping heroically with the family curse.

As an adult, Karl would carry with him a daguerreotype portrait of his paterfamilias. But he did not attend his father’s funeral and neither would he be at the funerals of his mother in 1864, his wife in 1881 and his daughter Jenny in 1883. There is no evidence of his presence at the funerals of his other children, grandchildren and friends. He displayed a deplorable lack of empathy at the death of Engels’ companion Mary Burns, whose funeral in 1863 he also skipped. His contacts with the family would be restricted to money matters, and his friends would be often treated as money providers of the penultimate