Karl Marx: Man and Fighter Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen

Chapter 02: A Happy Year at Bonn

It had long ago been decided by the Marx family council that Karl should go to the university. His father's circumstances were quite comfortable, but he was not rich enough to allow all his sons to study. Hermann, Karl's moderately gifted younger brother, was indentured to a Brussels business house. But, however difficult it might occasionally be, means must be found for Karl, the favourite child, the son in whom his father lived again, the son who should achieve what his father had been denied.

The university he should go to had been chosen too. Most students from Trier went to Bonn as the nearest university town. In 1835 and 1836 the association of Trier students at Bonn numbered more than thirty members. Later Karl was intended to spend a few terms at another university--at Berlin, if it could possibly be managed.

What he should study had also been decided for him. He was to study law; not because at the age of sixteen he was particularly attracted to the subject; he was equally interested in literature, philosophy and science, especially physics and chemistry. As he had no particular preference for any one branch of knowledge, because he wanted to embrace them all, he accepted his father's advice without question. Practical motives were undoubtedly Heinrich Marx's chief consideration in making the choice for his son. New courts were being established in the Trier area, and intending lawyers had excellent prospects of finding good and well-paid posts. Of the seven students from Trier who matriculated at Bonn University in 1834, four studied law.

Parents, brothers, sisters and friends accompanied Karl to the 'express yacht' which left Trier at four o'clock in the morning. Halley's comet was in the sky. The covered boat so grandiosely styled took him down the Moselle--the river was almost the only link with the east of Germany--as far as the Rhine, and then one of the recently introduced Rhine steamers took him upstream to Bonn, where he arrived on Saturday, October 17, and entered his name at the University on the same day.

Bonn, a town of nearly forty thousand inhabitants, was distinctly bigger than Trier. Although it did not number many more than seven hundred students, the University dominated the life of the town. In the twenties and the thirties the University of Bonn could rightly boast of the great freedom it enjoyed. Students' associations had no need for concealment. This did not apply only to associations of students from the same town or district; it applied equally to the definitely Liberal 'Burschenschafter,' who drank and duelled and sang, regarded with esteem by the citizens and benevolence by the authorities. 'They act so freely and openly,' an examining magistrate later wrote, 'that the existence of the societies is a secret to no one'--least of all to the university authorities, who were not in the least perturbed by them. On the contrary, they practically sanctioned them. As the State officials did not wish to disturb the university, they respected its independence and let things take their course.

A stop, and a very thorough stop, was put to this state of affairs shortly before Marx came to Bonn. In April, 1835, a small group of foolhardy young men had attempted to break up the Federal Diet at Frankfurt and set up a provisional government in its place. The rising was undertaken with totally inadequate means and put down without any difficulty whatever. But the governments of Germany were thoroughly alarmed. Though some of them had hitherto had Liberal impulses, they now started furiously building at 'the saving dam' which the decisions of the Vienna Conference of spring, 1834--drafted by Metternich--imposed upon them the duty of erecting against the 'rising flood.' The drive descended with especial fury upon the students' associations. Bonn's turn came a little later. When Marx came to Bonn in the autumn of 1835, informers were daily sending 'suspects' to prison. University authorities, police and spies denounced, arrested and expelled dozens of 'Burschenschafter.'

Not a single association that was connected in any way with any general purpose, even the most discreet, survived the stress of these severe measures. The only one to remain was the 'Korps,' who, as a contemporary protested, regarded 'brawling and carousing as the highest aim of a student's life.' The authorities were glad enough to close their eyes to the activities of the 'Korps.' There were also small 'tavern clubs,' consisting of groups of students from the same towns, from Cologne, Aachen, etc. These were not distinguished for their rich intellectual life either. After most of the boldest, most advanced and liberal-minded students had been eliminated those who remained were too bewildered or too indifferent not scrupulously to avoid all discussion of politics.

Lectures had not yet begun when Marx arrived at Bonn. He had plenty of time to settle down. He took a room quite close to the University, and immediately fell upon the lecture list. The natural sciences were so badly represented at Bonn that Marx resolved to postpone his study of physics and chemistry until going to Berlin, where he would be able to study under the real authorities on those subjects. Sufficient remained for him to do nevertheless. He decided to attend courses of lectures in no fewer than nine subjects. His father, to whom he wrote of his plans, hesitated between pleasure at so much zeal and fear that Karl might overwork. 'Nine courses of lectures seem rather a lot to me,' he wrote, 'and I don't want you to undertake more than mind and body can stand. But if you can manage it, very well. The field of knowledge is immense and time is short.'

In the end Marx only attended six courses. According to his professors he was 'industrious' or 'very industrious' at them all. Professor Welcker, under whom Marx studied Greek and Roman mythology, stated that he was 'exceptionally industrious and attentive.' In the summer term Marx attended four courses. This was still a great deal, particularly when compared with his later studies in Berlin, when he only attended fourteen courses of lectures in nine terms. The year at Bonn was the only one in which he took his university studies seriously. Somewhat to his own surprise, Marx discovered a taste for law, his future profession. All the same he seems to have preferred listening to the great Schlegel on Homer or the Elegies of Propertius and D'Alton on the history of art.

However industriously he applied himself to them, his studies failed to engross him completely. As he demonstrated at school, he was no bookworm or spoilsport. He joined the Trier 'tavern club' and was one of its five presidents in the summer term of 1836. Marx, a true son of the Rhineland, appreciated a good 'drop' all his life. In June he was condemned to one day's detention by the proctor for being drunk and disorderly. The prison in which he served his sentence was a very jolly one. A contemporary who studied at Bonn a year later than Marx reports that the prisoners were allowed visitors, who practically never failed to turn up with wine, beer and cards. Sometimes the merry-making was such that the entertainment expenses made a serious inroad into the prisoners' monthly allowance. It was not because of the one day's confinement alone that Karl got into debt, in spite of the ample allowance sent him by his generous father.

Marx joined another club as well. It was called the 'Poets' Club.' If the police records are to be believed, this club of enthusiastic young men was not so entirely innocuous as it seemed. Its founders were Fenner von Fenneberg, who took a very active part in the revolution of 1848 and 1849, first in Vienna and later in Baden, and a Trier student named Biermann, who had come under suspicion while still at school as the author of 'seditious poetry.' He escaped to Paris to avoid arrest, and it was proved that he had been in contact with a Major Stieldorf, whom the police accused of agitating for the annexation by Belgium of the western Trier territory.

Marx appears to have been very active in the 'Poets' Club.' Moritz Carrière, a philosopher and aesthetician of some merit, who at the time was the leader of a similar group at Göttingen, with whom the Bonn club was on friendly terms, remembered Marx as one of the three most important members. The other two were Emanuel Geibel, who later made a reputation as a lyric poet, and Karl Grün, an adherent of the 'true' Socialism which Marx was soon so pitilessly to combat and deride.

His father approved of Karl's joining the 'Poets' Club.' He knew his son's stormy nature and was never without anxiety that it might run away with him. He did not like the 'tavern club,' for he feared Karl might become involved in a duel. He was relieved when he learned that Karl had joined the 'Poets' Club' and wrote: 'I like your little group far better than the tavern. Young people who take pleasure in such gatherings are necessarily civilised human beings, and set greater store on their value as future good citizens than those who set most store by rowdiness.'

However, it soon appeared that even this little group was not without its dangers. The police, suspecting treasonable activities everywhere, started taking an interest in the 'Poets' Club.' The club rules and the minutes of their meetings in the winter of 1834-5 fell into the hands of the police-spy, Nohl, who had now been sent to Bonn, but to their disappointment the police were forced to admit that both the rules and the minutes were politically completely innocuous. According to the rules the members, 'moved by a similar love of belles lettres,' had decided to unite 'for the reciprocal exercise of their would-be poetical talents.' In spite of this the police remained full of misgivings, and although their inquiries had resulted in nothing tangible, the matter was handed over to the University authorities, whose disciplinary court should institute proceedings.

Marx's name was not mentioned. His father, well informed about events in Bonn, once more had cause for anxiety about him, and not on account of the 'Poets' Club' alone. In the spring of 1836 a wild conflict broke out among the students, and the association of Trier students was in the midst of the fray. Conflict between the 'Korps' associations and the tavern clubs had begun during the winter. The 'Korps' demanded that the tavern clubs should merge with them. This the tavern clubs refused to do, and the refusal resulted in hostile encounters with members of the Borussia Korps, who were 'true Prussians and aristocrats,' and, under the leadership of Counts von der Goltz, von der Schulenberg and von Heyden, provoked, derided and challenged the 'plebeians' whenever they met them. Their especial hatred was directed to the Trier students. In the conflict of the feudal Borussians with the sons of the bourgeois citizens of Trier there was, in a sense, an element of class-war.

In 1858 Lassalle, after some unpleasant fellow had sent him a challenge, wrote to Marx and asked him his opinion of duels. Marx replied that it was obviously absurd to try and decide whether duelling as such was consistent with the principle; but within the biased limitations of bourgeois society it might sometimes be necessary to justify one's individuality in this feudal manner. As an eighteen-year-old student at Bonn Marx evidently thought the same. An entry in the records of the university disciplinary court states that Marx was once seen bearing a weapon such as was usually used for duels. His father in Trier heard of this incident and wrote to his son: 'Since when is duelling so interwoven with philosophy? Men fight duels out of respect, nay, rather out of fear of public opinion. And what public opinion? Not always the best--far from it! So little consistency is there among mankind! Do not let this taste--if it is not a taste, this disease--take root. You might, after all, end by robbing yourself and your parents of their finest hopes for you. I do not believe that a reasonable man can so easily disregard these things.'

There was foundation for his father's fears. The duels the students fought in the suburbs of Ippendorf and Kessenich were anything but harmless. The young Count von Arnim was killed in a duel in 1834, and soon afterwards a student named Daniels, from Aachen, was killed too. Karl did not heed his father's warnings. He fought a duel, in all probability with a Borussian, in August, 1836. He received a thrust over the left eye.

How his father took the news is not known. Before the end of the summer term he had given the Bonn university authorities his consent to his son's transfer to Berlin. He did not 'merely give his consent' but heavily underlined the statement that it was 'his wish.' A longer stay in Bonn would have profited Karl nothing and only threatened duels on the one hand and police persecution on the other.