Life and Writings
The formative years
Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 the eldest son of Heinrich and Henriette Marx in the provincial town of Trier in the Rhineland, where his father practised as a lawyer.
On his father’s side Karl was descended from a Jewish family with a long-standing tradition of rabbis. But his father Herschel (or, since 1814, Heinrich) Mordechai had converted to Protestantism in 1816 in order to escape the Prussian restrictions against the Jews, and he also had Karl and his six brothers and sisters baptized as Protestants. Heinrich Marx was a cultured man, who had great admiration for Leibniz, Lessing, and Kant, and raised his children as liberal and law-abiding Protestants. His wife Henriette, nee Pressburg, was the daughter of a Jewish merchant from Nijmegen in the Netherlands.The person who exerted the most important intellectual influence on the young Karl, apart from his father, was Johann Ludwig von Westphalen, a high-ranking civil servant, who treated the talented young neighbour’s boy and schoolmate of his son Edgar as an equal partner in discussions on literary and philosophical themes. While his father acquainted him with the German and French enlightenment philosophers, Karl would learn about Homer, Shakespeare and the Romantics from his future father-in-law. Presumably, it was also Baron von Westphalen who introduced him to the ideas of Henri de Saint-Simon, in which he took a keen interest himself. Until his twelfth year, Karl was educated privately by his father and the local bookseller. In the gymnasium, which he attended from 1830 to 1835, he was conspicuous mainly for his diligence and for his strong interest in literature and fine arts.
From 1835 to 1841 Marx studied at the universities of Bonn and Berlin. Following his father’s advice, he enrolled at Bonn University as a student of law, but attended courses also in history, medicine, and theology.
In 1836 he changed over to the University of Berlin, where at first he continued his studies in law, but then devoted his time and energy mainly to philosophy, after he had come into contact with some of the so-called Young Hegelians, who gathered around the radical theologian and religious critic Bruno Bauer (1809-1882). In 1841 he earned a doctorate with a philosophical dissertation on “The difference between the Democritean and the Epicurean philosophy of nature” at the University of Jena. However, he quickly realized that there was little chance of success for an academic career, in view of the strict actions of the Prussian authorities against radical left-wing Hegelians: his mentor Bruno Bauer, whom he had intended to follow to the University of Bonn, was deprived of his lecture rights. Being thrown back on his own financially by the unexpected death of his father, Marx turned to journalism and began to write articles for the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, which had been founded by enlightened citizens and industrialists in early 1842. In October, Marx took over the editorship of the liberal and anti-clerical, and under Marx’s influence increasingly more radical, newspaper. Being watched with mounting suspicion by the censorship authorities, the Rheinische Zeitung was banned in March 1843.