What Was Karl Marx Like?

Tourists walk past a statues of Karl Marx (1818–83) and Friedrich Engels (1820–95) in the center of Berlin on April 28, 2009. Theo Heimann /DDP/AFP via Getty Images

“Men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their personal lives.” —Aristotle

The consequences of Karl Marx’s ideas stagger the imagination. His thoughts have shaped history. Empires have risen and fallen on his theses. Dreams and visions have bloomed and shattered. The surging tide of revolutions have washed the shores of continents because of this man, and the lives of millions of human beings have been altered—or ended—due to his ideology. In altered shape, his ideas continue to whisper through the corridors of institutions of higher education and even the halls of governance.

But who was this man whose voice rumbles like forbidding thunder through all of 20th- and 21st-century history? A glimpse into the man’s character—a portrait of his temperament, beliefs, and personal and professional life—will shed light on this question.

A portrait of Karl Marx. John Jabez Edwin Mayall, colored by Olga Shirnina/CC BY-SA 2.0

Marx, the Man

Who was Karl Marx the man? While we can’t judge an idea’s merits  solely on its author’s virtues or vices, understanding the man who concocted Marxism may illuminate, the theory itself—and its often dire consequences.

Marx wrote in 1848 that “a specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism.” His words were, for once, accurate. But it seems that a specter was also haunting Marx, a dark spirit of depression, rage, violence, and apocalyptic aspirations. In his book “The Devil and Karl Marx,” Paul Kengor outlines the disturbing content of Marx’s early poetry and playwriting, which preceded his “scholarly work.” It reveals his tormented interior life. In one poem, Marx describes a feverish violinist who plays a maddening dance of destruction, calling up a storm of darkness and threatening to stab his listener:

Look now, my blood-dark sword shall stab Unerringly within thy soul. God neither knows nor honors art. The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain,

Till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed. See the sword—the Prince of Darkness sold it to me. For he beats the time and gives the signs. Ever more boldly I play the dance of death. 

“The dance of death”—fitting words from the pen of a man whose ideology would claim the lives of at least 100 million people, according to some estimates. This dark tone continues and takes on world-ending proportions in one of Marx’s plays in which a character named Oulenam declares, “All lost! The hours is now expired, and time/ Stands still. This pigmy universe collapses./ Soon I shall clasp Eternity and howl/ Humanity’s giant curse into its ear./ Eternity! It is eternal pain.”

The image of an eternity of pain returns in Marx’s “The Pale Maiden” in which the maiden in question moans, “Thus Heaven I’ve forfeited/ I know it full well./ My soul once true to God/ Is chosen for Hell.”

Taken as a whole, Marx’s body of literary work betrays the man’s obsession with death, hell, apocalypse, and pacts with the devil. Religiously, Marx was an atheist, although he was born to a Jewish family in Trier, Germany, that converted to Protestantism about the time Marx was born in 1818. By age 16, Marx had repudiated any faith that he may have held. Indeed, he later wrote with hatred against Judaism and Jews.

On the subject of Marx’s atheism, Mr. Kengor quotes a victim of communism, Richard Wurmbrand, who spent 14 years in a communist prison and under torture for his Christianity. Wurmbrand stated, “Marx hated any notion of God or gods. He determined to be the man who would kick out God.”

Another famous communist dissident and victim of the Soviet gulags, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, made a similar observation: “Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn with his family at the Zurich airport, in March 1974. Solzhenitsyn was the victim of grave human rights abuses at the hands of Soviets who had subscribed to Marx's toxic philosophies. Public Domain

Free from religious scruples, then, Marx operated free from any moral restraints. As a student in Bonn, Germany, and then the University of Berlin, he lazed about, wasted his father’s money, and got drunk. For a man with so much alleged economic wisdom, Marx demonstrated an astonishing incapacity to handle money. Throughout his life, he leeched off of others, including his friend and co-writer Friedrich Engels.

Although Marx gleaned some half-baked ideas of philosophy from his time at university, latching on to and modifying the popular Hegelian dialectic of his day, he remained a second-rate scholar. He plagiarized. He handled sources irresponsibly and even deceptively, sometimes falsifying quotations to support his own ideas, as historian Paul Johnson wrote in his book “Intellectuals.” Marx never visited a mill, factory, or industrial building, and he knew only two people with connections to the world of finance and industry. Yet he spent his days in an ivory tower, conjuring up untested theories on these subjects.

A Sordid Personal Life

Marx’s private life horrifies even more than his so-called “professional life.” There is the question of whether  working here and there as a journalist and editor for failing newspapers, soliciting money from family and friends, and participating in extremist revolutionary clubs can be called “a professional life.”

When Marx eventually married Jenny von Westphalen, the family lived in destitution due to Marx’s refusal to work. The family often needed money, food, shelter, and medical care that they did not receive. Multiple Marx children died, possibly as a result of their poor living conditions. Instead of earning a living, Marx insisted that his mother and others provide money for the family, leading her to exclaim with exasperation that she wished “Karl would accumulate capital instead of just writing about it.” Marx’s main interactions with his mother were to hound her for cash.

The socialist’s idleness eventually got him kicked out of his apartment. His landlord lost all patience with missing payments and with his tenant’s abysmal hygiene. Marx drank and smoked to excess, did not exercise, and rarely bathed, which quite simply, made him stink. It produced outbreaks of warts and festering boils all over his body. Paul Johnson proposed that these boils contributed to Marx’s irritability and violent tendencies. You didn’t want to be Marx’s enemy—or friend, for that matter. Both parties frequently received bombardments of diatribes and hatred.

Marx also ill-used the family servant, Helen Demuth, known as “Lenchen.” Though Marx proclaimed himself the champion of the poor and working class and railed against the bourgeoisie, demanding more equal distribution of wealth, he never paid his own servant anything at all. Lenchen was treated as a slave. Moreover, Marx got her pregnant, and she gave birth to his child. Marx refused to acknowledge the boy, whose first name was left blank on the birth certificate. Engels stepped in to clean up after his friend, accepting paternity for the boy to erase the social embarrassment for Marx. Engels revealed the secret to one of Marx’s daughters when he was dying of cancer in 1895.

Multiple European governments had been wary of Marx and his revolutionary work for years. In 1849, he was expelled from Germany on a charge of “incitement to armed insurrection.“ He moved to London where, evidently, the Prussian government was still keeping tabs on him since an 1850 Prussian police spy report recorded the chaos in Marx’s household:

“Though [Marx] is frequently idle for days on end, he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has much work to do.

“He has no fixed time for going to sleep or waking up. He often stays up all night and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday, and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the whole world coming or going through [his room].

“There is not one clean and solid piece of furniture. Everything is broken, tattered and torn, with half an inch of dust over everything and the greatest disorder everywhere.

“When you enter Marx’s room smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water. Everything is dirty and covered with dust, so that to sit down becomes a hazardous business. Here is a chair with three legs. On another chair the children are playing cooking. This chair happens to have four legs. This is the one that is offered to the visitor, but the children’s cooking has not been wiped away and if you sit down you risk a pair of trousers.”

As this report indicates, Marx’s wife and children suffered immensely under the socialist prophet’s unpredictable lifestyle and overbearing rule. Marx wrote disparagingly of marriage and family life, though, according to Johnson, Marx did love his wife Jenny, at least at one time. Mr. Kengor quoted Marx: “There is no greater stupidity than for people of general aspirations to marry and surrender themselves to the small miseries of domestic and private life.”

Perhaps as a result of their traumatic upbringing, two of Marx’s daughters committed suicide after their father’s death, one of them in agreement with her husband, a target of Marx’s mockery, who also killed himself. Thus ended the sordid and tragic story of Marx’s family, his other children having died previously.

In spite of all his rage and energy, Marx was not a major political or philosophical figure in his time, according to historian Warren Carrol in “The Crisis of Christendom,” and without the success of Lenin’s revolution, perpetrated in Marx’s name, history would likely not even remember this odd, unstable, and unpleasant little man. It was the military success of Marx’s followers that raised him, undeservedly, to a position of dominance over world history.

Anti-Bolshevik poster, in which Lenin is depicted in a red robe aiding other Bolsheviks in sacrificing Russia to a statue of Marx, circa 1918–1919. Public Domain

Would that it had been otherwise.

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