Karl Marx Read Online Free PDF

sent petitions to the king begging for a reprieve, but to no effect. A second censor was installed to prevent any monkey business in the final weeks. ‘ Our newspaper has to be presented to the police to be sniffed at ,’ Marx grumbled to a friend, ‘and if the police nose smells anything unChristian or unPrussian, the newspaper is not allowed to appear.’
    Since no explanation was given for the ban, Marx could only speculate. Had the authorities panicked when they noticed the paper’s swelling popularity? Had he been too outspoken in his defence of the other victims of censorship, such as Ruge’s Deutsche Jahrbücher ? The likeliest reason, he guessed, was a long article published only a week before the edict, in which he had accused the authorities of ignoring the wretched economic plight of Moselle wine-farmers who were unable to compete with the cheap, tariff-free wines being imported into Prussia from other German states.
    Little did he realise – though he might have been gratified to hear it – that there were more potent forces working behind the scenes. The Prussian king had been asked to suppress the paper by no less a figure than Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, his closest and most necessary ally, who had taken exception to an anti-Russiandiatribe in the 4 January issue of the Rheinische Zeitung . At a ball in the Winter Palace four days later, the Prussian ambassador to the court of St Petersburg was harangued by the Tsar about the ‘infamy’ of the liberal German press. The ambassador sent an urgent dispatch to Berlin reporting that the Russians could not understand ‘how a censor employed by Your Majesty’s government could have passed an article of such a nature’. And that was that.
    ‘Today the wind has changed,’ one of the Rheinische Zeitung’s censors wrote on the day after Karl Marx had vacated the editor’s chair. ‘I am well content.’ Marx himself was pretty happy too. ‘ I had begun to be stifled in that atmosphere ,’ he confided to Ruge. ‘It is a bad thing to have to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom.’
    He had no future in Germany, but since most of the people and institutions for which he cared were now dead – his father, the Baron von Westphalen, the Deutsche Jahrbücher , the Rheinische Zeitung – there was nothing to keep him anyway. What mattered was that, at the age of twenty-four, he was already wielding a pen that could terrify the crowned heads of Europe. When Arnold Ruge decided to quit the country and set up a journal-in-exile, the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher , Marx gladly accepted an invitation to join him. There was only one caveat: ‘I am engaged to be married and I cannot, must not and will not leave Germany without my fiancée.’
    Seven years after pledging himself to Jenny, even the thick-skinned Karl Marx was beginning to feel prods and stabs of guilt. ‘ For my sake, ’ he admitted in March 1843, ‘my fiancée has fought the most violent battles, which almost undermined her health, partly against her pietistic aristocratic relatives, for whom “the Lord inheaven” and “the lord in Berlin” are equally objects of a religious cult, and partly against my own family, in which some priests and other enemies of mine have ensconced themselves. For years, therefore, my fiancée and I have been engaged in more unnecessary and exhausting conflicts than many who are three times our age.’ But the trials and torments of this long betrothal could not all be blamed on others. While Karl was making whoopee in Berlin or fomenting trouble in Cologne, Jenny stayed at home in Trier wondering if he would still love her tomorrow. Sometimes these anxieties surfaced in her letters – which were then