In the revolutionary year of 1848, there was no welcoming place for Jenny Marx and Karl Marx in continental European countries. They had to flee to England. Soon it too became unforgiving, but in a different way. Jenny wrote to her friend, Mr Weydemeyer. She apologised for not having heard from him for so long. “I was silent when your wife wrote so kindly, silent even when you announced that a child had been born to you. This silence has often been difficult for me, but most of the time I have not been able to write, and even now I find it very difficult to write. But the situation is forcing me to do so – I ask you to send us, as soon as possible, the money that has come or will come for the newspaper. We need it very much. Surely no one can accuse us of ever having talked much about what we have sacrificed and endured for years; we have seldom or hardly ever bothered people with our personal things.”
Before they fled to London, Marx and his followers founded the New Rhenish Journal in Cologne, in which they supported rebellious workers, especially those in Paris, with hard-hitting articles. 1848 was the year of the so-called European Revolution, which began in Italy, moved to Paris and spread from there across Europe. It also boiled over in Germany. As long as the revolt of the Paris workers was successful, the paper had a few supporters, but when it was suppressed in June 1848, it lost them.
The newspaper was about to collapse. To save it, Jenny and Karl invested what little inheritance Marx had squeezed out of his family. Parents of three children and with a fourth on the way, they risked their existential security with the newspaper and lost. In August 1848, Marx had to go into exile. His friends did not stand up for the paper and mismanaged it, Jenny explained in a letter, which is why the New Rhine Journal ceased publication in May 1849.
“My husband was almost suffocated by the smallest worries in life,” she explained. Not long after Marx, Jenny and the children were expelled from France. A month after arriving in London, she gave birth to a son, Gvid. While nursing, “he drank so much worry and silent bitterness from me that he was constantly ill and suffered terribly night and day. He has never slept a night since he came into the world, at most two or three hours. Then more severe convulsions began to attack him, so that he was continually suspended between death and a poor life.”
One day, sitting in the kitchen, Jenny continued to describe her current life, when suddenly the landlady appeared. Two hundred and fifty thalers had already been paid, and the rest was to be given to the owner of the house. Nevertheless, she wanted the five pounds that were still owed to her. “And as we had not them at hand, two robbers came to the house and confiscated all my little possessions, beds, linen, clothes, everything, even the cradle of my poor child and the prettier toys of the girls, who wept piteously at this.”
They gave Jenny two hours to raise the money. The friend rushed to town in the cart, but “the horses got spooked, he jumped off the cart and they brought him back to our house bleeding”. The next day, “it was cold, rainy and gloomy”, the Marxes had to leave their home. “My husband was looking for an apartment, but nobody wanted us when he mentioned the four children.” A friend came to their rescue. Jenny hastily sold “all my beds so that I could settle my debts with the chemist, the baker, the butcher and the milkman, all of whom were terrified by the foreclosure and all of whom suddenly came rushing at me with their bills”.
But when the devil has young people, he has more of them. The sold beds were put outside the door, and because it was late in the evening, the policeman came. At such a late hour, they were not allowed to hand over their things, so he harassed them, because there might be something among them that was not theirs. “In less than five minutes, more than two to three hundred people, all the Chelsea scum, had gathered outside our door. The beds were brought back and it was not until the next morning after sunrise that we were able to give them to the buyer.”
Jenny has paid off her debts. All seven members of the Marx family – which included the housekeeper Helena Demuth, or Lenchen, or Lenka – moved into two rooms on Dean Street. One had water, the other did not. The toilet in the house with several tenants was shared. “Don’t think that these little pains broke me. I know only too well that our struggle is not an isolated one and that I, in particular, am among the lucky and chosen ones because my dear husband, the mainstay of my life, is still by my side.”
What she finds much harder to bear than such problems, she continued, is that her husband has to deal with such trifles when he could so easily be helped, “and that he, who loved and was happy to help so many, is here without any help”. It was not quite like that.
The Marxes did live in poverty for the first years in London, but they had Friedrich Engels on their side. Engels had been helping Marx, who had been trying to support his family by earning money and writing books, financially since 1850, when he took a job with his father, the co-owner of a textile factory in Manchester. In fact, for the next 20 years, he gave half of his annual income to the Marx family, so that Marx could study and work politically without hindrance.
Fighting for love
Jenny more or less dealt with the everyday problems of life. Until her marriage, she was no stranger to deprivation, but thanks to Karl Marx, who was four years younger than her, she realised early on that life can be a struggle. She and Marx had been close since childhood, but he was neither of noble birth nor a suitable match for her. At the age of 16, the attractive and educated Prussian Countess von Westphfalen began looking for a husband who would provide for her for the rest of her life and ensure her social standing. There were many suitors, but she had little interest in them. The people around her pressured her to make up her mind, but she secretly pledged herself to Marx at the age of 22.
The pressure from her family was already fierce when she kept her engagement a secret, and in March 1837, when she made it public, they made her so ill that she fell seriously ill. If they wanted to keep her alive, they had to make concessions, but it was still not easy for her. Marx was studying in Bonn, she was alone in her native Trier. He loved her, as he wrote, but he was equally fiercely committed to ideas. He studied and wrote all night, took part in student political and cultural life, drank, and then fell ill. He repeated this pattern throughout his life: he would work, lie down, recover, and start again from the beginning. Cigarettes and alcohol also played a role. He always enjoyed a night of heated debates over beer and wine.
But they did not exist in 1841, when he finished his studies. Twenty-seven-year-old Jenny, who was too old to marry by the rules of the day, hoped that the clouds would now part. She had seen Marx only a few weeks a year during her studies, when he was on holiday. At his request, she read and studied, becoming more and more distant from her friends and family. With the death of Marx’s father, she lost the only interlocutor she had at that time, and was no longer welcome in the home where she had once found refuge.
She was lonely, but steadfast. When Marx finished his studies, they would marry, she believed. But Marx needed his own income for that. If he had become an assistant professor of philosophy in Bonn, as he expected, he could have supported them, but he did not. Even then, he had too revolutionary a view of the world in a time marked by rapid and radical change.
In England and France, industrialisation had already reached considerable heights, but it only touched Germany, then fragmented into countries separated by customs borders. At the time of Jenny’s childhood, the bourgeoisie was weak and the feudal lords strong. Peasants were completely disenfranchised, yet only a third of Germans lived in towns.
Although the craftsmen rejected technical progress, they could not stop industrialisation. When Jenny was growing up, the first textile factories, dyeworks, ironworks and the like were already standing, and the first gas lights appeared on once-dark roads. In the 1840s, however, innovations outpaced one another.
They benefited the princes and the Prussian landlords, while the workers lived in miserable conditions, working 14 to 16 hours a day. Ten per cent of the workforce were children, especially in the Rhineland. Class struggle was inevitable, even if the authorities tried to suppress all those who sought better living conditions for all people.
Among the progressives were also the bourgeoisie, which was still a rather weak social class in Germany at that time. The craftsmen were not bothered by customs borders because they sold their products locally, while the bourgeoisie needed a large market and a united Germany with open borders to industrialise. They joined the struggle for change.
Karl Marx became part of it early on. When he returned home at the age of 23 with a reputation as a subversive, he immediately drew Jenny into his world. She watched as he and his followers set up a new newspaper, the revolutionary Rhenish Journal. It was published in Cologne on the first of January 1842, but Marx was at home at the time.
He’s sick. Then he had a fight with his mother, who wanted him to earn money instead of being involved in politics. He didn’t even try to find a job. Now Jenny was also upset with her because she supported him instead of forcing him to be like the others. To top it all off, Jenny’s father fell ill. Both Jenny and Karl were attached to him. Three months later, he died. Not long after, Marx’s brother died. At that time, Marx and his mother had such a falling out that he never renewed genuine contact with her.
But that meant he was left without financial support from his family. Jenny couldn’t count on hers either. She remained on good terms with her mother until the end, but she and her pious half-brother Ferdinand were on completely different sides, even though he still believed at the time that he could get her on the right track by threatening and cajoling her. The right path for a girl from a noble family. A path that she owed to her family and to God’s will.
He made her life a living hell by constantly eating, but he didn’t change her. On the contrary, he made her believe even more in Marx, who was already engaged in an open political struggle. At the age of 24, he became editor of the Rhenish Journal, and the paper soon gained great influence. It was the beginning of modern journalism in Germany, according to Friedrich Engels. Of course, this could not go unpunished. The Prussian government and the Tsar did everything they could to ensure that the paper ceased publication after a year, leaving Marx once again without an income.
He decided to leave Germany. “I am fed up with the hypocrisy, the stupidity, the raw power and our kowtowing, twisting, back-bending and hair-splitting …”, he wrote to his friend Arnold Ruge. It seemed to him that there was nothing more he could do in Germany. He had only one problem: Jenny.
They have been engaged for seven years. He had nothing to offer her. He later wrote to a friend that they had “had more unnecessary and tiresome confrontations than many others three times their age who talk about their life ‘experiences'”. But Jenny did not doubt him. By the time of her marriage on 19 June 1843, she had done with her family and was mentally prepared for exile.
First encounter with scarcity
After the Prussian government unsuccessfully tried to win Marx over to its side, Jenny did not hesitate to travel with him to Paris. There he was to edit a new newspaper, the German-French Papers, for a yearly fee of 500 to 600 thalers at the time. This should be enough to live on, the publisher promised him. For the Marxes, modest meant that young Helena Demuth or Lenka, who had been Jenny’s maid since she was nine, would live with them. The Marxes never left her husband and wife, not even in the hardest of times.
When they arrived in Paris in October 1843, it was buzzing. Marx was not interested. Jenny and her husband wandered the working-class streets, gazing into people’s secluded homes. At last she saw what her husband had only told her about before. Rooted among the gentry, his words had been alien to her then, but now she was alien to the workers. Dressed in the aristocratic clothes she had brought from home, she intercepted their hostile glances and listened to their scowls.
Slowly, she has done with her old life and started a new one. She and Marx lived apart. Among the few friends who came to visit them was the poet Heinrich Heine. When he was too much vilified by the reactionaries, he almost came to their home. Then Marx always sent him to Jenny. She was an optimist by nature, but she always brought him back to his feet with her shrewdness.
In the same way, she helped herself when life pressed her, for example when the publisher suddenly stopped publishing the German-French Papers and she and Marx were left penniless. At that time, friends from the former Rhenish Journal still helped them with 1000 thalers, but afterwards nothing more.
But for now, Marx was still able to study without having to worry about his family’s survival, and to meet with French labour leaders, who were organised in secret societies. But he did not only talk about the labour movement with them, he also discussed it constantly with his wife. Until he met Engels, she was his first interlocutor, but above all, she was the firmest pillar on which he could rely when he doubted his path.
Jenny enjoyed sharing her husband’s thought world, even though she was first and foremost his wife and the mother of his children. In May 1844, she gave birth to her first child, a baby girl, Jenny. While she was in Germany introducing her to her mother, Marx met Friedrich Engels in Paris, who used his position as the son of a wealthy factory owner to investigate the situation of workers in England.
The two men felt each other and a friendship was born that could not be broken by intrigues, gossip or Marx’s poverty. It hung by a thread only in January 1863, when Engels’ mistress Mary Burns died. Engels was deeply affected. All his friends tried to be supportive, and Marx wrote to him at length about his troubles. He barely mentioned Mary.
Engels was about to burst. Marx quickly apologised and blamed Jenny for his insensitive words. Even though Engels was like a father to her children, Jenny was always distant, albeit polite, towards him. The good-natured Engels quickly forgave Marx, in whom he saw a genius.
After ten days in Paris, Engels left, and in February 1845 Marx left Paris. The hounds of the Prussian government, against which he had fought, reached far beyond the provincial borders, and he was expelled by the French authorities. Jenny was left alone and almost penniless in Paris. It was the first time she had to make all the arrangements for moving alone, and certainly not the last.
Engels wrote to a friend that as soon as he found out about the exile he had started to raise money for it, but since he doesn’t know whether it will be enough, he is ceding his fee for “the first English thing”. He refused to let Marx’s opponents take pleasure in the fact that they had got Marx into money trouble by persecuting him. In the letter, he also doubted that Marx would remain in Belgium for long.
The Prussian authorities really did not leave him alone. Among other things, he lost his Prussian citizenship and had to promise not to write about politics in the Belgian press. This left him once again without a source of income. He and Jenny moved several times before they found something reasonably modest for themselves in a poor working-class suburb. They sent Jenny back to Germany, but she refused to leave them. She stayed, even though they couldn’t pay her.
Now, for the first time, Jenny realises what kind of life she has chosen for herself. She has clung to poverty and endured the humiliations it brings. It did not break her. She believed in her husband and in his ideas. And when she believed in something, she was willing to pay the price, even though she now had three children, having had a daughter, Laura, and a son, Edgar, in between. The latter was a particular joy for Marx. He had always wanted a son.
Since Marx was not allowed to publish, he and Engels got around the rules a little. They set up the Brussels Correspondence Office and presented their revolutionary world views in circulars. They reproduced them and distributed them around. Jenny, who was their equal interlocutor, participated as much as she could with three children. She had Lenka by her side, who was a second mother to the children, but the children were lively, she wrote later, and they were constantly hanging around her.
Visitors were now handing over the door handle of their home door. Jenny was their hostess and her husband’s secretary. She copied his extremely difficult-to-read manuscripts, took care of his mail, helped with the distribution of materials and dealt with printers on his behalf. She had a better sense of money than he did, which was not difficult because he had almost none. Nevertheless, as a rule, she did not object when the last of their money went to cover printing costs or something like that.
Her husband’s struggle was her struggle. She was the first to read the Manifesto of the Communist Party, written by Marx and Engels after the second Congress of the League of Communists, held in London at the end of 1848. That year was marked by the European revolution, which reached Brussels after Italy and Paris. It was at this time that Marx recovered a small inheritance from his family. He and Jenny gave a large part of it to the rebellious workers of Brussels, even though this put the family at risk. It was only a matter of time before Marx would be imprisoned and Jenny would be left alone.
He was indeed arrested, and surprisingly, Jenny was brought before a judge. The President of the Democratic Alliance of Belgium came to see her so she could visit her husband, and at the police station she was accused of vagrancy for coming without papers. In broad daylight, she was escorted across the city by the police. She waited two hours for the investigating magistrate. In the meantime, she listened to all kinds of indecent offers from the guards.
“My wife’s whole crime is that she thinks as democratically as her husband, even though she belongs to the Prussian aristocracy,” Marx explained in the French newspaper Réforme. Jenny’s arrest sparked an international outcry, but the Marxes had to leave Brussels in a hurry. They went to Paris.
Morece England
The leading members of the Union of Communists have already gathered there to take a position on what is happening in Germany. In March 1848, workers in Cologne stormed the municipal council and demanded a republic, and peasant revolts broke out elsewhere. Although the rebels won, the bourgeoisie began to collude with the government, leaving the workers and peasants in the lurch.
Marx and Engels were also at the heart of what was happening in Germany, the latter a revolutionary at times and a bohemian at others, who could not imagine life without women and alcohol. Jenny was staying with her mother in Trier at the time and only joined her husband when he and his followers founded the New Rhine List in Cologne. By then, their former generous financial supporters had left them. When the French workers supported by the newspaper lost their struggle, the townspeople who had previously helped them with change also withdrew. Three weeks after the publication of the first issue in June 1848, the New Rhine Gazette was to cease publication.
Karl and Jenny rescued him with Marx’s inheritance, even though Marx could have been imprisoned or deported at any time. In 1848 and 1849, Cologne was the centre of the revolutionary ferment, and Marx was the editor of the newspaper, writing the most useful articles, going from meeting to meeting, making deals on all sides, travelling around the then German Confederation, and constantly on the move.
Summons to the police and court were the Marxes’ most frequent mail. The authorities never managed to put Marx behind bars, but Jenny never knew whether he would return home alive that evening. Each goodbye could have been the last and each was a small death, but she never said she would stay.
They did not kill him, but they deported him. Jenny also had to sell her furniture to pay off their debts. All they had left was Marx’s precious library and her grandmother’s silverware. She pawned it when she and her children took refuge with friends in Frankfurt. There she did not feel ill, but she was pressed by “longing and fear for my dear husband … And on top of that, the severe general suffering and defeats that are weighing on our shit, the difficult situation in which almost everyone who is fighting for the principles of the new world finds themselves at the moment …”
She didn’t know where her husband was. When a message arrived from Paris, she set off with the children. But Paris was only a short stopover. The opponents had exiled the family to the swampy and muddy Morbihan region. Because of the rampant frostbite, it was considered the last home of the newcomers.
Marx’s only solution was England. There was no money to go. By the end of August 1848, Marx had raised enough to board the ship himself. He had only to take his heels off, and the police were already at Jenny’s. The pregnant men ordered her to leave as soon as possible. She would have, but she had no money. When Marx found him, she went to London too.
None of the previous relocations has been comparable to this one. She could not fit into the grey and gloomy London, she was surprised by the suspicious and hostile attitude towards refugees, and she found it hard to bear the greed and the debauchery of many people. She suffered more than her husband, although for the next years life was more or less torture for both of them.
Neither of them gave in. Even though her newborn was sick and she was sick herself, she and her husband continued to work. According to Marx, the revolution was over for now. It was necessary to start building on new foundations. He and Engels changed the Union of Communists and set up a committee to help refugees fleeing from the continent to London. If they wanted to go further, for example to America, they needed money. Most of the refugees passed through their home, which became a kind of refugee camp.
Marx squeezed a little inheritance out of his family and they invested the money in the newspaper again. It was to be published in Hamburg. After six issues, it fell silent. The persecution made it almost impossible to sell and the Marxes were again out all their money.
Now they began to realise the poverty in which English workers lived. Unlike Germany, England was a developed industrial country with large industrial cities, Liverpool and Manchester in particular standing out. The bourgeoisie was also much wealthier and more powerful than in Germany. It traded across the ocean, in goods and in slaves, which it kidnapped in Africa and sold in the American South. By now it had taken root there and also in South Africa, India and China.
English and Irish workers were in a much worse situation. They worked for up to 16 hours a day for wages they could not live on. They had neither social security nor a pension. Social assistance existed only if they organised it themselves. Pregnant women and mothers were not protected. They worked until they gave birth and often gave birth by the machine.
Despite her own difficulties, Jenny has passionately thrown herself into the fight for their rights. She got to know workers and their leaders, went to meetings, lectures, rallies and events, and worked to educate workers. Like Marx, she was hurt every time a labour leader succumbed to petty bribes from the bourgeoisie.
But the workers did not have a protector like Marx. He could only write and publish his theoretical works because Engels had largely given up his own in order to support him financially. Because of Engels, Marx could go to the British Museum library almost every morning, pop in for a meeting in between, return home in the evening, host revolutionaries and then sit down to work again for a few hours, except that they usually dragged on until the morning. For Capital he read over 1500 books, as many as he could, in the original. The result was that he could not finish his work.
Jenny once jokingly wrote to Engels, “My husband is at the British Museum wasting his time.” Both she and Engels urged him to finish the matter once and for all. Engels to finally make some money from the book, Jenny because she feared that his body would not be able to take the strain for much longer.
Years of poverty, social isolation and personal loss
By then, he had already come a long way. When they came to London, he had intended to support his family on royalties, but after 1848, the Democrats and Liberals turned against him. No European newspaper would publish his gossip. The Marx family had sunk to an existential low point, accompanied by the silence of their surroundings, when it was not being shattered by their ridicule and slander.
The New York Tribune took pity on Marx for the last time. Marx’s English was still poor at the time, so Engels corrected the articles in grammar and style, and sometimes wrote them for him. Marx signed them. The pay was regular but low. The Marxes did not even have enough for food. They owed money to a baker, a greengrocer, a butcher and a landlord. Marx went around asking for money to pay off a debt before another one came up. Usually he addressed a miserable letter to Engels.
Sometimes he couldn’t get into the library in winter. His jacket and coat were in the pawn shop. Their two rooms were often cold because they had no coal. They ate potatoes all week long. If one fell ill, they could not pay for a doctor. They owed everybody. “How am I supposed to deal with all this devil? At last, for the last eight or ten days, I have borrowed a few shillings and pence from Knott, which, though it is a great hardship, was necessary to keep us from perishing,” he wrote to Engels in September 1852.
Six months later, Jenny asked Engels for money. She usually wrote to him when Marx no longer dared. She had written before to everyone she could count on conditionally, but no one had even written back. She was used to this. During those years she was constantly begging for money and humiliating herself in front of her creditors. People broke into their homes, demanded money and threatened to sue. They never knew when they would be thrown out on the street. Occasionally, all sorts of things ended up in the pawnshop, including laundry and Jenny’s skirt, which she wasn’t wearing.
Most of the burden of fighting poverty has fallen on her shoulders. She did not usually burden her husband with it, but when she did, he wrote her off, saying that she could tell him anything, “but otherwise I know how infinitely resilient you are and how the smallest good thing makes you come alive again”. She was quite resilient. She would cry in the midst of the worst, and sometimes she would be on the verge of a mental breakdown, but each time she would find something to hold on to, even though she knew that the trouble would not be over for a long time.
Without Engels’s financial help, poverty would have broken the family. But in the first half of the 1950s, it was not only poverty and social isolation that the Marxes had problems with. One by one, the Marxes lost their two children, their son Guido and their daughter Franziska. At the time of her death, Jenny wrote in her diary: “A dear child died in the midst of our worst poverty … I immediately rushed to a French refugee who lives near here and had recently visited us … He immediately gave me, with the warmest sympathy for us, two pounds. This paid for the coffin in which my poor child now sleeps peacefully. He had no cradle when he was born, and he had to wait a long time for his last home.”
Three years after their daughter, they lost their nine-year-old son Edgar. He had been ill for some time. “My wife was as sick as ever all week because of the excitement. My heart bleeds and my head burns too, though of course I must endure,” Marx wrote to Engels. They wrote to each other every day. Marx’s youngest daughter later recalled that Marx eagerly awaited Engels’s letter every day, talking to him as if he were standing in front of him while reading, and sometimes laughing to tears at his words.
On 12 April 1855, he wrote to a friend: “It is impossible to describe how much we miss him everywhere. I have had all sorts of bad luck, but what real bad luck is, I know only now …” It was not only Engels’ friendship and the thought that they still had something to create together that made him fall to the bottom when he lost his son, he also wrote to him.
When little Guido died, Jenny wrote about her great pain. When Edgar died, she wrote: “Oh, I didn’t know then what was ahead, before that everything, everything collapsed into nothing!” She and Marx never got over the death of their son Edgar. Nevertheless, Eleanor, whom Jenny gave birth to at that very time, did not feel the consequences, according to Jenny, because all the love had been transferred to her. Tussy, as everyone called her, became her father’s darling, even though she was the wrong sex.
Of Marx’s seven children – the last was stillborn – three daughters survived, unless he had eight children, and son Friedrich also survived. Jenny gave birth to a daughter, Frances, on 28 March 1851, and her housekeeper Lenka gave birth to a son, Friedrich, on 23 June of the same year. The father’s name was not on the birth certificate. At the time, no one seems to have known who Friedrich’s father was, but it later came to light that the child might have been Marx’s, but for reasons of reputation, Engels took care of him.
The deception was not in line with Marx. Engels was a womaniser, Marx was devoted to Jenny. Marx and Jenny wrote to their friends about all sorts of things, but hardly mentioned Friedrich’s birth in their letters. Lenka remained Jenny’s best friend until her death and the family relations did not change after Friedrich’s birth. All this would have been unlikely if Jenny had known that Lenka was her husband’s mistress, but then again that does not mean that Lenka was not.
There is no hard evidence of Marx’s paternity, but in the midst of all the internal turmoil and personal losses, Jenny and Karl had to deal with mudslinging. In October 1852, the so-called Cologne Trial against the Marx Party began. The Prussian government wanted to force England to hand over communist subversives. It forged documents for the trial, enlisted the help of a whole series of police spies and even resorted to burglary. It tried to pin on Marx everything its members could think of.
Marx repelled all attacks. He described the workings and responsibilities of the Prussian government in his book Exposing the Communist Trial in Cologne, but all copies of the book were confiscated at the Swiss border. Again, there was no income.
Jenny bore it all with resilience. She believed in her husband’s work as much as he did. She continued to copy his manuscripts, and when his eyes were sore, she wrote to dictation. She went to political meetings in his place and wrote his letters on his behalf. Marx never published a manuscript without Jenny reading it first. She negotiated with publishers and printers in his place. What little time she had for herself she devoted to philosophy, art and literature.
She was known as an extremely kind woman, but she could also be fierce, especially when it came to her opponents. She never called her half-brother Ferdinand, an important member of the Prussian government, her brother, and she never took advantage of her noble title, even though she and Marx both liked comfort. When they could afford bourgeois luxury, they enjoyed it with relish.
A ray of sunshine in the dark
One such period came when Jenny’s mother died in 1856. The Marxes moved from their two rooms into the house and, after seven years of deprivation, breathed a sigh of relief. Jenny enjoyed shopping for furnishings for their new home. “Although the appointments did not last long, for piece after piece had to go to the pawnbroker’s again, yet for once we fairly enjoyed our bourgeois comforts,” she wrote later.
With the American crisis, Marx’s fee was halved and the cost of living in a house was much higher than living in two rooms. The story of scarcity, cold, debt and beggars repeated itself. Jenny was 42, Marx was 38. They could no longer bear the pressures of life so easily. They fell ill. For Marx, the stress and the long nights took their toll on his liver and his fetuses. They followed him for the rest of his life. He was often chained to his bed and sometimes laid on the operating table, and sometimes he would pierce one himself with a blade. They appeared all over his body.
All kinds of other problems accompanied the creatures, from sore throats, ears and eyes to toothaches. Jenny persuaded him to live a healthier life, even though she lived the same way he did: she worked, fainted, lay down, recovered, kept working and lay down again.
By 1858, it was so bad that Marx again asked Engels for help. He sent him a list of the debts they had and asked if he could “help him sort them out” to make it easier for Jenny. She was on the verge of a mental breakdown. Engels covered the costs and sent Jenny to the seaside to recover.
When she returned, Marx reported on their Christmas spirit: ‘It is even gloomier and more hopeless than usual at home.’ Instead of concentrating on Christmas preparations, Jenny was editing a pile of notes, running to the pawnshop and copying her husband’s handwriting.
In 1860, a new blow came. Marx found himself in a new international storm of mudslinging when he was attacked by the German émigré scientist Karl Vogt. Eleven years later, it was revealed that Napoleon III had been behind the attacks, and at that point, a hurt and helpless Jenny could only cry. Marx had no chance to explain the truth, neither in court nor in the newspapers. He exposed Napoleon’s policy in his book Mr Vogt and poured into it all the bile and anger that had been building up in him over the years.
Jenny copied it again, but this time the stress got to her. She copied the last page and lay down. She had been walking on the edge of sobriety for a good year, and now she was breaking down.
She got goats. Her life was hanging by a thread. Her three children were taken by friends, she was cared for by Marx. She could not sleep. Her face was burning. Her lips were glowing, even though the cold November air chilled her. She could hardly swallow. She heard worse and worse and finally closed her eyes. She didn’t know if she would open them again.
She pulled out. On Christmas Eve, the children were home again. Her beautiful face was now so disfigured, she wrote in her letter, that they were frightened of her, but that the scars were slowly healing. She was barely on her feet before Marx was lying down. “There was too much fear, worry and misery of all kinds,” she wrote to her friend Luisa Weydemeyer. He recovered for four weeks. The reduction of the fee at the Tribune and the cost of the treatments were enough to put them in debt again.
By January 1863, they were suffocating in them. For the first and last time, Marx decided to find work. He applied for one at the railway office. He was turned down because his handwriting was illegible. He couldn’t enrol his children in school because he hadn’t paid the old school fees, or else they didn’t have enough money for decent clothes.
He and Jenny saw only one solution: they would declare bankruptcy. Jenny’s two older daughters would become educators, while Lenka would find a job elsewhere, even though she had already helped the family quite a lot with her savings. Karl, Jenny and youngest daughter Tussy will move to cheaper accommodation.
For Engels, the solution was unacceptable. If Marx had really done what he decided to do in despair, he would never have finished Capital. Once again he pulled it out of the abyss, and later it fell to Marx’s hand to inherit it twice more unexpectedly. The death of Engels’ father was also favourable to them. It made it easier for Engels to take care of them, as he became co-owner of Engels & Erman.
However, in 1862, their house was again in short supply. Jenny went to Paris to borrow money. The journey was tragicomic, Marx reported to Engels. In the middle of winter, a storm arose at sea. Her ship rode it out happily, but a nearby one sank. The man with whom she was supposed to get together was struck by a stroke. When she took the train to meet him, there was an accident and she had to wait for two hours. She continued her journey on the omnibus, but it overturned.
She bore everything calmly, but Marx’s health was failing rapidly. In 1864, with the First International, he was able to start working internationally, but he became dangerously ill more and more often. Jenny’s health was also failing. “One invalid writes for another,” she wrote to Engels, all out of breath, writing at the dictation of her husband, who had an eye infection. All this made the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867 all the more important for them, even though they were again so much in debt that Marx’s head, in his own words, almost “burst”.
Yet it was not always exhausting for the Marxes. If Tussy Marx is to be believed, Jenny and Karl overcame difficulties with mutual devotion, indestructible humour and natural optimism. They were loving parents to their three surviving children. Marx read them stories and made up his own. What they did not end for months. He was their hobby, especially the youngest, Tussy. As a passionate lover of Shakespeare, he put on real plays for them.
The girls grew up in a home frequented by the most important revolutionaries and thinkers of the time. When Engels sent them a case of wine, they enjoyed it indescribably.
All three daughters – Jenny, the eldest, Laura, the middle, and Tussy, the youngest – have followed in their parents’ footsteps. The elder two sons-in-law were Marx’s disciples, but Tussy waited to marry. Although her mother and sisters were wives of their husbands, she wanted to make a name for herself. She became a vocal defender of women’s rights.
During the years of their close friendship, Marx’s daughters also became Engels’ daughters, and after Marx’s death he gave them generous financial support and included them in his will. He was now a rich man. In 1870 he sold his share in the factory for about two million pounds today and invested the money well. Although he lived up to his status, he kept a close eye on the Paris Commune and its fall in 1871. After it, the Marxes lived more peacefully and easily.
At the time, Jenny wrote to a friend who had lost two children: ‘I know all too well how hard it is and how long it takes to regain your equilibrium after such losses. Life, with its little joys and big worries, with all the little daily swellings and insignificant sorrows, helps us to do this. The greater pain is overwhelmed by the eternal, tiny afflictions and, without one noticing, the once intense pain fades away. The wound is never healed, especially not in the mother’s heart, but gradually we become accepting and even sensitive again to new pains and new joys. So we live on and on with a wounded yet ever-hopeful heart, until at last we fall silent and eternal peace comes.”
It was not given a quick end. In 1876, Marx wrote to Engels that she was seriously ill. She had cancer. She was dying slowly and in pain, but at least this time there were no money problems. Once again they were saved by their inheritance, and with it they were placed in the upper bourgeoisie. Although Jenny claimed that he was striving for social status because of his daughters, because he wanted to marry them well, and Marx claimed that it would have been different if he had had sons, in reality they both enjoyed the comforts.
Nevertheless, Jenny continued to follow politics avidly, even in the 1880s, when she rarely got out of bed. Even on her deathbed, she was interested in the outcome of the German elections. In the autumn of that year, it seemed that the end was at hand. Marx was also very ill at the time. “It was a difficult time. Our mother was lying in the big front room, and Mohr [Marx] was lying in the small room next to it. And these two people, so used to each other, so grown up with each other, could no longer be together in the same room…,” Tussy recalled.
Marx recovered, Jenny did not. She has fought many battles in her life and paid a high price for her choices, but she could not win the battle with cancer. On 2 December 1881, she finally closed her eyes. “Even Mohr is dead”, Engels declared when he saw Marx. He was laid in his grave a good year later, on 14 March 1883. Lenka moved into Friedrich Engels’ home and stayed with him until her death. She was buried in the same grave as Marx.
