Story and Dream

Chapter 1 THE ENCHANTED PRINCESS Mrs. Karl Marx

Title : BEHIND EVERY GREAT MAN
The Forgotten Women Behind the World’s Famous and Infamous

Author : M A R L E N E WAGMAN-GELLER

The Argentinean-Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara remarked, “Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” Fellow zealot Karl Marx was likewise the possessor of passion; however, the woman he loved was obscured by the red shadow he cast over the world.

The founder of communism exhorted the workers of the world to throw off their chains, but there was one who continued to carry these heavy links after marriage—Marx’s long-laboring wife. Johanna Bertha Julie Jenny von Westphalen was born high on the royal hierarchy of Trier in the Kingdom of Prussia; her father was Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, a descendant of Prussian nobles and the Scottish House of Argyll. The indulged heiress, renowned for beauty and brilliance, was always ensconced in silk, from clothes to pillows to sheets. The family’s parlor knew no shortage of eligible suitors, yet she rejected them when the “boy next door” (or rather the ruffian from the less affluent side of the tracks of Trier) proffered his heart.

This was, in fact, Karl Heinrich Marx’s first revolutionary act. It was nothing short of audacious for the young man to court Trier’s princess, as his blood had no semblance of blue that her family sought in a son-in-law. Marx was descended from a long line of rabbis, though his father, Hirschel, became Heinrich when he con-verted to Lutheranism (a baptism undertaken for expediency rather than religious conviction). Marx garnered his chutzpah because of his deep-seated belief that class should not be an impediment to love—and life without Jenny would be unbearable. It may seem surprising that a twenty-two-year-old manor-born beauty should have fallen for a bourgeois boy four years her junior instead of a dashing officer in braided uniform and of private income.

However, the Prussian Jenny subscribed her feelings to the French quote, “The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.” The couple was secretly engaged in 1836 before Marx left for the University of Berlin to study law, followed by a stay in Cologne to edit a leftist newspaper. He returned seven years later, where Jenny, like the biblical Ruth, faithfully waited. By this time, the baron had passed away and Jenny’s mother, realizing her twenty-nine-year-old daughter’s devotion, bestowed blessing and a dowry—both of which Jenny would desperately need in years to come.

The marriage banns were published announcing the imminent wedding of “Herr Karl Marx, doctor of philosophy, residing in Cologne, and of Fraulein Johanna Bertha Julie Jenny von Westphalen.” Marx was overjoyed his hometown beauty had chosen him — a fellow student had described him as “nearly the most unattractive man on whom the sun ever shone.” The bride well understood she was marrying not only a man but a cause and willingly pledged herself to both.

The long-delayed nuptials took place in the Protestant church at Kreuznacher Pauluskirche (the Kreuznach Church of St. Paul) on June 19, 1843. It was a small affair, boycotted by the bride’s disapproving family except for her mother and brother Edgar. Marx’s radicalism did not extend to his honeymoon, which was a conventional trip to the Rhein-Pfalz, the German version of Niagara Falls. The baroness had given Jenny sufficient cash to cover expenses, carefully secured in a double-handed strongbox. The honeymooners left the
strongbox open for needy hotel workers to partake.

Unfortunately, their first brief romantic interlude was to be their last. Jenny had hoped her brilliant husband would secure a niche as a philosophy professor; however, his voluble social advocacy made this impossible. He raged against a world where royals lived in splendor and the masses were duped into accepting their lot through the anesthetic of religion. He espoused his theories as a journalist for a Parisian newspaper, and they became friends of
Heinrich Heine, the famed poet who waxed eloquent on Jenny’s considerable charms.